Aoife Moore: Why I offered to help Catherine Connolly and why the Irish establishment won’t stop her

By Saturday, it’ll all be over. Campaigning for the Irish presidency began in July this year when Independent Galway TD Catherine Connolly announced she would be running. 

Within weeks, I’d offered to help. Campaign experience for an independent candidate I’d always respected sounded like a no-brainer.

A few weeks of press strategy and consultancy work at the heart of a volunteer-run campaign is like manna from heaven for a political nerd like me.

The Irish press these days mostly think elections are there to entertain them. Weeks and months of moaning about how the campaign was boring ensued on the TV, radio and in newspapers.

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That was until Micheál Martin’s political judgement, much like his housing policy, proved it was dead in the water.

With the departure of Jim Gavin, a man who wasn’t even a member of Fianna Fáil before becoming their candidate, we’re left with two women. Two capable women at that.

Former Fine Gael minister Heather Humphreys and former barrister Catherine Connolly have taken each other on in a head-to-head challenge.

A two-horse race is a rarity in these elections. There were some attempts to get on the ballot by your run-of-the-mill conservatives, businessmen and total head-the-balls, but none managed it.

My own theory is that had one former MMA fighter found liable for sexual assault not been saying for months he was going to run, more people might have put their hat in the ring. The thought of going up against not only him, but his army of delusional fans in America, probably put all right-thinking people off. 

So it’s just the girls left standing.

What began as a cordial enough race has become increasingly toxic in the final days.

Fine Gael were 18 points behind Connolly in the latest poll, with one insider telling The Sunday Times they were basically in “damage control” mode.

Heather Humphreys is now the government candidate in a race that has become a referendum on the government. That’s an argument Fine Gael know they cannot win.

Rather than fight on the merits of Humphreys, they’ve begun a “red under the bed” strategy aiming to make Catherine Connolly look like Putin. But no one’s really buying it.

Fine Gael and their allies have attacked her publicly on everything from hiring an ex-convict to working as a barrister.

But it’s hard to frame someone as a lunatic Marxist when most of the footage of her is dancing, doing keepy-uppies, hugging small children and talking about her abhorrence of war. 

The most desperate times call for the most desperate measures and Fine Gael have reached a new level of desperation. A level only known by men on Tinder who lie about their age.

Connolly’s crime this week was representing banks as a barrister. Fine Gael says it smacks of hypocrisy to lambast housing evictions while previously representing banks in repossessions.

Fine Gael, the party of law and order, as they like to say, know this is ridiculous, but it hasn’t stopped them saying it.

The duty of barristers to accept instructions, sometimes referred to as the “cab rank rule”, ensures that everyone is entitled to access to justice and is central to trust in the Irish legal system and the rule of law.

“Barristers cannot discriminate in favour of or against any person availing, or seeking to avail, of the services of the barrister on the grounds of race, colour, sex, sexual orientation, language, politics, religion, nationality, national or social origin, national minority, birth or other status,” according to a statement by the Bar Council of Ireland. 

The last time they put this statement out was during the 2020 election, when Fine Gael were going after Fianna Fail’s Jim O’Callaghan for representing Gerry Adams when he was a barrister.

You know Jim O’Callaghan? He’s the Minister for Justice now in the Fine Gael-Fianna Fáil-Michael Lowry coalition government.

Jim said the same thing back then, that the cab rank rule means he had to represent Gerry.

We’re now in a baffling state of affairs where Fine Gael are demanding someone account for their role in home repossessions while Fine Gael were in government.

More desperation came during the week when Humphreys, who is currently being sued for defamation by TD Paul Murphy, said on live radio that Murphy was Catherine Connolly’s campaign manager – twice. She was not corrected on air.

It’s always good to have a radical left bogeyman waiting in the wings. They do this about “the boys in Belfast” when debating Sinn Féin too. Just enough to plant the seed that there might be a scary man pulling the little lady’s strings.

The campaign manager is Beibhinn O’Connor, Connolly’s long-time parliamentary aide, but we must remember Humphreys found out that morning she was 18 points behind, so erasing another woman’s work is small fry to claw back some dignity. 

The usual suspects in the media are eating it up too. No less than six columns appeared in the Sunday Indo this week maligning Connolly. The Irish Daily Mail compared the left-wing independent to Donald Trump.

During debates, Fine Gael texts out attack lines to journalists. They’re often forwarded directly on to me by colleagues in journalism and minutes later the very queries Fine Gael direct them to ask appear in the Connolly press inbox. If you didn’t laugh, you’d cry.

By Saturday, we’ll know how the country voted and it’ll all be over.

The effect of the campaign will be longer lasting. People’s general derision of the mainstream newspapers will increase.

We malign the death of our industry yet continually treat customers, or potential customers, like idiots.

If Connolly wins, the media and establishment will learn nothing from the whole encounter. Like they haven’t so many times before. 

But what should we expect from a government ruling over 15,000 homeless people who look people in the eye and say their plan is working?

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