Maria Steen - Just Another Establishment Fraud

Maria Steen stood outside the Dáil dressed as a caricature of Margaret Thatcher. She had her Hermes handbag over her arm. The designer bag alone was worth €22,000 - close to a low paid workers’ yearly wage.

She spoke about the need for “an alternative candidate” to the establishment. But the establishment in Ireland had for decades relied on Church power to keep workers down. Steen wants to return to those dark days. That’s as establishment as you can get.

Steen describes herself as an “arch-conservative” so the resemblance to Thatcher goes beyond the dress code. She opposed marriage equality and Repeal. She also opposed legislation in line with the X case.

She’s one of the leading lights of the shady “Iona Institute” which was set up in 2006 as Lolek Ltd. After the child abuse scandals of the 1990s this well funded group wanted to rescue the reputation of the Catholic Church while pushing ultra-conservative politics.

The Iona Institute works close with “Agenda Europe” which is financed by some of the richest conservatives in the world - like Patrick Slim Domit, son of multi-billionaire Carlos Slim Helú, representatives of the aristocratic Habsburg-Lorraine family (Austria’s last imperial family), who have wealth between $63 million and $207 million.

Far-right multimillionaire oligarch Konstantin Malofeev, was in charge of the foundation’s international projects. One wing of the capitalist class wants to rule over us with a fake liberal mask, while the other wants to go back to authoritarian forms of rule.

Steen is part of a layer of upper middle class Irish people who want to go back to the old Ireland where they can order workers around. They miss that power and control. Sticking rowdy working class women into slave labour laundries.

We’ve been there. We won’t want to ever go back.

Steen was raised in Ballsbridge in Dublin 4 and is the daughter of well-known auctioneer Seán Davin. Her aunts include former presidential candidate Joan Freeman and Theresa Lowe, the former RTÉ presenter.

Her multi-million euro Blackrock home was featured in an Irish Times article about its renovation. It’s this upper middle class background that illustrates why her talk about “the death of procreative sex” is a nothing but desire to control workers’ minds, sex lives and general behaviour

They want a population that lives on its knees. Steen wants to create an Ireland that would be a horror show for all working class women, on divorce she says:

“When we have this conversation about divorce we are constantly talking about how to make it easier, rather than talking about how do we prevent it or how do we reduce the numbers.”

So she’d force women to stay with abusive partners for life. She’d have let Savita die. She’d have locked up the rape victim in the X case and prevented her from travelling.

The tragedy is that some working class people, who in some cases were victims of abuse or have had trauma in their lives, believe the bullshit spouted by the likes of Maria Steen and see these posh clowns as an “alternative” to the neoliberal capitalists in Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael.

There are two wings to the capitalist rich, liberals and authoritarians. Socialists say overthrow them all.