Comment: Trying to make sense of Peter Casey’s rise

What does it all mean?

Just how did Peter Casey, who said all those nasty things about Travellers, end up doing so well in the race to become president?

Is Ireland becoming like Trump’s America?

Is Casey our Donald Trump?

What does it say about all of us?

Or at least, what does it say about the 342,727 people who gave Casey a first preference vote, let alone the thousands more who gave him a number two or three?

Are they racist, given they clearly bought into his message about Ireland’s marginalised gypsy culture?

It was all getting a bit Father Ted at one stage, as the righteous mob couldn’t wait to ascend their high horses.

But now, with the campaign over, let’s put a few things into perspective.

For all of the Derryman’s success, the country has overwhelmingly re-elected Michael D Higgins, who gave a powerful reposte to the coarse language espoused by Casey.

“Words matter. Words can hurt. Words can heal. Words can empower. Words can divide,” boomed Higgins during his victory speech.

Casey, before he made his comments about Travellers, was in last place, based on several opinion polls. Nobody knew who he was and nobody was listening.

Once opinion polls emerged which showed Higgins was on course for victory — by a huge margin — attention shifted to who would come second, and in reality Casey was the only one showing a bit of life.

A soft target as they may be, it is clear his comments, particularly around the taxpayer-funded housing development in Tipperary (which Travellers refused to accept because of a lack of stables for horses), that many agreed with him.

His comments allowed him, on October 17, to dominate the TV debate on Virgin Media and set him apart from the other candidates.

Rounded upon by his fellow candidates and the politically correct social media community, all of a sudden Casey was alive.

His faux threat on RTÉ radio to consider exiting the race last weekend, while writing a major newspaper column, showed that he was quite able to manipulate the media for his own end.

Jumping from 1% to 23% in less than 10 days was a remarkable spike in popularity.

Much was made of the fact that Casey’s vote was strong among rural voters, but such analysis is too simplistic.

His fellow Dragon and wooden-spoon recipient, Gavin Duffy, gave an accurate summation of Casey’s spectacular performance.

He stressed that Casey is not an “evil genius” and that his Travelling community comments should not be overstated to represent something Ireland is not.

“If there was some strategy then you would have to attribute some evil genius to him,” said Duffy. “He was throwing grenades repeatedly, one of them was going to explode, it did, and it drove him up in the polls.”

By beating expections, Casey has been able to claim victory in his defeat.

His “victory” is as clear a sign as we need to show us we are not nearly as progressive as we think we are and we are in some part still, a very racist country.