Brace yourselves, said Harry McGee in The Irish Times: “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”.

Some see Connolly’s victory as evidence Ireland “has gone stark staring mad”, said Eilis O’Hanlon in The Irish Independent. 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 10-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”. 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. 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. 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.

It’s 53 years since Bloody Sunday, when 13 unarmed civilians were killed by the British Army in Londonderry, said Andrew McQuillan in The Spectator – but the events of that day continue to reverberate. Last month, the trial of a former British paratrooper, now in his 70s, began at Belfast Crown Court. He was accused of shooting dead two protesters and attempting to kill five others. But after a five-week trial, Judge Patrick Lynch found “Soldier F” not guilty. Delivering his verdict, he said that the evidence offered by Northern Ireland’s Public Prosecution Service had fallen “well short” of the standard required. This was “a politically driven show trial”, said the Daily Mail, and the ruling will doubtless have come as an “immense relief” to Soldier F, who’d been “hounded through the courts” for years. The case should never have been allowed to proceed as far as it did.

Claims of a “witch-hunt” against Army veterans who served in Northern Ireland are wide of the mark, said Dan Sabbagh in The Guardian: since 1998, only one has been convicted, and he received a suspended sentence. Soldier F’s acquittal came as no great surprise. Although the judge said that he was part of a group of soldiers, some of whom had opened fire on civilians “with the intention to kill”, the evidence against him was largely based on statements made in the early 1970s by two other Paras present that day, which were, the judge said, unreliable and untestable. One of those men has since died; the other refused to testify. Testimony from civilians added context, but didn’t directly implicate Soldier F. Given the quality of the prosecution’s evidence, the verdict may have been the only one the judge could reach, said The Irish News, but it will have come as a terrible blow to the families of Bloody Sunday’s victims. They have spent decades fighting for justice for those killed, but it “remains heartbreakingly out of reach”.

This trial was mired in the particularly brutal events of Bloody Sunday, said The Times. But many other elderly veterans who “risked their lives” during the Troubles now also live in fear of being investigated for alleged misdeeds decades ago – while the paramilitaries behind 87% of the deaths have no such concern. It’s true that cases have often collapsed before they reach the courts, or ended in acquittal, but the stress of the process is dreadful in itself. The 2023 Legacy Act sought to end conflict-related prosecutions, but was opposed in Northern Ireland. Labour now plans to “resume inquests and civil cases” while protecting veterans. However this works, it must take a “far broader account of the full human reality of the Troubles, and all who suffered in them”.

Aged 16, Keira Knightley was cast in a leading role in “Bend It Like Beckham”. Over the next year, she starred in “Pirates of the Caribbean” and “Love Actually” – and suddenly became one of the most famous women in the world. “I remember waking up one day and there were 10 men outside my front door – and they didn’t leave for about five years.” It was the early 2000s, the era of the lads’ mag, and the press was at its most brutal, to young women in particular, said Caitlin Moran in The Times. She’d walk out of the house, and they’d shout abuse at her. “It was mostly ‘whore’. ‘Slut’ sometimes. Particularly if I was with someone – a boyfriend, my brother or my dad.” The photographers were trying to provoke them to violence, “so they could sue”. She was constantly followed, and at one point, photographers even rented a flat opposite hers, and trained their telephoto lenses into her home.

Eventually, she came up with a strategy. “I was like, ‘What would Gandhi do?’ Passive resistance. So I just … stopped.” Stopped? “I started wearing the same clothes every day … If I was being followed, I stopped walking. I’d literally stand there. Stock still.” Because? “Because it wasn’t a valuable shot to them if it was always me in the same clothes, standing still. There’s only so many times you can write, ‘Ooh, she’s wearing the same clothes,’ with a photo of me standing still. It gets boring.”