Ok let's clear some things up.
All UK competitions are always open to everyone, at any competition throughout the year, any member of the community can come and compete, regardless of country. That is what the WCA is all about, getting cubing out to as many people as possible, and giving them all an environment to compete in.
However, once every year, it is nice to be able to call someone the "UK Champion" in a certain event. To allow this, we create a UK Championship, where the intent is to crown a UK Champion in each event. However, we still allow everyone to come and compete, because why not? We want to hold a big competition in a great venue and invite overseas competitors to come and compete at our competitions. It is explicitly stated prior to the competition that only UK citizens can win prizes. If you are coming solely for the prizes, you are probably doing the wrong hobby. Most, if not all of you will come to do something you love, break some personal bests, and come and see friends, some of whom you may only see a couple of times a year.
Restricting prizes to the country's championship is not uncommon, and is a choice every country can make. Another great example are things like Asian and European Championships, where people who hold citizenship outside of Asia and Europe respectively can not win prizes. They are still allowed to compete, because we can support them to do so. For example, Noah Arthurs came to the last European Championships and won 4BLD, but he is not the reigning 4BLD European Champion, that title is held by Callum because he was the highest ranking European at the event.
This is how we apply results to the UK Championship. Ciarán, yes you did win the UK Championship 2015, by no means and easy feat, with a really great average in the final. Honestly, congratulations, you do deserve it. However, the title of UK Champion goes to Robert because he was the highest ranking UK citizen. As said before, we allow you to compete because we want the competition to be available to everyone who has the capability to attend, but prizes were explicitly for UK citizens, and so Robert won the 1st place trophy, Sameer 2nd place and Breandan 3rd. As stated before, this is common amongst National championships, and we also choose to do this for one competition a year. If you really have a problem with it then don't come to the UK Championship if you aren't a UK citizen, we hold like 10 other competitions in the year as well where you can win prizes.
As for the specific Ireland/UK situation. I have suggested it before, that we have a UK & Ireland Championship. However we agree now that if Ireland want to have their own championship, they must organise their own. And they have happened! This year an Irish Championship was held and I'm sure many more will happen in the future. The biggest problem in my opinion is that if we held a UK & Ireland Championship, there would be far less incentive to hold competitions in Ireland, and the community could not grow as much.
On the topic of media, we all are aware of the lack of knowledge in cubing that the media has. Why would you start caring about their opinion now? We all know who won, and we all know who the UK Champion is, the media can say what they like to be honest.
There are no plans to change anything with how the UK Championship is run.
TL;DR: Ciarán won, Rob is UK Champion. Prizes are for UK citizens only, that was stated beforehand, it's always been like that and always will be for UKC. Other countries do it, it happens as majors as well.
