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PaperclipPerfector
2mo ago
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Transnational Thursday for October 23, 2025
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Notes -
Ireland has a new President, the outspoken leftist Catherine Connolly.
I'm less interested in talking about her politics (which I find enormously distasteful) than describing what a circus the election turned out to be. With a meagre three candidates on the ballot (one of whom had formally pulled out too late for his name to be taken off), it was down to Connolly and the boring neoliberal centrist candidate, Heather Humphreys. Turnout was nearly two points higher than the most recent presidential election in 2018, with 45.8% of the electorate (or ~1.65m people) going down to the polls. Results were as follows:
You may notice that the three figures listed above do not add up to 1.65m/100%. That's because the real story of this election is that about 214k people (nearly thirteen per cent of those who voted) elected to spoil their votes rather than vote for any of the candidates. (In the last Presidential election in 2018, only 1.2% of people did so.) In some cases these voters wrote in "Maria Steen" (who sought a candidacy but did not succeed) or "Conor McGregor" (whose efforts to seek a candidacy seemed entirely performative). In other cases these voters wrote political slogans on their ballots, such as "she was only 10", in reference to a young girl who was sexually assaulted by a 26-year-old asylum seeker earlier this week, leading to riots on a comparable scale to those of November '23 outside an asylum centre in west Dublin. One enterprising individual in Cork decided to spoil his ballot in the most literal possible sense of the term. Personally, I couldn't bring myself to give a first preference to either candidate, so simply wrote on the ballot that there were no candidates I felt represented me.
While I remain relieved that Conor McGregor's name was kept off the ballot, Connolly's tenure in the role troubles me. The best-case scenario is that she spends her first year engaging in some grandstanding before quietly settling down and treating her role as the ceremonial sinecure it is. The worst-case scenario is that, when meeting with Trump, she openly attacks him on his immigration policy and support for Netanyahu, and Trump immediately slaps Ireland with a massive tariff as reprimand for her impudence. Even if she's smart enough not to go that far, the Irish president cannot travel abroad in an official capacity without the express approval of the government: Éamann Mac Donnchada is concerned that, should one of her requests for a "fact-finding mission" to Gaza be vetoed (as it inevitably will), Connolly will start a knife-fight on social media which will embarrass the government and bring the office of president into disrepute. The current incumbent (Michael D. Higgins) does not differ greatly from Connolly in his attitude to the Palestinian cause, but credit where credit is due: he never overstepped himself, so far as I can recall.
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