Blocking Maria Steen from running for the presidency was not clever. It is likely to rebound in particular on Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael.

Let us consider a different scenario, however improbable. Suppose Michéal Martin, who effectively manoeuvred to prevent even any FF politician or former politician from running, had instead decided to emulate Enda Kenny in 1997. Kenny instructed Fine Gael councillors merely to abstain rather than vote against Dana Rosemary Scallon when she took the local authority route to nomination. Kenny did so even though Fine Gael had Mary Banotti in the race. (Fine Gael was not so magnanimous in later presidential elections)

Steen would likely have secured a nomination if the councils had not been stitched up. In gratitude, her highly motivated followers would probably have transferred to Jim Gavin. Given his unspectacular showing so far, it may prove to be the case that Gavin could have done with the help. In the unlikely event of Steen winning, Martin could have taken some credit for being fair-minded, as could Simon Harris, had he chosen not to apply the whip.

Instead, Martin asked why people who have been criticising Fianna Fáil for years now expected it to support their candidate. No one was expecting FF to support Maria Steen, just not to use Constitutional provisions designed to widen access to running for president in a way that blocks candidates instead.

If Steen is as unrepresentative of the electorate as claimed, why not allow her to run and be trounced?

Being on the wrong side of referendum campaigns apparently made her unsuitable. What a double standard.

Michael D Higgins was on the losing side of the citizenship referendum and in a party that was regularly demolished at the polling stations, but no major party suggested that disqualified him from running.

[ Fierce blame game as Maria Steen’s backers point fingers in wake of failed presidential campaignOpens in new window ]

In full disclosure, I have known Maria Steen for many years and have the highest regard for her and her husband, Neil. However, I learned about her potential candidacy in The Irish Times and was not involved in any way with her campaign. But I believe that she is a person of integrity. She has championed unpopular positions at no little personal cost because she believes them to be right. Those qualities are rare. She would have cut an impressive figure on the international stage – not to mention the delight of young children living in the Arás.

There were alleged liberals among the independent members of the Oireachtas who made it clear that they did not value diversity in the race, preferring instead to complain about being lobbied too hard to support her.

To be clear, given that online communication is frequently poisonous, I am sure that some people subjected elected representatives to personalised abuse. That was unequivocally wrong. But you cannot be an elected representative and object to a large volume of communication if it is respectful.

People who could have signed her nomination papers but did not conspired to give us a less meaningful campaign. It reinforces cynicism about, and alienation from, politics. The turnout is likely to be historically low.

Steen, who is acknowledged even by ideological opponents to be intelligent, able and articulate, would have raised the quality of debate. She would have compelled the other candidates to account for what they stand for and what the role of the president should be. She would have made it painfully clear that when it comes to important issues, the differences between the Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael candidates are non-existent. Aontú, Independent Ireland, and others who supported her, in contrast, have demonstrated that they understand the need for diversity among presidential candidates.

As Marian Harkin said, “By not giving a voice to different viewpoints, certain groups of people become further polarised.” Even though Harkin will be voting for Heather Humphreys, she was able to see that she had a responsibility not to push people away from electoral politics towards much uglier alternatives.

The same people who blocked Steen are already rubbishing Independent Ireland’s proposed Bill for a constitutional referendum to widen access to candidacy. Independent Ireland has suggested that nominations should require the support of 20 members drawn from the combined pool of 160 TDs, 60 Senators, and 14 MEPs, or 80 individual councillors from across the country. These proposals would keep the bar high and eliminate some of the messers.

[ Handbag at the Dáil for Maria Steen as her Áras run comes to an endOpens in new window ]

It would also prevent councils from blocking candidates. Aside from official or unofficial party whips being applied, some councils organised meetings at the same time as other councils, then berated potential candidates for being disrespectful because they could not bilocate or trilocate.

As for Steen entering the race late, it is a fair criticism – but it is clear that some of the people who refused to back her would not have done so no matter when she started campaigning. Gareth Sheridan was also a victim of the establishment closing ranks, and he began his campaign months ago.

Commentators were busy mocking Steen for claiming to offer real choice. But can the three candidates running credibly claim to represent the segment of the electorate denied the choice to vote for Steen?

To be alive in our time is to be bombarded from all sides, at all hours of the day and night, with text and images, with sound and information. I am increasingly aware, as I drift ever deeper into my forties, of a growing misalignment between all the things I want to read, and watch, and listen to, and the dwindling time I have in which to do it: the time in my day, and the unreckonable – but decreasing – number of years left to me. I haven’t read Don Quixote or The Man Without Qualities or The Interpretation of Dreams. Nor have I read, or even unwrapped, the last three issues of the London Review of Books, or for that matter most of the articles that are open in tabs on my laptop, and if you sent me an email in the last couple of days I probably haven’t read that either (sorry). I haven’t watched any of the new supposedly must-see television they keep making, and I haven’t listened to any of the podcasts people keep recommending to me. There is too much content, too much culture, too much text – and everyone keeps adding to it all the time! (I realise that I am adding to it, quite literally, as I write.)

