By Dean Buckley
In the final week of Maria Steen’s failed effort to receive a nomination to the Irish presidency, emails with the same message appeared in the inboxes of ten TDs, all of them independents or supporters of the government.
The emails read:
“Ireland deserves a real presidential choice, not another party retirement plan. Nominate Maria Steen and break the cartel lock on Áras. She stands for life, family, community, and free speech. Rural voters you represent crave those values ignored by Dublin elites.
“Your signatures alone can bring her onto the ballot. Let debates finally include conscience, culture, and faith. If you want our continued support, show that Ireland's independents guard democracy, not establishment comfort.
“Do the bold thing today.”
Though ostensibly sent in the names of Irish voters, these emails came from a Spanish political organisation, CitizenGo. It was established in 2013 as the international sister organisation to the hard right, ultraconservative Catholic group HazteOir, with which it later merged.
CitizenGo has had a presence in Ireland for a number of years through American anti-abortion activist Scott Schittl, who has longstanding political and business ties to Niamh Uí Bhriain of the Life Institute. The organisation hired its first full-time campaigns manager for Ireland earlier this year, former journalist Louise Roseingrave. Last month however she wrote about leaving CitizenGo.
Its model is simple: flood the inboxes of legislators, public servants and institutions with emails and where possible hit them with phone calls. The latter requires volunteers and CitizenGo has few in Ireland. But the former only requires people to sign one of its “petitions”, which sends an email in their name to the petition’s addressees.
As CitizenGo’s petition to “Give Ireland a Real Chance to Nominate Maria Steen for President” explains:
“Politicians count letters more than likes; signatures show real names and addresses. When an inbox overflows, staffers flag the issue for urgent attention.”
Both Roseingrave and CitizenGo’s Britain-based global campaigns manager Caroline Farrow promoted the petition, launched 18 September, online. Farrow also claimed in posts on X to have organised volunteers to call the offices of TDs on the Monday before the close of nominations.
There is no evidence that Maria Steen or anyone involved in her campaign approved of CitizenGo inserting itself into the presidential nomination process on her behalf. There is some evidence she wasn’t aware – two of the ten TDs targeted by the petition – Mattie McGrath and Carol Nolan – had endorsed her from the start.
Though CitizenGo’s attempted intervention in the presidential election was clumsy it was nevertheless remarkable: a foreign political organisation whose board includes a corrupt ex-politician linked to an international money laundering scheme tried to influence an Irish election.
And it’s not the first time one of its founding board members, a former Italian MP, inserted himself into Irish politics.
‘Irish media has never covered the Azerbaijani laundromat’
In 2014 Luca Volonté donated €25,000 to the Iona Institute.
Unbeknownst to Iona, Volonté had accepted millions in bribes in exchange for helping to whitewash Azerbaijan’s human rights record in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE).
He was convicted of bribery in 2021 for receiving more than €2 million through the “Azerbaijani laundromat”, a complex scheme that siphoned billions out of the Azerbaijani economy and into companies controlled by family, friends and allies of Azerbaijani dictator Ilham Aliyev.
Azerbaijani MP Elkhan Suleymanov and lobbyist, later an MP, Muslim Mammadov organised the bribes and both were convicted alongside Volonté.
Thirteen PACE members were expelled from the organisation in 2018 for accepting gifts and bribes from the Azerbaijani delegation in exchange for lobbying on their behalf.
Others who did so, including Volonté, had already left the body but were stripped of honorary memberships.
The most conspicuous example of this lobbying came during an infamous 2013 vote on a report into political prisoners in Azerbaijan. It was called the Strässer report after the German MP assigned to produce it.
The vote – in which Azerbaijan and its allies quashed the Strässer report and adopted a softer alternative report – set a record as the best attended in the history of PACE. Volontè was one of the MPs who helped to organise its defeat.
For this and other efforts he received around €100,000 a month from December 2012 to December 2014. He then funnelled the proceeds to dozens of Christian fundamentalist groups across Europe through his Novae Terrae Foundation.
