Worse Than Michael D. Higgins?
With only a few short weeks until Michael D Higgins vacates the office of President, there will be many who will cheer his departure – from Dublin to Jerusalem. The Irish President has used his office to espouse dangerous rhetoric about Israel, from dismissing claims of antisemitism as a ‘PR exercise by the Israeli government’ to calling for an international force to march on Jerusalem. His 14-year tenure cannot end a day too soon.
However, such celebrations will be short-lived if the ‘United Left’ candidate, Catherine Connolly, manages to secure at least another seven years for the anti-Western, socialist force dominant in Irish politics. Only this week, she rebuked British Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, for stating that Hamas should form part of any Palestinian government because Hamas is “part of the fabric of the Palestinian people”. When her comments were criticised, she defended her stance – going on to say that “history did not start on 7 October” and Israel would have to disarm alongside Hamas.
In launching her campaign, Connolly has made it clear that Palestine will be to the forefront of her campaign – we should believe her.
Between May 2021 and July 2025, she raised Israel in the Irish Parliament over 200 times…regularly slandering Israel as a “terrorist state” or “an apartheid regime.” When serving as Deputy Chairperson of the Lower House of the Irish Parliament, she tabled questions to then Minister for Foreign Affairs on “Jewish control” and “Jewish supremacy.”
Previously, she questioned then Minister for Foreign Affairs, Micheál Martin, on why the Irish Embassy in Tel Aviv signed the local EU Statement on Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day. A month after October 7th, she sounded the alarm over 100 Israeli engineers coming to work for Intel in Ireland and had already accused Israel of “genocide.” During the Covid-19 pandemic, she demanded an explanation for why Israel had been exempted from the list of countries required to enter mandatory hotel quarantine upon arrival in Ireland. Issue after issue, the record of her obsessive persecution of the Jewish State grows long.
Independent of Israel, Connolly has also been in hot water for going to Syria in 2018 with infamous former MEPs, Mick Wallace and Clare Daly, and for being escorted around by Assad ally Fares Al-Shehabi. She has called for the Irish government to prevent US Military Aircraft from refuelling at Shannon Airport. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Connolly strongly condemned the “warmongering” of NATO. She has also warned that Ireland cannot trust either America, the European Union or the UK as allies. Only recently did she compare German rearmament to the rise of the Nazis in the the 1930s. Such anti-Western pedigree would almost make one opt for seven more years of Higgins…
It speaks volumes as to the broken nature of Irish politics that the cause of a foreign terrorist movement dominates the national media cycle, and that a candidate with the record of Connolly can tout her record of shame with pride. At the time of writing, Ireland is the first country to seek to enact anti-Jewish boycott legislation since the fall of Nazi Germany and is willing to commit economic suicide which will fail to progress the ‘Palestinian cause’ so much as an inch.
Perhaps, upon reflection, Connolly is the President the Irish people want and deserve, but what does that say about us as a people? It says we are not a serious people. To the detriment of our people and national priorities, we obsess over a foreign nation. We lecture Israel and America on security, when our government struggles so much as to put a plane in the sky or a ship in the sea. Connolly is the candidate who confirms our hubris, but if she follows on from Higgins, Ireland will be the poorer for it.
* Daniel Epstein-O’Dowd, Government Relations Consultant, former Political Advisor within the Irish Parliament, and widely-published political commentator.
