{"id":271973,"date":"2026-01-30T13:42:13","date_gmt":"2026-01-30T13:42:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/271973\/"},"modified":"2026-01-30T13:42:13","modified_gmt":"2026-01-30T13:42:13","slug":"this-years-farcical-st-brigids-advert","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/271973\/","title":{"rendered":"This year\u2019s farcical St Brigid\u2019s advert"},"content":{"rendered":"

While I will enjoy my extra bank holiday in honour of St Brigid on Monday, I absolutely did not enjoy the ridiculous video released by the Department of Foreign Affairs on Wednesday.<\/p>\n

If you haven\u2019t seen it, it\u2019s pretty awful, even by the standard we\u2019ve come to expect from these productions.<\/p>\n

I was quite happy to ignore our Government\u2019s attempts to remind everyone that it has, at the taxpayer\u2019s expense, recast St Brigid as the unwilling Saint of Woke. It\u2019s now happening every year.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d hoped that February 1st would pass off without another yearly cringe-fest usurpation of a great Christian saint.<\/p>\n

Maybe the communications teams in Government departments might have listened to the public who don\u2019t seem to be that interested in their desire to recast St Brigid as a witchy abortionist? Will they take a break and give us all a day off from this tiresome nonsense this year, I thought to myself.<\/p>\n

But it wasn\u2019t to be, and seeing as the ad has now been viewed over 800,000 times on X alone, and people are becoming quite incensed about it (you can look at the Department being ratio\u2019d in the comments) it\u2019s worth your correspondent writing about it all over again this year.<\/p>\n

As ever, we have the long list of St Brigid themed events plated out by Dublin City Council. They all, funnily enough, seem to yearly revolve around witchcraft and flower crowns and the new age and LGBT and inclusion.<\/p>\n

I sighed when I read that \u2018Brigit: Dublin City Celebrating Women 2026\u2019 will return on Friday and run until Monday. It\u2019s basically the Spring version of the Winter Lights fiasco. This is the fifth year of the St Brigid\u2019s Day programme, which was founded in 2022 by the Lord Mayor\u2019s Office, as the \u2018Dublin City Celebrating Women\u2019 event (name taken from the ancient Celtic goddess Brigid, not to be confused with the saint, they say). And quite honestly, I\u2019m tired of it. Can someone please put us out of our misery?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Saints, goddesses and queens are all tangled together in the big, confusing, and quite honestly, jarring programme.<\/p>\n

Lord Mayor of Dublin, Ray McAdam, commented: \u201cIt\u2019s a great privilege to mark the fifth year of Brigit: Dublin City Celebrating Women. \u201cJust as the goddess Brigit was known for her many gifts \u2013 from poetry and healing to smithcraft and wisdom \u2013 this festival has grown into something truly special for our city, encompassing so many different ways to celebrate women\u2019s achievements. This is our chance to recognise the incredible contributions women have made throughout Irish history and continue to make today.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ok, so we are having the Bank Holiday to celebrate St. Brigid\u2019s Day, but it\u2019s not actually about the Saint. It\u2019s about a mythical goddess who had nothing to do with the traditional celebrations of the saint who lived and established a community in Kildare and was revered in Ireland. Just so we understand that point.<\/p>\n

Now onto the video advertisement from the Department of Foreign Affairs. When you think this Government is tired of rage-baiting, they always prove they have it in them to come back for more.<\/p>\n

To break it down for the reader, the video shows the triumphant celebrations from abortion activists at Dublin Castle after Repeal the Eighth. (Ah yes, remember when the politicians said there would be no celebrations?)<\/p>\n

That, I can only imagine, is to reinforce the lie that St Brigid was an abortionist. I mean, she was a consecrated virgin who gave her life to Jesus and spread Christianity, and there\u2019s no real basis for the despicable claim, but this is the vision of St Brigid and Ireland the Department wants to sell to the world.<\/p>\n

