Explained: Who is presidential candidate Catherine Connolly?
Eva Osborne
Independent TD Catherine Connolly has confirmed she will launch her presidential election bid next week.
The Galway West TD said she believes she has enough support to get on the ballot.
But who is Catherine Connolly? And what are her views?
Background
Connolly is an independent politician who has served as a TD for the Galway West constituency since 2016.
She served as Leas-Cheann Comhairle of the 33rd Dáil from July 2020 to November 2024, and was chair of the Committee on the Irish Language, the Gaeltacht and the Islands from 2016 to 2020.
She was Mayor of Galway from 2004 to 2005.
In 2006, Connolly resigned from the Labour Party after she was denied her wish to contest the Galway West constituency as running mate of Michael D. Higgins.
Prior to her election to Dáil Éireann in 2016, Connolly was a City Councillor for 17 years having been first elected to Galway City Council in the West local electoral area in June 1999 and subsequently re-elected in the South local electoral area in 2004, the same year she was elected Mayor of the City.
Views
In May of this year, the Phoenix described Connolly as a "long-time socialist" who had been regarded as "left-wing" and an "Irish republican" during her time in the Labour party.
She has been outspoken on her views regarding Gaza. In the Dáil earlier this month, she accused Israel of being a “genocidal state”.
"I see the narrative that continues from the government despite the good steps that have been taken," she said.
"There's a narrative that utterly fails to condemn Israel for the genocidal state that it is. We talk as if history started on October 7th. It certainly did not.
"We condemn without hesitation what happened, but no context given, no history given at all."
She then criticised labelling what happened between Iran and Israel as "conflict".
"As if Iran wasn't attacked in an unprovoked attack by a genocidal government that went in. And our government and our Tánaiste calls that a mutual conflict where they attacked each other," she said.
"Now that's the type of narrative that makes me very, very angry, and deals a terrible blow to our credibility as an independent soverign state, a republic, with a duty to speak out, a duty to call out power abuse no matter where that is. And at this stage, it's Israel, and absolutely Israel."
The Irish Times reports that Connolly was vocal in the lead-up to the abortion referendum in 2018, insisting the Eighth Amendment “simply has to go” and it is “time to trust women to make decisions”.
On Irish neutrality, she said it is threatened “by the warmongering military industrial complex” in Europe.
Connolly has said the housing and homelessness crises have been "caused by government policy".
Speaking in the Dáil last month, she said: "Each policy from each government has intensified the crisis because you have failed to recognise, deliberately so, that housing is a basic human right, and you've dealt with it like an asset and allowed the market to provide.
"And when the market didn't provide, you brought in every possible scheme to support the market."
