A Clear-Cut Victory

Before going into the dynamics of the campaign, we need to discuss the turnout for the election and the number of spoiled votes, both of which have been used by some commentators in recent days to belittle the significance of Connolly’s achievement. Less than half of those eligible cast a vote in the election, and nearly 13 percent of those votes were spoiled. The turnout figure was by no means unusual, but the rate of spoilage was.

There have been five contested elections for the presidency since the modern history of the office began with the victory of Mary Robinson, a liberal feminist, over candidates from Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael in 1990. Three of those elections had a turnout figure below 50 percent, and the average participation rate was 51.5 percent. The turnout this year — 45.8 percent — was higher than it was for the last election in 2018.

If no candidate gets more than 50 percent of first preferences, the lowest-placed candidate is eliminated, and their second-preference votes are distributed; the process continues until there is a winner. Apart from Connolly, there has only been one other candidate since 1990 who won the presidency without needing transfers: her predecessor, Michael D. Higgins, when he was running as an incumbent in 2018. She would still have won the 2011 election, which had a turnout of 56 percent, on the first count with the same number of votes.

Since 1990, the highest percentage for a successful candidate, even after second-preference votes were taken into account, was 57 percent for Higgins in 2011. Connolly smashed that record with first preferences alone, winning almost as many votes as Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael put together in last year’s general election. By any meaningful standard, this was a very impressive victory.

In contrast with the turnout level, the high proportion of spoiled votes is a real departure from past experience, since the figure was about 1 percent in previous elections. The only organized force campaigning for voters to spoil their ballots was the far right, disgruntled at its inability to put a candidate in the race. We’ll discuss the impact of this political bloc on the campaign, and what it might augur for the future, in more detail below.

From Higgins to Connolly

Born in 1957, Connolly is another illustration of the fact that you don’t have to be a twenty- or thirty-something candidate to enthuse young voters if they like your ideas and political record. She comes from a working-class family in Galway, the main city of Ireland’s western region, and grew up in one of its council housing estates. Her father worked as a carpenter in the Galway shipyard; her mother died suddenly when she was still a child.

After finishing school, Connolly qualified as a psychologist before passing the exams to practice as a barrister in her thirties. She became a full-time politician at a relatively late stage in her career: having served as a local councilor, she first won a seat in the Dáil, Ireland’s national parliament, at the age of fifty-eight in 2016. Neither Connolly nor her campaign put too much stress on her origin story, which would surely have been placed front and center if she was running for a party of the center or the radical right. When you’re not planning to screw over your class in the style of J. D. Vance, you don’t have to make such a fuss about where you came from.

In political terms, Connolly has a few things in common with the man she will be replacing. Like Higgins, she has a background in the Galway Labour Party, although Connolly broke with Labour before she was elected to the Dáil. Like Higgins, she resisted the pressure to embrace neoliberalism and austerity in the name of “realism” that has had such a damaging impact on center-left parties, in Ireland as elsewhere. And like Higgins, she has a strong interest in international affairs and a record of challenging the Western foreign policy consensus.

Connolly faced much more hostility from the Irish commentariat than Higgins did at the time of his first presidential campaign back in 2011. In part, this reflected the frustration of many Irish opinion-formers with the record of Higgins himself as a two-term president. They looked back wistfully at his main rival in 2011, a businessman and minor celebrity named Seán Gallagher, and dreamed of what might have been. Instead of having to engage with another speech by Higgins about the perils of free-market capitalism or the urgency of the climate crisis, they could have been documenting the rise of Ireland’s answer to Silvio Berlusconi or Donald Trump.

Higgins was also more of a political insider than Connolly. He served as a cabinet minister in the 1990s and remained a member of the Labour Party until he ran for the presidency. Connolly clearly belonged to the new left-wing forces that displaced Labour during the Great Recession when its ministers presided over years of punitive austerity. Those forces included parties like Sinn Féin, the Social Democrats, and People Before Profit, as well as left-independent Teachta Dálas (TDs) like Connolly. That was where the center of gravity in the broad-left alliance that supported Connolly clearly lay, with Labour now reduced to the status of a minor party.