\u201cSt Brigid was an activist, healer and peacemaker,\u201d the ad declares. \u201cInspiring women who turned compassion into power. It lit the torch of a movement.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not only was this the abortion movement, according to the Government department, but apparently St Brigid, as some pink haired, flower power liberal icon, has inspired every progressive cause under the sun.<\/p>\n

Archive footage included in the ad shows a woman holding up a sign: \u201cNo Banning Family Planning.\u201d You also have an individual waving a rainbow flag, beaming with a Marriage Equality sticker.<\/p>\n

It appears to hint at transgenderism too, because you have a very masculine looking individual dancing around in all-black, with some spiel about \u201cfeminine power.\u201d It must be a man, I thought, clicking back to replay the ad. I mean, doesn\u2019t that just sum up how this Government feels about Irish women?<\/p>\n

Lest we forget how our Government tried to remove Constitutional protection for mothers, holding a referendum to do so on International Women\u2019s Day of all days. That was their way of celebrating and thanking women.<\/p>\n

Oh, and how could I forget about the very deliberate moment when the ad cuts to a shot of Ailbhe Smyth, the so-called feminist veteran who led Repeal and now gets worked up about \u201ctransphobic hate speech\u201d anytime anybody points out women don\u2019t have male genitalia, or should have their own safe spaces.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve got to love the logic here \u2013 let\u2019s make an advert about how great women are, and promote all the usual suspects who are entirely unable to define what a woman is.<\/p>\n

The very people who want men like Graham Linehan to pay with his career for standing up for real women. It\u2019s ridiculous, and I\u2019m glad people aren\u2019t buying it.<\/p>\n

The problem at the heart of all of this, I think, is that a major government department doesn\u2019t care about what its own citizens think. It\u2019s giving them the middle finger, in fact. It is completely clear from the video that it was intended to cause annoyance, even anger.<\/p>\n

This is not just a county council or some arts body going rogue \u2013 it\u2019s the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade; The Department tasked with the responsibility to represent and promote Ireland on the world stage.<\/p>\n

Their job is to make us look good to everyone else. And what does it come up with (with our cash)? A video deliberately made to antagonise people of faith by deliberately ignoring the real story of St Brigid \u2013 and punching down on the hundreds of thousands of women who opposed Repeal, because only the right sort of woman is ever celebrated in progressive but definitely not inclusive Ireland.<\/p>\n

There isn\u2019t one hint of St Brigid\u2019s Christianity in that video. But you\u2019ve got your fair share of far-left activists. You\u2019ve got gloating abortion campaigners. You\u2019ve even got women in black cloaks holding lanterns like they\u2019re in the Traitors. I assume they\u2019re meant to play the role of sexy witches, smouldering to the camera. It\u2019s so ridiculous.<\/p>\n

The maddening thing is that we are paying for this rubbish with our wallets. And those in the Department responsible for this tripe, I assume, sit back and grin smugly while people get annoyed?<\/p>\n

They are promoting a distorted, warped vision of both our patron saint and of Ireland. One where our patron Saint supports abortion and every woman has purple hair and a nose-ring like their fictional version of St Brigid. I do think people should say they\u2019ve finally had enough.<\/p>\n

The Advertising Standards Authority requires that advertisements avoid causing offence on religious grounds. So how did this qualify?<\/p>\n

The activist framing is all so boring and so blatant. And it actually makes Ireland look anything but attractive. Those looking on, without a doubt, must feel sorry for us having to endure yet more one-sided, performative, taxpayer funded indoctrination.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"While I will enjoy my extra bank holiday in honour of St Brigid on Monday, I absolutely did…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":271974,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1844,132623,61,60,43,133025,116949],"class_list":{"0":"post-271973","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ireland","8":"tag-department-of-foreign-affairs","9":"tag-february","10":"tag-ie","11":"tag-ireland","12":"tag-news","13":"tag-st-brigids-day","14":"tag-st-brigid"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271973","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=271973"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271973\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/271974"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=271973"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=271973"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=271973"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}