On the campaign trail, Catherine Connolly insisted Ireland needed a president who is “not afraid to stand against the consensus”.It is something the Galway native learned to do from a very young age.”Coming from a family of 14 children, I grew up with an understanding of the importance of listening to different voices,” she said.Her parents’ marriage produced seven girls and seven boys who were raised in a social housing estate in Galway city.The future president was their ninth child and has reminisced about how growing up in such a large family shaped her views and “formed me in every way”.”I come from a background that put a very high value on integrity and honesty,” she told theBBC’s Talkback programmelast month.”My mother died when I was young and I watched my father – the most honest man – work every single week on our behalf to bring us up.”Her mother’s death was sudden. The young Catherine was only nine years old at the time and the youngest child was a one-year-old baby.Her widowed father, a plasterer who also took on small building jobs, was left needing help at home.In interviews, Connolly pays tribute to her two older sisters who “stepped into the breach” and spent most of their teenage years looking after their younger siblings. As a teenager, Connolly became active in her community, volunteering with two Catholic lay organisations – the Legion of Mary and the Order of Malta.This involved bringing meals-on-wheels to elderly people and cleaning their homes.”The joke was that I was out saving the world and not doing the housework at home,”she recently told podcaster SÃle Seoige.She later studied for a degree in psychology with German, before taking a job as a clinical pyschologist with a County Galway health board.But she turned down a permanent post and instead began night classes to study for a law degree.She qualified as a barrister in 1991 and the following year she married her boyfriend, Brian McEnery.
The mother of two was in her early 40s when she entered elected politics in 1999.She recalls being encouraged to stand for the Labour Party by the outgoing President of Ireland, Michael D Higgins and his wife.Her main reason for getting involved was an ambition to address Ireland’s housing shortage which she has described as the “defining social crisis of our time”.Connolly served 17 years as councillor in Galway, including a one-year term as mayor of her native city.However, she criticised Labour for not supporting her bid to run alongside Higgins in the 2007 general election and she left the party in the aftermath of that dispute. Standing as an independent, she made two failed attempts to get elected to the Dáil (Irish Parliament) before finally winning a seat in 2016.Connolly then became the first ever woman elected to chair debates in the Dáil when she secured the post of Leas-Cheann Comhairle (Deputy Speaker) in 2020.It was a surprise win in which she managed to unite opposition parties against the sitting government’s candidate.She united them again with her presidential bid, securing the support of Sinn Féin, the Social Democrats, People Before Profit and her own former party, Labour. During the campaign, Connolly faced some tough questions over her personal judgement and past associations.Her rival,Heather Humphreys, accused her of hypocrisyfor criticising repossessions while at the same time representing banks as a barrister in repossession court cases.Connolly also had to defendhiring a woman who had been recently released from jail for firearms offencesin a dissident republican court case.She was also quizzed over her decision to take a trip to Syria in 2018, where at one stage her group came into contact with an armed supporter of Bashar al-Assad.Connolly responded by saying the trip was a fact-finding mission to highlight the plight of refugees and insisted her group had no control over who attended the tour. Connolly is anoutspoken critic of Israel’s actions in Gazaand has vowed to use her presidency to be a “voice for peace” in an increasingly uncertain world.She opposes the increasing militarisation of Europe and has warned against a “building consensus” to weaken Ireland’s policy of military neutrality.She told BBC Talkback that when she canvassed voters, Gaza was “top of the list of their concerns” and was raised more often than any other issue, including Irish unity.Connolly has said she would “love to see a united Ireland” in her lifetime and if elected president she would make Northern Ireland the site of her first official visit.But she has also emphasised that, under the Irish Constitution, Irish unity can only be achieved by peaceful means and the consent of voters in both parts of the island.
