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THE PEOPLE HAVE spoken and Catherine Connolly has been successful in her bid to become the tenth president of Ireland.
It was clear within moments of the ballot boxes being opened this morning that – as Bob Geldof might have put it – she walked the thing.
Connolly had a commanding lead in the opinion polls over Fine Gael’s Heather Humphreys throughout the campaign, and bookmaker Paddy Power was willing to pay out early on her victory more than two weeks out from the election.
The victory is a notable one, though: while Connolly is an Independent TD, she was able to pull off a first in Irish politics by getting all the left opposition parties to row in behind her.
Her path to the Áras is an unusual one, which may change the way that candidates put themselves forward for president in future.
This campaign started way back in January, when Labour leader Ivana Bacik wrote to the Social Democrats and Green Party to seek a “common approach” to the presidential election, with all the opposition parties backing one person.
The following month, Connolly said she had an “open mind” to running for president, on the condition that her campaign would “unite the opposition”.
The Social Democrats later extended this invitation to Sinn Féin and People Before Profit, though Sinn Féin only jumped on board following the party’s Ard Fheis on 20 September.
A number of figures were floated as this potential left candidate, including former World Health Organisation director Mike Ryan and human rights lawyer Noeline Blackwell.
By June, it had been whittled down to Senator Frances Black and Catherine Connolly.
However, Black said she was not “actively seeking a nomination” while at the same time Connolly was increasingly being viewed as a “credible candidate” for whom there was “good enthusiasm”.
By the end of June, Black officially ruled herself out of the running and on 11 July, Connolly confirmed to her local Galway City Tribune newspaper that she would formally launch her campaign the following week.
She was the first candidate to publicly declare that they would put themselves forward for the presidential election.
That same day, both People Before Profit and the Social Democrats announced that they would support Connolly’s campaign.
On 16 July, she formally launched her campaign on Raidió na Gaeltachta.
It was only at the end of July that Labour decided to also row in behind Connolly, following consultation with its party membership.
The Journal reported that just under 60% of Labour members supported backing Connolly.
Connolly’s history with the Labour Party is a difficult one.
She was a Labour councillor from 1999 but left the party in 2006 when she was denied a chance to run in the 2007 general election as future president Michael D Higgins’ running mate.
When she was elected to the Dáil for the first time in 2016, Connolly said the Labour Party had “lost its soul”.
Labour’s Alan Kelly was among the figures within the party to declare that they were not supportive of a move to back Connolly.
Kelly pointed to Connolly’s decision to back Gemma O’Doherty’s presidential bid in 2018 and her views on Syria as being among the reasons why he wouldn’t endorse her.
From the moment she formally announced her candidacy, Connolly has faced questions around a 2018 visit to Syria.
Connolly went to Syria in June 2018, along with TDs Clare Daly, Mick Wallace, and Maureen O’Sullivan.
She visited areas that were controlled by the since-toppled Bashar al-Assad regime.
Following the launch of her campaign in July, Connolly said she went on the 2018 trip “for the purpose of fact-finding”.
Connolly said that during the trip she met “no member of [the Syrian] government”.
“We met the chamber of commerce,” she said. “We had a meeting with Unicef. We went into a convent and met a nun.”
“On no occasion had I anything to do with the government, nor did I utter one word of support for Assad.”
However, Connolly had been shown around Aleppo by a supporter of Assad: the chair of the city’s chamber of commerce Fares Al-Shehabi, who was under EU sanctions.
Speaking to RTÉ at the end of July, Connolly remarked: “I had absolutely no respect for that man (Al-Shehabi) after listening to him for the duration that I listened to him.
“He was the head of the chamber of commerce. There were community activists with us, and that man was put under serious pressure in relation to questions. Were we happy with the answers? Absolutely not.”
She added: “We have to remember that various members of the Irish government, and particularly Micheál Martin, actually met with Assad. I’ve never done anything like that. I went for a specific purpose.”
Meanwhile, Connolly has said that she doesn’t regret her decision to sign O’Doherty’s papers in 2018.
At her campaign launch, Connolly said she didn’t know O’Doherty personally but saw her as a journalist who had done some very good work in the past.
“Do I support her in any way? Not at all,” she said, adding that her “judgment call was right at the time”.
Elsewhere, Connolly also came under scrutiny from Fine Gael over her past work as a barrister in which she represented financial institutions in repossession cases.
Humphreys and other party politicians said Connolly had shown hypocrisy in being a critic of banks and landlords while not saying that she had worked on the cases.
Fine Gael also put together an almost three-minute long video headlined ‘Catherine Connolly’s hypocrisy’, showing some of Connolly’s Dáil contributions on housing and the banks.
