Catherine Connolly skated in by a landslide. She won every age group by a distance. Turnout was up on the 2018 election.

Many may retain their reservations but no one with a functioning brain cell can deny she is our president.

Yet the soundtrack of the weekend was the gloating masterminds of #spoilthevote. Even combined with the entire vote of Connolly’s opponents, their “vote” wouldn’t have come near her first preference total.

Yet the ferocity of their message, scrawled into a 213,000 ballot pile, was frenetically picked over and analysed. This was the authentic voice of their risen people, the leaders insisted, a claim borne out by data collected by Technological University Dublin (TUD) politics academic Kevin Cunningham.

Those who spoiled the vote were no random mix of the general population. They were overwhelmingly supporters of Independents, Aontú, Independent Alliance and other right-wing parties. Given a list of hypothetical candidates, two thirds of them said they would have voted for Maria Steen. When asked whether they would vote for a left alliance of Sinn Féin, Social Democrats, Labour and People Before Profit at the next election, nearly three quarters said no.

So #spoilthevote was unquestionably the conservative, nationalist movement it claimed to be, with supporters such as far-right councillors Malachy Steenson, Gavin Pepper and the National Party.

It........

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