The Island of Broken Toys
RTE throws childhood innocence on the bonfire of the identities
The Toy Show is an Irish institution. It’s the annual Christmas special of RTE’s Late Late Show, itself a fixture of Irish television for decades, and it is by far the most-watched episode of the year. Every Christmas, children gambol on the studio floor while demonstrating the year's most popular toys, all against elaborate themed sets that transform the studio into everything from Willy Wonka's chocolate factory to the Home Alone house. Everyone carries fond memories of The Toy Show, the whole country still makes an event of it, and it can dominate the national conversation for days afterwards.
The Late Late Show’s enduring success is almost entirely down to its first host, Gay Byrne, one of the early geniuses of television. Byrne’s fireside manner was ideal both for quizzing celebrities and, somehow, moderating debates about the most painful topics in Irish society. Since then, The Late Late has gone through a series of presenters who lack Byrne's avuncular charm and ability to manage a ruckus, so the show has been coasting on his legacy for the past thirty years. His successors lacked both the expertise and the confidence to conduct a thorny debate, so the thorny debates just stopped happening, and the celebrity interviews felt weightless and cynical without them.
But it trundled on, and everyone still loved The Toy Show.
But now, in 2025, the show's producers may have found a way to exhaust the goodwill of the Irish public.
RTE have announced that a portion of the money raised by the Toy Show this year will be going to Irish trans activist organisations TENI and Belong To: €15,000 and €40,000 respectively. Both are purely ideological groups, run by activists who believe that gender-nonconforming children — many of whom are autistic, gay, or abused — are somehow faulty and need to be ‘fixed’ through surgical and pharmaceutical interventions.
They are child abuse organisations. And like many similar trans orgs, they’ve been operating in plain sight for over a decade. The Irish group Not All Gays is made up of young gay people who had the misfortune to pass through Belong To’s doors."A pattern emerges in their stories, from inappropriate advances by older men to pressure from trans-identified adults insisting they weren’t gay, just born in the wrong body. That’s what TENI and Belong To are all about: reframing conversion therapy and predatory behaviour as inclusion and kindness. And now The Toy Show is lending them legitimacy.
I don't want people to underestimate how serious this is. Taking something that's been a part of Irish childhood for generations and using it to fund an organisation that targets children is a poisonous inversion of what the Irish people treasure about the show. And I think Irish people may sense this, even though they’re being largely kept in the dark on this issue by Irish legacy media.
It reminds me of another moment of overreach: when Leo Varadkar's government tried to remove the word "woman" from the Irish Constitution. My mum is not a political person, but even she was outraged. With her friends in agreement, they voted accordingly, helping to bring an end to Varadkar’s time in office. On this issue, my mum was always on my side — because mums are like that — but when Leo tried to erase Irish women, that’s when she and her friends finally saw what I'd been talking about. This wasn't just about feminism, free speech, or comedy. It was an attack on fundamental language and values.
Queer Theory preaches that reality, sexuality, and decency are just flimsy social constructs: arbitrary and oppressive rules ready to be dismantled. Judith Butler, the high priestess of this chaos, once asked whether “unspeakable sexual acts” might have “pedagogical and ethical value.” Michel Foucault, Queer Theory’s creepy uncle, whose musings on “different ways of loving” are seen by many as sly justifications for eroding boundaries around age and consent — a reading made more credible by the allegations of his predatory behavior with underage boys in Tunisia.
These ideas aren’t just academic wordplay. They’re a deliberate assault on boundaries, designed to erode the safeguards that protect children from harm. When this toxic sludge seeps into something as innocent as The Toy Show, it’s more than a betrayal, it’s cultural vandalism. For families across Ireland, it’s their kids’ innocence being hijacked, dragged into a perverse culture war by ideologues who see childhood as just another artificial boundary to be ignored.
Here's what gives me hope: this might backfire on them. The gender movement is already losing. The Cass Review destroyed their credibility. Countries are rolling back policies around ‘trans healthcare’. Irish media hasn't figured it out yet, but it’s all over. In fact, this is exactly the kind of overreach that was always going to bring it down. They’re about to pollute something that's genuinely loved in Ireland, something truly innocent.
So let them keep pushing. Let them corrupt more beloved traditions. Every move they make clarifies what we're really dealing with, and what kind of future we’re all signing up to if we don’t break out of the spell soon.
For all your brave and noble advocacy against it, there will be no sudden and 'contagious' end to the transcult, no clearcut 'ending of a tide', as there was at its start. A return to sanity will be gradual, enduring, a slow 'one by one' recovery as deluded individuals emerge on their own from this monstrous nightmare (Goya: "The Sleep of Reason produces Monsters"). There is no arguing or debate to be had with transcult members, for, as Dean Jonathan Swift observed centuries ago ['the poor Irish priest' possessed of one of the most brilliant intellects of his time who 'gradually received a universal recognition'] "... it is futile to reason someone out of a thing that he was not reasoned into." We can conclude that the transcult, like other cults, owes its remarkable power to survive every evidence based criticism to the fact that it is not directed towards truth but towards the power needed to maintain a delusion.
We should know by now that the “Covid turn” of 2020 signalled an unprecedentedly brutal transformation of the entire media theatre into a naked tool of the parasite class in an increasingly overt war on the population. That their methods were appallingly shameless and showed the most openly cynical contempt for the masses comes as a shock even to someone as jaded as myself.
And for me, the single most insufferable aspect of this isn’t the openness of the assault or even the vicious pathology of this parasite class. In a way, you might even say that these reptiles (in the non-David Icke sense .... though sometimes I wonder) are behaving perfectly logically given their vicious ideology. You might even say that these creatures have a fatal flaw in their psychotic overreach. Trying to remove the word “mother”?
But no, for me the most disgusting aspect of this is the unfathomable gullibility of what now passes for “The Left”. For more than half a century the postmodernist flatulence of these academic buffoons has been accelerating as they preen themselves over their latest lucrative offering guaranteed healthy sales through inclusion on “recommended reading lists” for the latest batch of pitiable students treading water in the university sewage.