But the main factor behind the antagonism toward Connolly was the change in the international climate since Higgins was first elected. Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, and their allies in the media want to push Ireland firmly into the Western military bloc, if not as a formal member of NATO then certainly as one of its satellites. They saw the presidential election as an opportunity to move toward this goal. To their immense chagrin, it ended up creating a new obstacle in the form of Connolly’s successful campaign.

Good Europeans

Fine Gael initially wanted to run Mairead McGuinness as its presidential candidate, before she ruled herself out for health reasons this summer. McGuinness had two decades of experience as a member of the European Parliament and the European Commission under her belt, and she was expected to bring that experience to bear on the office.

The orthodoxy in Strasbourg and Brussels exerts a powerful gravitational pull over Irish politicians who have served there (or those who would clearly like to do so in the future, like the current Taoiseach, Micheál Martin). In 2019, McGuinness and her Fine Gael colleagues in the European Parliament joined forces with the far right to vote against search and rescue missions for refugees crossing the Mediterranean. That wasn’t enough to satisfy their colleagues in the European People’s Party (EPP), who berated Fine Gael MEPs for not lurching to the right on ecological issues in lockstep with the EPP president, Manfred Weber.

EPP notables were especially displeased when the Fine Gael leader and Taoiseach, Simon Harris, issued a joint statement with Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, in February 2024, calling for the EU to review its trade agreement with Israel. Harris felt obliged to take this stand because public opinion in Ireland was strongly opposed to the ongoing massacre in Gaza. His allies in the EPP saw it as a betrayal and wanted him to line up with Spain’s Trumpian, hard-right opposition instead of Sánchez.

Both Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil would dearly love to resolve the tension between domestic and international pressures on their foreign policy in favor of the latter. Fine Gael nominated Heather Humphreys, a former government minister, as its substitute for Mairead McGuinness, while Fianna Fáil’s candidate was Jim Gavin, an army veteran with a track record as a Gaelic football manager but no political experience worth speaking of. Both Humphreys and Gavin wanted to scrap the so-called triple lock on Irish military commitments, which means that Irish troops can only be deployed on peacekeeping missions after votes by the cabinet, the Dáil, and the United Nations.

Opponents of the triple lock disingenuously claim that they want to restore Irish sovereignty by evading the veto that permanent members of the UN Security Council can exercise over approved military missions. In reality, the goal is to bring Ireland into line with a rapidly militarizing Europe whose leaders are anxious to appease Donald Trump. While the president has no formal powers over foreign policy, the current government would certainly have presented a victory for Humphreys or Gavin as a popular mandate for abolishing the triple lock and hiking military expenditure.

Welfare and Warfare

The aggressive hostility of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil toward Connolly’s views on foreign policy reflected this barely concealed agenda. In one radio debate, Humphreys compared Connolly to Neville Chamberlain and accused her of jeopardizing relations between Dublin and the leading European states: “You have insulted France, Germany, and the UK.”

What Humphreys had in mind were comments like this, from a parliamentary speech Connolly delivered in May on the occasion of Europe Day, where she highlighted European complicity with the destruction of Gaza:

I am certainly not using my words to celebrate Europe Day. I say so because it has completely lost any moral compass, if it ever had one. . . . When we look at Europe, I have said repeatedly I am a proud European. I have intimate connections with Germany through my family and the German language. I am not here to protest that I am European. I am here to use my very short time to say that I am ashamed to be European, with its current leadership and with [Ursula] von der Leyen standing shoulder to shoulder and in solidarity with a war criminal. . . . I am ashamed to be here looking at this speech and what I am reading about Palestine and I do not use my own words because they do not suffice any more. According to the Red Cross, the situation in Gaza “will haunt us” for decades because nobody will be able to say we were not aware.

This is what made Connolly’s campaign so refreshing to her supporters and so threatening to the Irish political establishment. She spoke about issues like the Gaza genocide with the appropriate level of moral indignation and pointed the finger at those responsible: not merely the wanted fugitive at the helm of the Israeli state but also his Western enablers like Von der Leyen, the European Commission president.

