The 2018 trip to Syria by four TDs, including president-elect Catherine Connolly, was organised by Elaine Daly, sister of Clare Daly, the former TD and MEP has said.
The issue of who organised the trip at a time when the sanctioned Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad was still in place became a subject of controversy and media scrutiny during the presidential campaign.
Ms Connolly was asked on several occasions who organised the trip but did not answer the question.
It was “a private citizen in Dublin who had previously organised many trips to the Occupied Territories”, she said when asked during a candidates’ debate on RTÉ.
RM Block
Ms Connolly travelled to Syria with the then TDs Clare Daly, Mick Wallace and Maureen O’Sullivan among others. During the trip the group was photographed in the company of a militia leader linked to the killing of Palestinian refugees.
Pictures show the group meeting with Saed Abd al-Aal, who led a pro-Assad armed group responsible for killing and starvation in a Palestinian refugee camp in Yarmouk, a district of Damascus.
Asked during the campaign about the meeting, Ms Connolly said she was not aware of the presence of the militia leader.
“Obviously I have no control in a country controlled by a dictator as to who might be there or not there, but I’m on the record for utterly condemning the Assad regime,” she said.
The 2018 visit came a year after an earlier trip by Ms Daly and Mr Wallace to Syria, which was organised with the help of a pro-Assad Irish activist, Declan Hayes, working with people in Syria.
On the latest edition of their podcast, I4C Trouble, Ms Daly and Mr Wallace, who did not respond to media queries during the presidential campaign, said they received more than 100 texts from journalists during the campaign, with many wanting to know who organised the 2018 trip.
“We organised that trip ourselves, lads, seeing as you are so bloody interested in finding out, and yes, my sister ... raised the idea of seeing Palestinian exiles in Lebanon and Syria,” Ms Daly said on the podcast.
“And we had been to Syria and we were talking over dinner,” she said.
The idea arose of working with a travel operator Clare Daly had developed contacts with during an earlier trip in 2017 to organise another visit, she said.
“I put my sister in contact with the travel agent and she came up with a proposition. My sister put it out to people in the Palestinian community and I asked our colleagues in the Dáil. And that’s what happened,” said Daly.
Elaine Daly is an employee of the Irish National Teachers Organisation who up to 2017 organised regular trips to the Occupied Territories for Irish people interested in the Palestinian question.
In September 2017 she and three others were detained and then deported from Israel after they landed in Tel Aviv with a group of 27 other travellers.
Clare Daly, in the podcast, said that after her sister was deported the option of bringing people to the Occupied Territories was no longer available and she and her fellow activists thought of bringing people to meet Palestinians in exile.
During the presidential campaign the Irish Syria Solidarity Movement criticised Ms Connolly for saying she had been “shown around by Palestinians” at Yarmouk during the 2018 trip.
Given the nature of the regime, it said, she could only have met people who were supporters of the Assad regime.
But Ms Connolly, who is to be inaugurated as president on Tuesday, said the meeting with the militia leader “didn’t take at all from the main reason we were there”.
Attempts to contact Elaine Daly for comment were unsuccessful.
