By-election candidate AJ Cahill has described multicultural societies as “chaotic, low-trust” and “high-violence”, while also arguing that many of Ireland’s modern social problems stem from a decline in Christian values.
In an interview with Gript today as part of an ongoing series of Galway West by-election candidate interviews, the Irish People Party candidate also defended the role of Christianity in public life, saying: “If I was gay and I was an atheist, I would want to live in a Christian Catholic country.”
Cahill is an engineer and father of three who said he became politically active after becoming concerned about “the direction of travel” in Irish politics and society over recent years.
“Our message is really a message of hope and love for the Irish nation,” he said.
Cahill went on to compare Christianity to an “operating system” underpinning Western society, arguing that secularism had led to a breakdown in social cohesion “logic”.
“We’ve discarded the operating system i.e. become a secular society but the logic is now starting to break without a proper value system,” he said.
“And now we’ve got situations where we don’t know whether men are women, we think Somalis are Irish, we don’t know how to build a children’s hospital.”
Cahill further argued that Christianity provided a safer and more stable basis for society than alternative systems or belief structures.
“If I was gay and I was an atheist I would want to live in a Christian Catholic country,” he said.
“Because they’re not going to throw me from a building, they’re not going to collapse a wall on me, they’re not going to kill me. What are they going to do? They’re going to pray for me – you know?”
The Galway West candidate also criticised current immigration policy, linking migration levels to the housing crisis and broader societal tensions.
“We’re living in a housing crisis that’s government created because they decided to welcome the world and they’ve contempt for their own people,” Cahill said.
“And I think that’s the penny that’s dropping at the doorsteps with people because it’s fear. It’s fear that they’re going to be made homeless.”
Discussing immigration more broadly, Cahill called for the State to “end the asylum racket and begin re-migration” – a term referring to mass deportation of immigrants back to their countries of origin – while also advocating deportations for foreign nationals convicted of crimes.
“You need to deport criminals,” he said.
“We need to just use the same policies that are already in place in Denmark,” specifically criticising asylum seekers who travel back to the country they originally fled on holidays, and family re-unification.
Cahill also criticised multiculturalism, claiming that societies with large numbers of differing cultures become unstable over time.
“We’ve got to get the numbers down and we’ve got to go back to normal,” he said.
“And if we don’t, what awaits you is hell. That’s multicultural societies – they’re chaotic, they’re low trust, they’re high violence.”
He went on to reference practices such as female genital mutilation and child marriage while discussing cultural differences between societies.
“Europe is the biggest safe space ever created and Ireland is probably the safest,” Cahill said.
“And the irony is in one of my posters it’s kind of controversial – we’re not trying to be controversial but we are trying to move the Overton window.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Cahill rejected criticism that his positions were offensive or extreme, arguing that attitudes which were once mainstream are now treated as controversial.
“The stuff 30 years ago that everyone took as normal is now somehow extreme or offensive,” he said.
He also defended aspects of Ireland’s past when discussing criticism of the Catholic Church and historically religious Irish society.
“You know I remember when the hospitals were very well run by the nuns, I remember the schools were great,” Cahill said.
“Was there individuals who were evil? Absolutely. You will always get them, that’s the nature of evil – it always exists.”
He said that issues like healthcare, homelessness and more were dealt with in a preferable way under religious institutions.
The Galway West by-election was triggered after former Independent TD Catherine Connolly was elected President of Ireland last year. The contest is taking place alongside a parallel by-election in Dublin Central.
Gript has interviewed a number of candidates for the upcoming elections already as part of a series on the individual candidates and their policies in their own words.