In the same speech, Connolly referred to an article by the Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh that called for the rundown of Europe’s welfare states to finance a bigger military machine. This is going to be one of the key lines of division in European politics over the coming years, and Connolly planted her flag firmly on the side of welfare, not warfare.

Micheál Martin was clearly furious that she was making it harder for him to launder militarism in the name of being “pro-European.” In a speech delivered incongruously beside the grave of Wolfe Tone, a Jacobin revolutionary, Martin demanded complete submission to the EU’s line of march since the turn of the century:

We need to start calling out people who say “Oh, but I’m pro-EU” as they constantly announce and re-announce the supposed end of Irish sovereignty. You’re not pro-EU if you stand against every treaty which has built the union over the last quarter of a century. You’re not pro-EU if you constantly say that it’s destroying our neutrality and is in the hands of a military-industrial complex.

By the time of the final television debate, Martin’s candidate, Gavin, had dropped out of the race after a lackluster, scandal-plagued campaign. It was left to Humphreys to hold the line for the political establishment. When the moderators asked if she agreed with Connolly that the United States had been enabling genocide, she began by praising the Trump administration for negotiating a ceasefire deal in Gaza before waffling for a minute or so without saying anything critical.

Listening to Humphreys, you would have gathered the impression that something terrible has happened in Gaza since October 2023 but nobody in the West bears any responsibility for it. This is the basis on which Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil would now like to move on, refusing to draw any conclusions from the conduct of the US and the leading European states over the past two years. They also intend to water down measures that have made Ireland something of an outlier among Western states, like the Occupied Territories Bill prohibiting trade with Israeli settlements. Connolly’s insistence on calling a spade a spade poses a real challenge to this plan of action.

In the same debate, the moderators asked Humphreys if she had ever said anything critical about the EU, since Connolly was facing criticism for having voted against the Nice and Lisbon treaties (along with the majority of Irish voters in both referenda, before they were told to vote again). She appeared to be stumped by the question, before eventually settling for “overregulation” as an issue that sometimes concerned her. This was not a random choice: US tech firms have lobbied some of her Fine Gael colleagues in the Irish government, pressing them to undermine the EU’s regulatory framework for AI and digital advertising.

Refusing to Bend

To their great frustration, the conservative parties found that none of their broadsides seemed to damage Connolly. One line of attack concerned her views on Palestine. In September, the BBC asked her to comment on Keir Starmer’s assertion that Hamas could play no part in a future Palestinian government. She insisted that it was not Starmer’s call to make: “I would be very wary of telling a sovereign people how to run their country. The Palestinians must decide in a democratic way who they want to lead their country.”

In another interview, Connolly pointed out that Hamas had won the last elections held in the occupied territories and was part of Palestinian civil society. Strangely, the interviewer asked her if she would have said that the Irish Republican Army was “part of the fabric of the Catholic people of the North,” as if there would be anything controversial about saying that it was. Sinn Féin received between 30 and 40 percent of the nationalist vote in the North when it gave unconditional support to the IRA campaign. Since the peace process began, nationalist voters have repeatedly elected Sinn Féin candidates with an acknowledged record of IRA membership and activism, from Martin McGuinness to Gerry Kelly and Martina Anderson.

The same interviewer asked Connolly if Hamas forces had committed war crimes on October 7, and she agreed that they had: “What they did was absolutely unacceptable. Both sides have committed war crimes, and hopefully both sides will be held to account.” She also said Israel was “acting as a terrorist state.” Martin appeared to think that such comments were self-evidently disqualifying for a candidate and directed a indignant tirade against Connolly, declaring that Hamas “cannot be part of Gaza’s future.” Simon Harris added his voice to the chorus.

Martin has never issued any statements to the effect that Likud can have no role in the future government of Israel. The idea that Hamas is beyond the pale while Likud is not may well be taken for granted at the EU summits that Martin frequents, but many of his fellow citizens who have watched a genocide unfold in real time for the past two years would beg to differ. Connolly refused to back down and the controversy had no impact on public opinion, with her support continuing to rise.

