Ireland Just Elected Its First Anti-Western President

Ireland has a new president, Catherine Connolly. Some headlines call her hope reborn, but she’s less a breath of fresh air than a gust from a gathering storm. Beneath the cardigans and courteous tone lies something more combative: a woman whose instincts run not to harmony but to hostility.

Connolly’s career is littered with the wreckage of bad judgment disguised as bravery. Her so-called “fact-finding” trip to Syria in 2018 stands as its most telling monument. While Bashar al-Assad’s forces were still reducing Aleppo to ash, and while his intelligence services were torturing dissidents in basements and burying children beneath bombed-out schools, Connolly decided to go “see for herself”. She flew into Damascus with Clare Daly and Mick Wallace — two of Ireland’s most notorious grandstanders, professional contrarians who mistake provocation for principle. Daly, a self-styled socialist who rails against the West while enjoying the freedoms it guarantees, and Wallace, a former property developer turned populist showman with a fondness for defending strongmen, make perfect travel companions for Connolly. Together, they form Ireland’s unholy trinity of moral inversion — politicians who see every tyrant as a victim and every victim as a Western fabrication.

The visit yielded no insight, only indignation. They smiled for the cameras, nodded through the briefings, and returned home not to condemn Assad but to question his guilt. Among the photos that emerged from the trip was one showing Connolly standing shoulder to shoulder with Saed Abd Al-Aal, a commander of a pro-Assad militia in Yarmouk. It was a picture of comfort beside cruelty, a snapshot that said more than any speech ever could. Abd Al-Aal’s men had fought alongside regime forces accused of massacring Palestinians and civilians alike. Yet there stood Connolly, a sitting Irish politician, in the company of a warlord whose hands were as red as the soil of Aleppo.

What exactly did Connolly hope to find amid the rubble? Justice hiding in the ruins? Mercy between the prisons? Syria under Assad was not a mystery waiting to be solved, but a massacre the world had already witnessed. Yet she came home speaking not of horror but of nuance, as if decency required dispassion. That trip remains the purest reflection of her instincts — the urge to defend the indefensible, and to challenge the obvious.

Her sympathy for Hamas follows the same script. She speaks of Gaza with grave emotion but never names Hamas for what it is — a terror movement that slaughters civilians and shields itself with their bodies. She even had the audacity to call Hamas “part of the fabric” of Palestine, as if its suicide bombers and hostage-takers were community workers. Rockets and executions vanish behind the poetry of resistance. For her, the West is always to blame, the aggressor always misunderstood. In her Ireland, sympathy is infinite, but responsibility is selective.

This is the tone she brings to the presidency: gentle on the surface, but deeply divisive underneath. Ireland’s presidents have often leaned left, but they understood the difference between conscience and crusade. Éamon de Valera built an office that bound the country together after war and partition. Mary Robinson opened Ireland to the world without losing her grip on the home soil that shaped her. Michael D. Higgins spoke of justice, but he knew the limits of the pulpit. Connolly shows no such restraint. She arrives not to unite but to instruct. Not to bless the republic but to re-educate it.

The presidency may be largely ceremonial, yet symbols in Ireland have always mattered more than statutes. When the person who embodies the nation’s dignity begins to trade in ideology, the tone of the country changes. Connolly will not just host ambassadors or sign laws; she will set moods, shape headlines, and lend moral cover to causes that break rather than bind. Her Ireland will not look outward with confidence but inward with indignation.

Then there is her choice of company. Connolly once employed Ursula Ní Shionnáin, a former member of the radical group Éirigí, who had served a prison sentence for firearms offences. Connolly defended the decision as an act of “rehabilitation”. Most people would agree that everyone deserves a second chance, but this was not a woman pushing trolleys in a Tesco car park or sweeping leaves for the council. Ní Shionnáin was brought into a taxpayer-funded political office, and handed the trust and access that come with public service. For many, it confirmed a troubling pattern — Connolly’s softness toward anyone who claims to fight “the system” no matter how dark their record.

Connolly’s rise says as much about the public as it does about her. After years of bland leaders and cautious language, voters mistook radicalism for authenticity. She speaks in certainties, and that feels refreshing in an age of hedging. But certainty can be seductive. Her supporters see resolve; others see self-righteousness without restraint. Ireland has now chosen a president who sees its history not as a heritage to preserve but as a narrative to rewrite. The saints and scholars forged a nation; the radicals fashion a narrative.

She will be polite and articulate. She will be applauded abroad by the same circles that applaud ethical exhibitionism everywhere. But Ireland deserves more than applause. It deserves a leader who believes in its dignity, and in the decency that built the West.

She is being called “anti-establishment”, a label that flatters more than it explains. In truth, Connolly’s defiance runs deeper and darker. It is not rebellion against power, but rejection of the West itself. Her instincts tilt instinctively against the societies that protect her freedom to speak. She mistrusts Western order, Western faith, Western restraint. To her, the West is not a civilisation but a culprit. And now, for the first time, the Áras has been overtaken by a far-left fanatic. Only time will tell how deeply the damage runs.