“Dear world, it’s better this little witch die before she starts, with her sponsors, WW3!” So wrote the businessman whom Catherine Connolly met in Syria in response to a seven-year-old girl’s tweet during the Battle of Aleppo. The little girl had written that Bashar al-Assad would, one day, have to face his maker for killing her friends.
In a disturbing interview with the Sunday Independent 12 days ago, the presidential candidate was asked if she could remember the businessman’s name. She replied that she did not have it to hand.
This may jog her memory.
His name is Fares al-Shehabi. When Connolly met him during “a fact-finding” trip with Clare Daly and Mick Wallace in June 2018 he was a member of the Syrian parliament, enthusiastically supporting Assad’s repressive Russia-backed regime. He subsequently lent an insight to his mentality when untrue rumours circulated in 2020 that a prominent female journalist had been “raped and left for dead”, and he joined an online pile-on pronouncing that to be the fate of traitors. When the Irish delegation met him, he was still furiously denying that state forces used chemical weapons against pro-democracy protesters in his home city of Aleppo, after the UN and the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons corroborated claims that they had. His lucrative business interests in pharmaceuticals, property and banking were feeling the pinch from EU sanctions imposed on him since 2011 for “providing economic support” to Assad’s regime.
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A week after the trip, Daly told the Dáil the group had gone “where we liked and talked to whom we liked”. She added: “We met businessmen in Aleppo. I laughed as we sat there, as one of them would have been at home in Fine Gael. He was tailor-made – a businessman who wanted to make money.” She submitted a parliamentary question to the minister for business, enterprise and innovation – coincidentally, Fine Gael’s putative candidate Heather Humphreys – about what supports were available for exporters to establish links with Syria. And she called for Shehabi to be granted a visa to visit Ireland.
Character is what makes a good president. A grasp of decorum is useful but what Ireland’s last three presidents, in particular, have demonstrated is that personal integrity is a must. Connolly has won cross-party admiration in the Dáil as an Independent TD, as a dogged inquisitor of wrongdoing and as a history-making first female Leas-Cheann Comhairle. Her sincere principles of social equality, human rights and pacifism appeal to many voters abhorred by the US military’s use of Shannon Airport, the EU’s spinelessness in tackling Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the racism underlying anti-immigrant protests and the planned dilution of Ireland’s neutrality. But if she fails the character test she should not expect to become the next president.
[ Alan Kelly criticises Labour’s decision to back Catherine Connolly for presidentOpens in new window ]
Admitting one’s mistakes is an early building block of character formation. Her failure to do so will trouble even Connolly’s most ardent fans. She has shrugged off criticism for agreeing to nominate conspiracy theorist Gemma O’Doherty for the 2018 presidential election, saying she does not regret it, and her answers to questions about who organised the trip to Syria have been evasive. Most troubling is her continuing association with Daly and Wallace. She has confirmed the pair – rejected by voters in both the European and general elections last year – will be involved in her election campaign. She and they are “like-minded”, she said. That must have felt to Ivana Bacik like someone walking on her political grave after the Labour Party opted to endorse Connolly’s candidacy. It will give Mary Lou McDonald and Sinn Féin pause for thought as they dither about, maybe, backing her too.
[ What’s going on with Sinn Féin and nominating a presidential candidate?Opens in new window ]
An Irish propensity for national self-denigration has suffused conversation about the power of the presidency. It holds that Ireland is too small, peripheral and insignificant for the rest of the world to care what it thinks. Had Mary Robinson succumbed to such vassalage she would never have flown to the UN to shake it awake to the catastrophic famine in Somalia. Michael D Higgins’s statements on Gaza have been reported by the BBC, the Jerusalem Post, CNN, Al Jazeera, Euro News and Turkish and Iranian news channels. He has said that when he wrote to his co-members of Arraiolos, an association of non-executive state presidents, his Italian counterpart, Sergio Mattarella, replied: “Would you have a go at drafting a statement?” Writer Quentin Fottrell has said Higgins’s call for multilateral action to halt the Gaza slaughter was a “siren call” for him as an emigrant in the US to come home. What our president thinks matters.
So what do Connolly’s “like-minded” associates think? Former property developer and ex-bankrupt Wallace seemed to think paying €1.4 million VAT to Revenue as well as his workers’ due pension payments was optional. That was a long time ago but not as long ago as Bertie Ahern’s confabulated digout which looks like rendering the former taoiseach ineligible for the presidential election. What did the feminist Connolly think of Wallace deriding a woman TD as “Miss Piggy” in the Dáil chamber and criticising women-led riots in Iran after the fatal arrest of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini by the morality police for not concealing all her hair? Was she of like mind when he claimed on RTÉ radio he once spoke to a hit man about how to recover money he was owed or when, in 2023, he said he owned three wine bars though he failed to mention them in his EU parliament declaration of assets? Was she of like mind when the pair declared the 2020 Venezuelan election of Nicolás Maduro’s government as “very transparent and professional” after most opposition parties had boycotted the election? On January 26th, 2022, Daly said the Russian military build-up on Ukraine’s borders was “clearly defensive” and there was “no evidence that Russia has any desire to invade Ukraine”. Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24th, 2022.
Idealists are not naive by definition but, when they are, they are ripe for exploitation as propaganda stooges. Connolly must acknowledge she erred in joining that trip to Syria and she must unhitch Daly and Wallace from her campaign wagon. Otherwise, the appalling vista voters need to consider is that this pair could end up on the Council of State advising Uachtarán na hÉireann as her constitutional nominees.
