The Irish presidential election was already an anti-democratic farce even before the combined left candidate lobbed an incendiary device into the mix. Catherine Connolly’s comments on BBC describing Hamas as ‘part of the fabric of Palestinian people’ – and her opinion that Keir Starmer is wrong to exclude Hamas from a new Palestinian state – has not gone down well.
Fourteen interminably long years of suffocating sanctimony from Michael D. Higgins will come to an end. But will Ireland’s new president be any better?
For the first time in 14 years, the Irish people get to elect a new president of Ireland next month. Fourteen interminably long years of suffocating sanctimony from the present incumbent, Michael D. Higgins, will come to an end. But will Ireland’s new president be any better?
When elected in 2011, Higgins promised he would be a one-term president, but that notion ended not long after he got his feet under the table of the presidential mansion, Aras an Uachtaráin. Higgins stood again in 2018 and won a landslide victory. This time, voters were hoping for a broader choice of candidates. That now seems unlikely.
The Irish system requires independent candidates to secure the nomination of twenty TDs or senators or, alternatively, the majority support of four county councils to get on the ballot paper. Which was never a problem – until now.
In a manoeuvre of breathtaking cynicism, Tánaiste Simon Harris instructed Fina Gael politicians to effectively block any independent seeking a nomination – or risk being booted out of the party. Taoiseach Micheal Martin was more covert; his elected representatives were told not to support any other candidate but Fianna Fail’s.
The diktat would deprive voters of an alternative candidate who might stand for something different than Fianna Fail, Fine Gael, or the ramblings of the left. But the real reason was likely to block the path of barrister and conservative, Maria Steen, who would take votes away from the government candidates in large swathes of rural Ireland.
Steen, the only independent left standing, was central to giving the government a bloody nose in last year’s disastrous ‘family’ and ‘care’ referendums that proposed removing ‘women’ and ‘mothers’ from the Constitution. Despite the backing of the entire political establishment, bar one small party, the proposals were defeated by 74 per cent and 67 per cent, respectively. She is a strong, articulate debater who reduced Martin into a stuttering mess in a head-to-head debate on the referendums. Steen has so far managed to secure seventeen nominations, and it will come down to the wire by close of nominations on Wednesday as to whether she will get over the line.
Martin divided his own party by parachuting a former Dublin football manager, Jim Gavin, to stand for Fiana Fail to capture the GAA vote. He is a weak debater and was already struggling to connect to voters when he became embroiled in what he termed ‘malicious’ social media smears about his private life, which have been shared more than a million times.
Fine Gael candidate Heather Humphries had to be cajoled out of retirement. Both candidates are bland, ineffectual, and uninspiring.
Which brings us to Catherine Connolly, the 68-year-old combined left candidate whose top priority is Gaza. In a BBC interview on Monday, Connolly said it is not for the British Prime Minster to decide on Hamas’s role in a Palestinian state. She described the murderous death cult as ‘part of the fabric of the Palestinian people’ but subsequently sought to distinguish Hamas terrorists from the Hamas ‘civil power.’
‘What happened on October 7, I’m on record for condemning. But history did not start on October 7…So, I don’t think Keir Starmer should have any say about Hamas. It’s up to the Palestinian people.’
Hours later, a clearly incensed Martin launched a broadside against her on RTS, saying she was ‘reluctant to unequivocally condemn October 7’. The Taoiseach accused her of appearing to ‘justify’ Hamas’s butchery.
‘Women were raped and there was terrible sexual violence. Catherine Connolly has said it was wrong but then moved quickly to qualify it by saying “oh yeah’ everything didn’t start on 7 October”, as if that somehow justified what Hamas did.’ Martin also referenced Hamas’s vow to eliminate the Israeli state.
Connolly has said she has ‘utterly condemned Hamas over and over’. In a follow-up interview on RTE radio, Connolly sidestepped questions on whether she considered October 7 a war crime and tried to switch the focus onto ‘terrorist state’ Israel.
Connolly already has questions hanging over her about her 2018 visit to Syria, where she met a supporter of deposed Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. She has since admitted that meeting was a mistake, but the fact she went in the first place should give pause for thought.
If Connolly does get elected, and Hamas end up leading this new utopian Palestinian state, will we see Zaher Jabarin and his band of murdering brothers invited for afternoon tea at the Aras, the same as other visiting heads of State?
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