Fresh detail about the decision of President Catherine Connolly to visit Syria in 2018 has emerged since the October election.
During the campaign Connolly repeatedly declined to say who had organised the trip to the war-torn country where the Russia-backed government of president Bashar al-Assad was involved in a complex and vicious civil war.
However, two days after the vote, the former TDs and MEPs Mick Wallace and Clare Daly, who accompanied Connolly on the visit, disclosed that they had organised the trip along with Daly’s sister Elaine, a trade union employee who separately ran non-profit tours for people who wanted to visit the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
“We organised that trip ourselves, lads, seeing as you are so bloody interested,” Clare Daly said, speaking on the I4C Trouble podcast she co-hosts with Wallace.
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She said the June 2018 trip was arranged with the help of people in Syria that she, Clare Daly, knew from an earlier trip she and Wallace had made in 2017.
The disclosure by Daly means it is possible to put the Connolly trip in a wider context than was possible during the presidential election.
Wallace and Daly were part of a group brought to Syria in October 2017 by Declan Hayes, an Irish supporter of the then Syrian government who has written for a sanctioned pro-Kremlin website called the Strategic Culture Foundation.
“I was supportive of the Syrian people as represented by the Syrian government and the Syrian Arab army and all people and factions allied to them,” Hayes told The Irish Times.
“What I was trying to do, primarily, was to get people of influence to go there and see what was being done and make up their own minds.”
Hayes is a former lecturer in business studies at the University of Southampton, who writes about international politics.
Aside from the Strategic Culture Foundation, his articles have been published by the conservative Irish website the Burkean, and his views published on the website of a pro-Kremlin think tank called Katehon.
[ Sister of Clare Daly organised Catherine Connolly trip to Syria in 2018Opens in new window ]
The Strategic Culture Foundation was sanctioned by the European Commission in December 2022 for targeting audiences outside Russia with disinformation supportive of the invasion of Ukraine.
“Strategic Culture Foundation is an organisation financed by the Russian Federation,” according to the commission. “It is closely associated with Russian special services, including the SVR [Russia’s civilian foreign intelligence service].”
Asked if he had any moral scruples about writing for a sanctioned Russian website, Mr Hayes said: “I stand over what I say.”
Russia is going to win the war in Ukraine, he said. “The West will have to accept that.”
In December 2016, Hayes organised the appearance of a number of religious leaders from Syria before the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Foreign Affairs to discuss the war in Syria, including the then Grand Mufti of Syria, Ahmad Badreddin Hassoun.
A supporter of Assad, Hassoun was detained after the collapse of regime last year and has since disappeared.
The November 2017 trip to Syria organised by Hayes included, among others, Wallace, Daly and a number of left-wing activists.
Hayes also organised visas for some journalists, including Sally Hayden of The Irish Times, who went their own way upon arrival in Syria. Hayden went on to report on the arrest and torture of Syrians under the Assad regime.
While in Syria, Wallace and Daly were interviewed for state TV. Back in Ireland, they put down a Dáil motion condemning European Union and United States sanctions against the Assad government.
“For me, cynically, that was a result,” said Hayes.
In December 2017 the Dáil debated Daly and Wallace’s motion calling on Ireland to campaign to have the economic sanctions on the Assad regime lifted.
The two TDs were part of a Dáil group called Independents 4 Change that included Connolly and Maureen O’Sullivan, who both spoke in favour of the motion.
Daly and Wallace referred to their visit to Syria a few weeks earlier.
“Assad is not in any way an exemplary democratic leader, but foreign interventions will not help,” said Wallace.
“Sanctions in this kind of situation only hurt people who are already hurting and only kill those who need our help. The EU and the US are being merciless in their treatment of the people of Syria,” he said.
Connolly said: “I thank deputies Wallace and Daly and the small number of others who accompanied them to Syria and saw for themselves the circumstances on the ground.
“Perhaps the Minister will listen to them. There is no propaganda here. It is following a visit to Syria and a tremendous amount of research that we stand here tonight to say we do not support the sanctions.”
She was not defending the Assad regime, Connolly said.
[ Catherine Connolly pictured with man linked to war crimes in SyriaOpens in new window ]
Then minister for foreign affairs Simon Coveney said Ireland supported sanctions targeting the regime and would continue to do so.
The sanctions were not directed at food or medicines and were kept under review for unintended consequences, he said.
An amended motion was passed that did not include condemnation of the sanctions.
In January 2018, the Irish Syria Solidarity Movement issued a statement criticising Wallace, Daly, O’Sullivan and Connolly, saying they were “horrified” by comments made during the Dáil debate.
“We feel TDs should properly inform themselves before speaking or tabling motions – especially in view of what many Syrians living among us have been through to escape from the genocidal Assad regime and [its] allies Iran and Russia,” they said.
In September 2017, a month before Daly and Wallace went to Syria, Daly’s sister Elaine, along with three other pro-Palestinian activists, were deported from Israel.
The four were part of a group of 37 who had just arrived from Ireland intending to spend a week in the Occupied Territories in a visit organised by Daly’s West Bank Tours group.
Clare Daly raised the issue in the Dáil on September 21st, 2017. “The group leader, my sister, is non-political and has never been involved in any political party,” she said.
According to Daly on her podcast, she and her sister discussed how it was no longer possible for Elaine Daly to organise trips to the West Bank following her deportation. The idea emerged that she could, instead, organise trips for Irish people to meet Palestinians living in exile in Lebanon and Syria.
Clare Daly still had contact details for the travel agent in Syria who had worked with Declan Hayes on the 2017 trip, she said on the podcast, though she did not mention Hayes.
“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,” Daly said.
Hayes said he was not involved in organising the 2018 trip, which Connolly participated in, and did not want to name the travel agent as they might “be shot in the head ... the people who run Syria [now] are total and utter savages”.
Among the places the delegation visited was Yarmouk, a suburb of Damascus once home to a large population of Palestinian refugees.
When Connolly, Wallace, Daly, O’Sullivan and others visited, they were accompanied by a man called Saed Abd Al-Aal.
Al-Aal was the leader of the military wing of the Free Palestine Movement (FPM), a Syrian organisation funded by a wealthy Syrian-born Palestinian property developer, Yasser Qashlaq.
When the war in Syria broke out, the FPM formed a militia that fought on the Assad regime side in the fighting in Yarmouk.
According to the Berlin-based European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, which is supporting the prosecution in Germany of alleged former FPM members, the regime reacted violently to antigovernment protests that broke out in Yarmouk in 2011.
“The government and its allied militias, including the FPM, which controlled the camp, brutally cracked down on the protests.”
A siege of the camp led to starvation, according to the German group.
Four alleged members of the militia group and an alleged Syrian intelligence agent are currently before the German courts accused of crimes against humanity.
During the Connolly election campaign, her office said her trip to Syria was funded using her parliamentary activities allowance.
The trip to Syria was made “to gather first-hand information relevant to Catherine’s parliamentary work on foreign policy, humanitarian issues, sanctions, Irish neutrality and Ireland’s role in international institutions,” it said.
Connolly told RTÉ she had not known Saed Abdel Al-Aal’s background when she met him in Yarmouk.
“You have no control when you go to a country like that as to who will come into your presence or not.”
“I’m on record for condemning the regime,” she said. “People came up and spoke to us as openly as they could within a dictatorship.”
A request sent early last week for comment from the President in relation to the 2018 trip and the involvement of Hayes in the 2017 trip met with no response.
Likewise, requests for comment to Wallace and Clare Daly met with no response. Efforts to contact Elaine Daly were unsuccessful.
