Meet Ireland’s new socialist president

Brace yourselves, said Harry McGee in The Irish Times (Dublin): “Storm Catherine is about to hit the Irish political landscape.”

Our next president will be the outspoken socialist politician Catherine Connolly, who won Friday’s election by a landslide with 63.4% of the vote. And though the role of president may be largely ceremonial, there are a number of reasons Connolly could still make waves, said Pat Leahy in the same paper – her far-left views, for a start.

The Irish-speaking former barrister is critical of the EU and Nato; wants to ringfence Irish neutrality from what she calls Western “militarism”; has accused the UK and US of enabling genocide in Gaza; and has called on the Irish government to prepare for a united Ireland. Combine all that with the fact nearly 40% of voters want the president to play a more active role and speak out on issues, and there’s a real chance the interaction between the government and the Áras an Uachtaráin – or Viceregal Lodge, as the president’s official residence used to be known – “may be about to enter a new and distinctly less congenial phase”.

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‘A kick in the pants’ to the establishment

Some see Connolly’s victory as evidence Ireland “has gone stark staring mad”, said Eilis O’Hanlon in The Irish Independent (Dublin). And certainly she’s guilty of “militant kookiness”. She opposed sanctions on Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime in 2018; she thinks Hamas should have a role in governing a future Palestinian state if elected; she thought nothing of employing a member of a republican party who’d been convicted of firearms offences. Yet the election of an “outsider” such as Connolly “is neither insane nor irrational” – it is “a logical response to the times we live in”. Irish voters are in the mood to deliver “a kick in the pants” to the establishment.

“Anti-immigration rage” is driving some of the discontent, said Finn McRedmond in The New Statesman. Last week, violent riots erupted outside the Citywest migrant hotel in Dublin, following reports a ten-year-old girl had been sexually assaulted by an asylum seeker. “Precipitous demographic change” caused by record asylum applications has turned parts of the country into a “powder keg”.

But as if oblivious to the febrile nature of the times, the governing coalition’s Fine Gael party chose to field an uncharismatic “middle-ground” candidate in the form of Heather Humphreys, said Gerard Howlin in The Irish Times. A serial cabinet minister, Humphreys presented herself as “capable”, but at the same time totally devoid of any “daring and imagination about where the country should go”.

Authenticity: the political zeitgeist?

Connolly, by contrast, more than meets “the zeitgeist in politics right now”: it is one that prizes “authenticity” above all else, said Mick Clifford in the Irish Examiner (Cork). She didn’t apologise when challenged on her various left-wing credos – her belief in open borders, for example – she “doubled down”: and the voters applauded her for it. Her election could “mark a turning point in Ireland’s anti-establishment politics”.

Actually, Ireland’s presidency has been trending this way for years, said Shawn Pogatchnik on Politico (Brussels). Formerly a quiet “sinecure for senior statesman backed by the dominant Fianna Fáil party”, the role has evolved to become an important counterweight to the government of the day – particularly so under outgoing incumbent Michael D. Higgins, who has spent the past 14 years “expanding what the president is allowed to say and do”, openly condemning Israel for its war in Gaza, for example.

But Connolly could take things to another level. Her equivocation on Ukraine and strident opposition to wider European security moves (she has compared Germany’s current plans to boost defence spending “with Nazi militarisation in the 1930s”) could make life very difficult for Micheál Martin’s government, already caught between the competing demands to maintain Ireland’s vaunted neutrality and to support the EU’s efforts in Ukraine. At the very least, her forthrightness could generate some extremely awkward headlines in Brussels.