Behind the Gag: We Consent Fiasco Underlines Dublin Rape Crisis Centre’s NGO Politicisation

Not for the first time has a foolish PR campaign for a progressive cause blown back in the faces of the NGO class in Ireland with a stinker of an ad campaign by WeConsent.ie (an effective offshoot of the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre), earning scorn internationally.

A thirty-second advert decrying unwanted hugging from grandparents, the campaign is easy to lampoon, pointing to a rather Orwellian distrust of intra-family relations that seem to haunt the progressive cause.

The funding trail of the advertisement has naturally come under scrutiny, enabled by the Department of Justice, CUAN and Community Foundation Ireland, the usual conduits for left-wing culture war propaganda.

Chief among the backers of the media drive by We Consent is the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, which, despite the ostensibly good cause, is an active political lobbying organisation as well as a charitable service provider. Per their accounts (€5.69m in 2025), they receive substantial public funding, with documented personal connections to the Irish Labour Party in particular through its director Fergus Finlay.

Its lobbying contacts included Ruth Coppinger, Máire Devine, Patricia Stephenson, Barry Ward and Erin McGreehan, among others, pushing for amendments on image-based abuse and engagement with an all-party parliamentary group on sexual violence.

The hinge point of its Oireachtas lobbying is the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Sexual Violence, giving it the ears of Fine Gael politicos, underlying the axis of feminist power created in the activist circuit around Repeal and Marriage Referenda the past decade uniting the left and the centre.

A brief perusal of their staff listings shows the interwoven nature of the Centre with left activism, often using the veneer of women’s rights to push the envelope on select causes.

The real significance of this ridiculous advert lies not in its clumsy attempt to police grandparents’ hugs, but in what it reveals about the politicisation of Ireland’s NGO sector and the institutional power it now commands. 

The Dublin Rape Crisis Centre exemplifies a wider convergence between the activist left and the political centre, where causes associated with progressive campaigning have acquired the funding, political access and institutional legitimacy to shape public policy.

The grandparents advert may have made its authors an international laughing stock, but the joke obscures a more consequential reality: those pulling the strings are not marginal activists shouting from the sidelines, but influential players embedded within Ireland’s publicly funded institutional establishment. The campaign may have backfired spectacularly; the machinery of influence behind it remains firmly in place.