There are times when I find myself daydreaming about a technological solution to this problem – some kind of AI brain implant, or perhaps radical life extension. But, so far at least, technology has been adding to the problem rather than making any serious attempt to solve it. The last thirty years or so of technological change has seen an exponential increase in the amount of digital stuff in the world: emails, streaming video, browser games, so forth. (Let’s not besmirch the innocence of these pages by even getting into the infinite proliferation of niche pornography.)

And now, among the various other benefits and nuisances it presents, generative AI is causing a considerable acceleration in the creation of content. Among the most dispiriting recent evidence of this was the announcement, in The Hollywood Reporter, of a new firm called Inception Point AI, which aims, via its Quiet Please podcast network, to flood the market with podcasts conceived, created and hosted by generative AI software. Its chief executive and co-founder is Jeanine Wright, former chief executive of Wondery, a hugely successful American podcast operation. “We believe that in the near future half the people on the planet will be AI,” she has said, “and we are the company that’s bringing those people to life.” (The use of the word “people” here is unsettling enough, let alone the Frankenstinian implications of a company bringing them “to life”, but this is the sort of puerile Prometheanism that has long appealed to a growing class of Silicon Valley money people.)

The company is still very much in the start-up phase; it has a team of eight people, four of whom are “working with content”. The topics for podcasts are, said the article, selected “with the help of AI, based on Google and social media trends.” The company then launches perhaps five different versions of the podcast, under different titles, to see which, if any, of them might catch on. The podcasts are given titles that are search engine-optimised to an almost parodic degree. Among the more than 4,000 podcasts already available from Quiet Please are: “Garden”, a podcast about gardening; “Snakes”, a podcast about snakes; “Anna Wintour”, a podcast about retired US Vogue editor Anna Wintour; “Chuck Mangione”, a podcast about American jazz flugelhorn legend Chuck Mangione; and “Lawn”, a podcast about lawns. Notably, “Lawn” shares an AI presenter with “Garden” – the indefatigable “Nigel Thistledown”, whose Instagram profile introduces him as a “tweed-wearing garden wizard creating whimsical landscapes.”

The use of Thistledown as the voice of two only very marginally different-seeming slop products is an indication of the business’s unique, if largely theoretical, selling point. Even if “Lawn” only gets a fraction of the number of listeners of “Garden”, the cost of producing it is still essentially zero, as is the effort. Likewise, with “Communism” – presented by the “sharp-tongued, fedora-wearing” Maxwell Tate, whose artificial speaking voice is, unexpectedly, eerily similar to that of former US president Barack Obama. Even if the market for an LLM-generated (and presumably therefore error-ridden) history of communism is minuscule, there is still money to be made from it: in this particular situation, the people who control the means of production no longer have to contend with human labour. The sharp-tongued, fedora-wearing Maxwell Tate may well address this very irony in the series itself, for all I know; I couldn’t get any more than thirty seconds into it. (If “Communism” is a little too radical for your taste, by the way, they’ve got another one called “Socialism”, also presented by Maxwell Tate, who is clearly exactly the Nigel Thistledown-type figure the left has for so long been in need.)

As so often with AI-generated products, the question all of this raises is: who on Earth needs or wants this slop? Wright, as it happens, has taken issue with that term, on behalf of the AI “people” she represents, and the work they do. “I think that people who are still referring to all AI-generated content as AI slop are probably lazy luddites,” as she put it. Her invocation of the term “Luddite” is strangely telling here. She is using it in the colloquial sense of a reactionary opposition to technology per se. The actual Luddites were textile workers of the early 19th century who destroyed machinery in specific protest not against technology per se, but against the way in which new machinery was threatening the livelihoods of skilled labourers, and turning out inferior products. These were people, in other words, who at the dawn of modern capitalism saw the tidal wave of slop cresting the distant horizon.

I am not a Luddite, at least not in the colloquial sense. I might even be something of a techno-optimist, in that I believe there must be a technological solution to the problem of all this trash being pumped into our online spaces. In fact, that solution may already exist, in a slightly different form: the filter built into your email client that recognises spam messages. It’s not perfect by any means, but email would be unusable without it. What we need is a slop filter, a technology that recognises AI-produced content and blocks it before it gets anywhere near us. That’s a business idea I could get on board with.