There was also an attempt to stoke up a row because Connolly had sought to hire Ursula Ní Shionnain, a member of a republican group who served time for a firearms offense, to work for her in the Dáil. Martin’s expressions of outrage about the matter rang hollow when another Fianna Fáil politician, Eamon Ó Cuív, gave Connolly his unambiguous support: “If Catherine showed a lack of judgement, I did equally, because she asked me about [Ní Shionnain] and I said that I was personally satisfied that she had moved on.” Once again, Connolly stood her ground and went on the offensive by asking how and why the information about Ní Shionnain — which was not on the public record — had been leaked to the press.

Connolly’s opponents were clearly hoping to divide the broad-left alliance that assembled behind her campaign. The Labour and Green parties, both of which have served in government as junior partners of the center right over the last decade, seemed more likely to break ranks than Sinn Féin, the Social Democrats, or People Before Profit. However, the only notable figure to speak out against Connolly was Labour’s former leader Alan Kelly, a man whose overweening self-confidence notoriously exceeds his talent as a politician.

The five-party alliance certainly played a vital part in Connolly’s success, and that unity wasn’t forged on the basis of the lowest common denominator. Connolly didn’t abandon or water down any of her main positions to get Labour or the Greens on board, so those parties ended up shifting away from their former allies in Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil for the duration of the campaign. Whether that means they will move left in a more permanent fashion is a very different question of course.

McGregor and Steen

The far-right “spoil the vote” campaign only materialized after this political subculture failed to nominate a candidate of its own. In order to make it onto the ballot paper, a candidate has to be nominated by twenty TDs or senators (from a total of 234) or else four local councils (from a total of thirty-one). Conor McGregor, the former mixed martial arts star who has reinvented himself as a far-right influencer since his sporting career fizzled out, was convinced that he had what it took to become president. Invitations to the White House and sycophantic praise from Elon Musk added more fuel to the raging inferno of McGregor’s self-regard.

However, the TDs, senators, and councilors on whom McGregor was counting didn’t want to touch him with a barge pole. Just as he was gearing up to campaign for the nominations, he lost an appeal against a civil judgment that found that he had raped a woman named Nikita Hand in 2018. The court heard testimony from an emergency room doctor about the extreme brutality of the assault to which Hand had been subjected. The gruesome details of the case made it especially galling that McGregor and his supporters like to present themselves as the defenders of Irish women against the menace that immigrants allegedly pose to their safety.

Maria Steen, who came much closer to securing a nomination, could hardly have been more different as a standard-bearer of the radical right. Unlike McGregor, Steen is a serious political operator with a polished debating style and an organizational base in the Iona Institute, an ultraconservative Catholic lobbying group. She was very active in the unsuccessful campaign to uphold Ireland’s constitutional ban on abortion. Nobody could ever imagine her punching a man in a pub for declining a shot of whiskey or partying with figures from Dublin’s criminal underworld, to mention two of McGregor’s more celebrated indiscretions.

If Steen didn’t make the cut, it wasn’t because she was a joke candidate, or a toxic bullyboy like McGregor — she simply couldn’t find enough elected representatives who wanted her to become president. Forces to the right of the mainstream consensus, from parties like Aontú and Independent Ireland to the neofascist fringe, have made real gains over the past two years in local and national elections. Yet Steen still fell short of the necessary threshold. This failure reflected the sense of entitlement with which she approached the campaign, entering the race for the presidency just two months before the vote was due to be held.

If she had scraped onto the final list of candidates, the biographical contrast between Steen and Connolly would certainly have made for interesting copy. While Steen also qualified as a barrister, before suspending her legal practice so she could homeschool her children, that is where the similarities end. This champion of the Catholic right has made an inspiring journey from her childhood days in Ballsbridge, one of Dublin’s most affluent inner suburbs, to the mansion she now shares with her husband in Blackrock, one of its most affluent outer suburbs.