One of those groups was CitizenGo, of which Volonté remains a founding board member. Another was the Iona Institute.
According to bank statements obtained by Italian magazine L’Espresso and shared with The Ditch the Novae Terrae Foundation donated €18,000 to the Iona Institute in January 2014. This was during the last of Steen’s three years as a director of the company. However there is no suggestion of wrongdoing on her part.
Novae Terrae donated a further €7,000 to Iona in December 2014 shortly after her term had concluded.
Iona chairman David Quinn acknowledged these donations in a BuzzFeed News article on the 2015 marriage equality referendum but said Iona didn’t use the funds for its referendum campaign.
After Italian financial police raided Novae Terrae’s headquarters in February 2015 the flow of money from the foundation reversed and former recipients sent money back.
The Iona Institute donated €2,000 to Novae Terrae in August 2016, several months after prosecutors in Milan had charged Volonté with money laundering and accepting bribes.
Volonté’s conviction for bribery was vacated in 2023 when Italy's highest court found the statute of limitations had expired prior to his conviction. It however upheld the confiscation of the bribes he received.
Earlier this year former German MP Eduard Lintner became the second parliamentarian convicted of taking bribes through the Azerbaijani laundromat.
The court also found that former German MP Karin Strenz had received bribes from both Lintner and the Azerbaijani delegation. She died in 2021.
Other cases arising from the Azerbaijani laundromat are before the courts in other countries.
Though widely reported in other countries, Irish media has never covered the Azerbaijani laundromat and PACE bribery scandal.
Volonté became a darling of the international anti-abortion right after collaborating with senator Ronán Mullen. The pair worked on a series of critical amendments to a PACE report on conscientious objection from providing abortion and other forms of reproductive healthcare. There is no suggestion that Mullen was aware of Volonté’s criminal activities.
Michael McNamara, then a senator, was a member of the Irish delegation to PACE at the height of Azerbaijani corruption in the Council of Europe. He earned the contempt of the Azerbaijani delegation through his steadfast opposition to their whitewashing agenda.
He even had a public shouting match with Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev on the issue of political prisoners in 2014.
McNamara was the only Irish parliamentarian to testify at the subsequent PACE investigation into corruption arising from the Azerbaijani laundromat.
He told investigators when he first went to Strasbourg in 2011 the head of the Irish delegation invited him to lunch with Belgian MP Stef Goris, who tried to persuade him to avail of Azerbaijan’s “caviar diplomacy”:
“Mr Goris had suggested that they should go there and see Azerbaijan for themselves, and that they would be provided with business-class tickets. He said that there might be a stopover in Istanbul, and if there was, it would be in a nice hotel, and that there were many nice hotels also in Azerbaijan.
“Mr Goris had insisted that it would be an interesting opportunity to see Azerbaijan and, perhaps, to dispel unfounded criticisms. However, when Mr McNamara had started asking about the issue of political prisoners in Azerbaijan, Mr Goris had ended the discussion and had never contacted him again,” reads the report.
Stef Goris was among the former PACE members stripped of their honorary membership for lobbying on Azerbaijan’s behalf. McNamara told investigators Goris was “very active in securing the defeat of the Strässer report”.
A naive inattention
Volonté’s CitizenGo’s efforts during the presidential campaign went largely unnoticed.
It is an oversight that reflects more than anything a naive inattention to how exposed Ireland is to foreign influence through international political institutions – and to unaccountable dark money through globalised finance capitalism.
Five years ago investigative journalist Peter Geoghegan warned that “Ireland can’t afford to ignore the danger of dark money” in an op-ed for the Irish Independent, but that is exactly what we’ve done. Anyone who thinks Ireland is too small or unimportant for foreign interference in our politics is mistaken.
CitizenGo seems to consider its prospects in Ireland favourably. It’s recently hired a new campaigns director.
