On Wednesday night there’s a bit of a hooley for Catherine Connolly at the Button Factory in Dublin.
The Connolly Céilí, a fundraising concert, is multigenerational but attended by a very large number of young people. There are tattoos and keffiyehs and, on the older audience members, sensible anoraks.
The host for the evening is the very funny comedian Maeve Higgins, who kicks off with some personal reminiscences. She has known Connolly since 2009, she says. There’s a pause.
“She was my landlord. We recently reconnected,” she says of the Independent candidate who is, along with Fine Gael’s Heather Humphreys, one of the two candidates still campaigning for the October 24th presidential election.
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Someone shouts something and Higgins laughs.
“There’s a man over there explaining the joke for ye. He says: ‘Does she owe you money?’”
This is, for the record, a joke at the expense of Jim Gavin, who ended his presidential campaign last weekend after a former tenant came forward complaining that Gavin had refused to reimburse overpaid rent.
It’s not the first joke at the expense of rival candidates. Later Higgins talks a little about the importance of focusing on policies and not personality.
“And if Heather Humphries had a personality, I wouldn’t go there,” she says.
Connolly was not Higgins’s landlord. She really met Connolly, she says, at a pro-Palestine demonstration outside the Central Bank.
Later Higgins leads some chants in support of Palestine and lists off the names of the Irish people, including the author Naoise Dolan, from the aid flotilla detained by Israeli forces.
Higgins goes on to tell us that Connolly can’t make the event herself before playing a campaign video in which Connolly thanks the audience. And then Connolly comes out on stage. Connolly blames this “little trick” on Higgins.
She anticipates a future interview: “When did I first become aware of her playing the trick? ... What did I do about it?”
She speaks briefly, ending by paraphrasing the psychotherapist Gabor Maté: “We should be broken-hearted over genocide. But we should also do something about that and we should also live. And we have to hold all of those contradictions in ourselves and keep going. Because we owe it to the people of Palestine and we owe it to ourselves to make a republic mean something. It is a movement and I am simply a symbol of this movement and we will do it together.”
Altan take the stage fronted by a rabble rousing Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh, who alongside fellow fiddle player Clare Healy teaches the audience how to dance to a highland. The audience really go for it.
Healy tells The Irish Times why they support Connolly: “More than anything she’s invested in the people. It’s not just one section of the people. It’s everyone. It’s not just the elites or those with lots of money.”
Her bandmate Martin Tourish adds: “That’s why we drove down from Donegal and will drive back there again after.” (Higgins jokes that that’s just a sign of how much they hate Dublin).
The line-up reflects a very socially engaged generation of Irish artists. Dublin poet Sarah Creighton Keogh reads about small rebellions.
Kerry songwriter Amano tells us she first met Connolly when Connolly was the only politician to turn up to an event in support of the people of Gaza.
The headline act, Mary Coughlan, is from an older cohort. She has known Connolly since they were four years old. Coughlan went out with Connolly’s brother, she says.
“I ran away with him. She’s one of 14. Her father was a painter. We grew up on the streets of Galway and she knows what it’s like to grow up with a family of 14. She’s f**king brilliant. I kind of wish she was running the Government. [But] Michael D wasn’t silenced and she won’t be either,” she says.
Before the night ends, Higgins tells the audience they have raised €8,000 for Connolly’s campaign.
“Catherine’s going to get hair extensions,” she says.
Then she announces another gig happening in Vicar Street on October 20th featuring The Mary Wallopers among others.
“Musicians seem to really like Catherine Connolly,” she says. “Is that a good sign? Who can tell?”