When she announced her failure to secure enough nominations, Steen was carrying a designer handbag worth tens of thousands of euros. After this sartorial choice elicited a chorus of derision, she claimed that it was a deliberate provocation: “I wanted to expose the hypocrisy of the left who don’t love the poor; they just hate the rich.” One can only imagine why politicians weren’t lining up to endorse her.

Spoiler Alert

Some of the main figures behind the vote-spoiling effort are also well acquainted with the finer things in life. They include Declan Ganley, a businessman with strong ties to the US military-industrial complex. Republican apparatchiks such as Karl Rove and Mike Pompeo have joined the board of Ganley’s firm, Rivada Networks, along with former generals from Britain and the United States.

According to the Sunday Times, Rivada’s main project is the creation of “an unhackable satellite communications array for use by governments and militaries, called the OuterNet.” Ganley has a fairly high public profile in Ireland because of his role in European referendum campaigns and his failed bid to become an MEP. He also had ambitions for the presidency earlier in the year that did not bear fruit.

Another prominent spoiler, Eddie Hobbs, has a background as a celebrity money expert who used to present television shows on Ireland’s national broadcaster RTÉ. His reputation still hasn’t recovered from his association with an investment fund that lost 90 percent of its money by plunging into the riskier end of the Detroit property market during the Great Recession. Hobbs now peddles a different variety of snake oil on his YouTube channel, with guests like the self-professed “raging antisemite” and white nationalist Keith Woods (a particular favorite of Elon Musk).

It’s depressing to see anyone from Ireland’s working-class communities pulled into the slipstream of grifters like this and the wider ecosystem of political entrepreneurs looking to monetize hate. At the same time, we should keep things in perspective. The total number of spoiled votes was about 214,000. Even if we assume that everyone who spoiled their vote is ideologically aligned with the hard right, this is only slightly higher than the number of votes cast for Independent Ireland, Aontú, and smaller groups on their right flank in last year’s general election (and nearly 50,000 fewer votes than those forces won in the European election a few months earlier).

The emergence of a consolidated bloc of opinion to the right of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil over the past few years is a real problem. Far-right talking points and conspiracy theories are circulating much more widely than they did before the pandemic, and a hard core of neofascist agitators have proved able to incite violent disturbances on several occasions, most recently outside a hotel in Dublin’s Citywest area where asylum seekers are being housed. We should take the danger that all of this poses very seriously. But whether it manifests itself in the streets or at the ballot box, Ireland’s far right is still a minoritarian force that has not achieved the same level of support as its counterparts in other West European countries.

A New Republic?

Indeed, one factor behind the groundswell of support for Connolly is bound to have been a desire to shift the focus of political debate away from incessant scaremongering about immigration and supposed threats to “Irish culture” (which on closer inspection appears to be indistinguishable from the very worst forms of Anglo-American culture, with nothing distinctively Irish about it). The Irish far right has managed to hog the mic in the last couple of years, with more than a little help from its transatlantic pals, but that doesn’t mean its partisans speak for “the Irish people,” as they incessantly claim.

In her victory speech, Connolly spoke for the part of Irish society that wants to spend the coming years discussing issues that really matter instead of paranoid, conspiracist drek:

I will be a president who listens, reflects, who speaks when necessary, and a voice for peace. A voice that builds on our policy of neutrality. A voice that articulates the existential threat posed by climate change. . . . Together, we can shape a new republic together that values everybody, that values and champions diversity, and that takes confidence in our own identity, our Irish language, our English language, and the new people who have come to our country. I will be an inclusive president for all of you.

The way that Connolly expresses herself while saying things like this — confident and articulate, without being aggressive or bombastic — is also part of her appeal at a time when dysfunctional caricatures of masculinity, from Trump to McGregor, are clogging up the landscape. The decade so far hasn’t been oversaturated with good news for the Left, in Ireland as in many other countries. But Connolly’s victory is unambiguously something to be cheerful about, and it contains the seeds of future victories, if they receive the right nurturing.