Catherine Connolly
Left-wing, supporter of the reunification of the Irelands and a social media star, Catherine Connolly is preparing to be the next president of Ireland.
During the election campaign, Catherine Connolly insisted that Ireland needed a president who “not be afraid to oppose the consensus“.
It’s something the Galway native learned to do from a young age.
“Coming from a family of 14 children, I grew up with an understanding of importance of listening to different voices“, these.
His parents’ marriage produced seven girls and seven boys, who were raised on a council estate in Galway city.
The future president was the couple’s ninth child and recalled how growing up in such a large family shaped her opinions and “formed me in every way”.
“I come from a background that highly valued integrity and honesty“, he told the BBC Talkback program last month.
“My mother died when I was young and I watched my father — the most honest man — work every week for us to raise us.”
Your mother’s death was sudden. Young Catherine was just nine years old at the time and her youngest child was a one-year-old baby.
His widowed father, a plasterer who also did small construction jobs, found himself in need of help at home.
In interviews, Connolly pays tribute to his two older sisters who “took responsibility” and spent most of their adolescence looking after their younger siblings.
“I was saving the world”
As a teenager, Connolly became active in your communityworking as a volunteer in two Catholic lay organizations – the Legion of Mary and the Order of Malta.
This involved bringing meals on wheels to the elderly and cleaning their homes.
“The joke was that I was saving the world and not doing household chores at home,” he recently told podcaster Síle Seoige.
Later, graduated in psychology with German, before taking a job as a clinical psychologist at a health board in County Galway.
But he turned down a permanent position and instead began studying law at night. She qualified as a lawyer in 1991 and, the following year, married her boyfriend, Brian McEnery. Mother of two children, she was just over 40 years old when she entered politics in 1999.
Do you remember being encouraged to apply for the Labor Party by the outgoing president of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins, and his wife.
Her main reason for getting involved was her ambition to solve the housing shortage in Ireland, which she described as the “defining social crisis of our time“.
Connolly served 17 years as a councilor in Galway, including a one-year term as mayor of her home town.
However, he criticized the Labor Party for not supporting his bid to run alongside Higgins in the 2007 general election and left the party after that contest.
Independent candidate, made two failed attempts to be elected to the Dáil (Irish Parliament) before finally winning a seat in 2016.
Connolly became the first woman elected to chair debates in the Dáil, when she secured the position of Leas-Cheann Comhairle (Vice-President) in 2020.
It was a surprising victory, in which he managed to unite opposition parties against the current government candidate.
He brought them together again with his presidential candidacy, securing the support of Sinn Féin, the Social Democrats, People Before Profit and his former party, Labor.
Social media star
Outside of politics, Connolly is a passionate speaker of Irish and an avid sportswoman who has run marathons and played badminton competitively in his youth.
The 68-year-old woman recently demonstrated her skills on the election campaign, playing football and basketball with children from an apartment building in north Dublin.
She became an unlikely social media star when a viral video of her doing “keepie-uppies” in apartments racked up millions of views no Instagram e no TikTok.
During the campaign, Connolly faced some tough questions about his views and past associations.
A sua rival, Heather Humphreys, accused her of hypocrisy for criticizing repossessions while at the same time representing banks as a lawyer in repossession lawsuits.
Connolly also had to defend the hiring of a woman who had recently been released from prison for gun crimes in a lawsuit by dissident republicans.
She was also questioned about her decision to travel to Syria in 2018where, at one point, his group came into contact with an armed supporter of Bashar al-Assad.
Connolly responded by saying that the trip was a fact-finding mission to highlight the plight of refugees and insisted that his group had no control over who took part in the tour.
Will Northern Ireland be the first official visit?
Connolly is a fierce criticism of Israel’s actions in Gaza and promised to use his presidency to be a “voice for peace” in an increasingly uncertain world.
Opposes the growing militarization of Europe and warned against “consensus building” to weaken Ireland’s policy of military neutrality. He has also described the EU as neoliberal and undemocratic.
On BBC Talkback, he said that when polling voters, Gaza was “at the top of the list of concerns” and was raised more frequently than any other issue, including Irish unity.
Connolly said that “I would love to see a united Ireland” during her lifetime and, if she were elected president, she would make Northern Ireland the location of her first official visit.
But he also stressed that, according to the Irish Constitution, Irish unity can only be achieved through peaceful means and with the consent of voters on both parts of the island.
