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Ireland Re-elects President and Rejects Blasphemy Ban

President Michael D. Higgins and his wife, Sabina, casting their ballots on Friday.Credit...Clodagh Kilcoyne/Reuters

DUBLIN — Ireland re-elected its leftist president, Michael D. Higgins, to a second term and voted overwhelmingly on Saturday to remove a ban on blasphemy from the Constitution.

Mr. Higgins won easily, with about 56 percent of the vote, despite a late surge by a former reality show celebrity whose support soared after he criticized an ethnic minority group. In a separate ballot, about 65 percent of voters, or 951,650 people, chose to abolish a constitutional ban on blasphemy.

The vote was more symbolic than practical: No one has ever been prosecuted for blasphemy in modern Ireland, and in practice the ban had never led to a prosecution.

But rights groups said that the existence of the ban was used by repressive governments to argue in support of their own restrictions.

Irish voters chose to remove the word “blasphemous” from the law that states “the publication or utterance of blasphemous, seditious, or indecent matter is an offense which shall be punishable in accordance with law.”

In the lead-up to the vote, the Catholic Church said that the Irish constitutional clause was “largely obsolete.”

Mr. Higgins’s re-election to the presidency, a largely ceremonial position with rarely invoked constitutional powers, was never really in doubt, and he won comfortably, but the gains made by Peter Casey, a former panelist on Ireland’s “Dragon’s Den” reality show, drew considerable attention in the final days of the race.

Mr. Casey saw his support leap from 2 percent in opinion polls conducted two weeks ago to about 23 percent in the election itself, lifting him from last in the six-candidate pack to second. Voting closed on Friday, with the results announced on Saturday night.

The results were a setback for Sinn Fein, the former political wing of the Irish Republican Army. The party ignored the longstanding convention against challenging presidential incumbents seeking second terms, putting forward a candidate to test its national strength.

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Peter Casey criticized the Irish Travellers, an ethnic minority group, and saw his support grow.Credit...Clodagh Kilcoyne/Reuters

Its candidate, Liadh ní Riada, finished fourth, with only about 6 percent of the vote, considerably less than the party’s 14 percent support over all in the most recent national survey.

The dramatic rise in support for Mr. Casey, 61, a businessman, followed the release of a podcast interview in which he criticized the Irish Travellers’ official status as an ethnic minority, recognized by Parliament last year.

The Travellers are a traditionally nomadic indigenous group. Ethnically Irish in origin, they are believed to have diverged from the general population many generations ago, developing their own variant of the Irish dialect and culture.

Mr. Casey had said that the Travellers were “basically people camping in someone else’s land” and that their separate ethnic status was nonsense. He also accused the Travellers of failing to pay taxes and of driving down home prices wherever they live.

“The Casey vote shows that Ireland, like any other Western country, is not immune from the populism we are seeing around the world,” said Noel Whelan, a political analyst. “The tactic he used was the same one we’ve seen in America and elsewhere, where you attack a vulnerable element of society and accuse them of being ungrateful and causing social problems.”

Mr. Casey was one of three panelists from the “Dragon’s Den” to run in the election. All three had argued that their experience as businessmen would help them to do a better job as president than Mr. Higgins, an academic, poet and former parliamentarian for the center-left Labour Party.

In the last presidential election, in 2011, one of those reality show celebrities, Sean Gallagher, came close to defeating Mr. Higgins. Mr. Gallagher, who is also a former fund-raiser for the center-right Fianna Fail Party, finished third this time.

In an impassioned speech at Dublin Castle on Saturday night, Mr. Higgins said voters had faced stark decisions about the “character of our Irishness.”

“The people have made a choice as to which version of Irishness they want reflected at home and abroad,” he said. “It is the making of hope they wish to share, rather than the experience of any exploitation of division or fear.”

The absence of any heavyweight challenger to Mr. Higgins was reflected in the turnout, which was down by a third from the 64.5 percent who came out earlier this year for the referendum that abolished Ireland’s constitutional ban on abortion.

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