Catherine Connolly's hypocrisy. pic.twitter.com/46ZE30e6eY
— Fine Gael (@FineGael) October 19, 2025
Connolly strongly hit back, noting that barristers cannot refuse cases and that she was simply doing her job within the rules of her profession.
The Bar Council of Ireland backed her up, pointing to the ‘cab-rank rule’. This means barristers are precluded from refusing instructions on the grounds that the nature of the case, or the conduct, opinions or beliefs of a client may be unacceptable to themselves.
Connolly was also supported on this front by Fianna Fáil Justice Minister Jim O’Callaghan, a barrister himself, who said it’s not “correct or fair to criticise lawyers because of the actions of their clients”.
Meanwhile, Fine Gael was accused of using the “Trump playbook” in resorting to such videos.
Social Democrats’ TD Jennifer Whitmore said such campaigning was “imported straight from the US” and “a very worrying departure”, while Sinn Féin’s Pearse Doherty said Fine Gael were “scraping the bottom of the barrel” with “smears” against Connolly.
The smears word came up throughout the campaign. Around three weeks out from the debate, former Fine Gael minister Ivan Yates said on his Newstalk podcast Calling It that he would “smear the bejaysus” out of Connolly if he were still in Fine Gael.
Yates would later say he was not involved in Humphreys campaign and Humphreys and her supporters denied she was engaged in a smear campaign.
Over the course of the campaign, Connolly and Humphreys faced off on seven occasions (Gavin also participated in the first two debates).
Connolly was seen as the clear winner of the first debate on Virgin Media on 29 September and carried that momentum with her.
The Journal opined that she did the “best job at articulating her principles and was largely unfazed by the glare of the studio”.
After this first debate, The Journal reported that Connolly sought to hire a woman convicted of gun crime to work in Leinster House.
Ursula Ní Shionnáin was sentenced to six years in prison in 2014 after being found guilty by the Special Criminal Court of unlawful possession of firearms and possession of ammunition.
At the time, Ní Shionnáin was a prominent member of the socialist republican group Éirigí.
She was released from prison in 2018 and Connolly said that Ní Shionnáin worked for her in Leinster House in 2019 for less than six months while the vetting process was underway and that she left of her volition after that period.
In the second debate, both Humphreys and Gavin went on the attack over this issue but it did little to dampen Connolly’s campaign.
The remaining debates were a showdown between Connolly and Humphreys but by the time the final debate rolled around earlier this week, Connolly was already speaking as though she had won.
While Connolly was popping up on many podcasts to get her message out there, Humphreys largely stayed clear of this format.
Connolly appeared on The Blindboy Podcast, The Louise McSharry Podcast, How to Gael (hosted by Síomha Ní Ruairc, Louise Cantillon, and Doireann Ní Ghlacáin), Joe Brolly’s Free State podcast, Síle Seoige’s Ready to be Real, James Kavanagh and William Murray’s The Simple Life, and The Candidate by The Journal.
She also did a live podcast episode for online publication The Ditch.
Humphreys, by comparison, only partook in long-form podcast interviews with the Irish Independent and the Irish Examiner.
She also appeared very briefly on The Tumbling Paddies podcast (for around two minutes) during their ploughing episode.
And while the likes of Christy Moore and The Mary Wallopers performed in Vicar Street at Ceol for Connolly, Humpreys received the backing of Daniel O’Donnell.
Independent Presidential candidate Catherine Connolly welcomes Christy Moore to begin her campaign concert in Vicar Street pic.twitter.com/ZckNiVaST3
— Barry Lenihan (@BarryLenihan) October 20, 2025
Connolly also had a viral moment during the campaign when she was filmed doing keepy-uppies and playing basketball with children at Courtney Place Flats on Ballybough Road in Dublin.
A video shared by Sinn Féin of the keepie-uppies in question has amassed over 185,000 likes and close to two million views on TikTok.
Connolly would later say she is somewhat disappointed in her keepy-uppies these days as she used to be able to do 100.
While Connolly was able to present this as her “party piece”, Humphreys could only point to her “listening” skills as a “people person” when asked by RTÉ whether she had a party piece.
In an opinion piece with The Journal, Gerard O’Shea, the vice president at communications firm FINN Partners, noted that Connolly’s campaign was more easily able to present her as being relatable and personable.
He also remarked that the keepy-uppies video allowed the public to “find out something we didn’t know about somebody, an opportunity to get to know her that little bit more”.
O’Shea added that when Humphreys was presented with an opportunity to let people know who “Heather the person” is via the party piece question on RTÉ, she defaulted to a “political [and] soundbite” response.
In the final debate of the election campaign, Connolly remarked that she was “looking forward to serving as president of this country”.
She was speaking as though she had already been elected, a confidence not usual in Irish politics – but a confidence well-earned in a campaign where Humphreys struggled to lay a glove on her.
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