It’s a beautiful September Tuesday lunch time in Portlaoise as Independent presidential candidate Catherine Connolly hits the streets as part of her nationwide canvass.
She’s in town with local Independent Republican TD Brian Stanley, who was one of the Oireachtas members who formally supported her nomination to run.
Along with Fianna Fáil’s Jim Gavin and Fine Gael’s Heather Humphreys, she is one of three confirmed candidates to replace Michael D Higgins when the country goes to the polls at the end of October.
She may have turned 67 during the summer but she looks as fit as a flea.
At one stage she even breaks into a jog. This is a woman that regularly cycles around Galway city, where she was born and raised and which she has represented in the Dail since 2007 and as councillor, prior to that, from 1999.
She’s going to need every bit of that energy for this campaign, a gruelling, demanding, intrusive election comparable to no other in this land.
“It took me a long time to make the decision,” she says of becoming a candidate.
“Once I made it, I was proud and I have never looked back. I made that decision not because I had the money to afford this election, not because I had the backing of parties.
“I made this decision in exactly the same way as I made the Leas Ceann Comhairle decision. It was the right thing to do.
“How did I come to that decision? Because finally I started looking at all the messages that had been coming in, in every way possible.
“People putting pen to paper, emails, phone calls. And I finally, with help from different people, began to look at those messages.
“And there were seen characteristics in me and qualities, perhaps, that I didn’t focus on because I just do what I do, coming from the background I come from.
“So I made that decision, and I made it. It was an absolute bonus, and obviously very helpful.
“Parties came behind me, and some of them came very quickly behind me, others took a little longer.
“That’s very welcome, but it was based on what’s right, so what can I do as President? We’re at a stage, there have been, Michael D has been very courageous, Mary Robinson, Mary McAleese, all in their ways have reached out.
“For me, we’re now at a stage in our history where we really need to decide where we’re going as a country in terms of a voice for peace.
“A voice for peace, a voice that’s not afraid to articulate the existential threat posed by climate change, and a voice that speaks out for the community. I know this from my own background.”
She grew up in a family of 14, her mother dying when she was just nine. Her father was a carpenter and shipbuilder and she still lives in the historic Claddagh area of Galway city, close to the Spanish Arch.
It’s in Stanley’s office where she meets and greets some of the local media, sitting at a desk beneath an image of the 1916 Easter Rising leaders. There’s a copy of the constititution, Bunreacht na hÉireann, in front of her on the desk which she says she carries in her handbag at all times.
Though she has been criticized for being elusive and for neither liking hard or easy media questions, her persona here strikes you of a kind aunt. Warm smile, softly spoken, a gentle but distinctive West of Ireland accent.
But there’s no doubt she’s a tough nut.
She has been an elected representative for 26 years, served a term as Leas Ceann Comhairle in the Dáil and previously fell out with Labour over not being added as a General Election candidate for 2007 (as Michael D Higgins’s running mate no less). She was first elected as an Independent TD in 2016.
There’s no doubting, either, that there is a very sharp intellect, having worked as both a clinical psychologist for the Western Health Board. She later qualified as a barrister and is fluent in both Irish and German.
Politically, she is part of a technical group in the Dáil alongside a disparate group of left-leaning TDs, including Stanley.
Claire Daly and Mick Wallace are among her associates and she accompanied that duo on a trip to Syria in 2018 where pro-Assad commentator Fares Al-Shehabi, who was described as the head of the city’s chamber of commerce, showed the group around Aleppo. She has recently said that that trip was a mistake and that Al-Shehabi’s views were totally unacceptable to her.
Like any politician, she’s able to talk extensively without saying much of consequence and these group interviews don’t lend themselves to a decent over-and-back.
On a strictly political level, in the context of this campaign, she does chat about the support she has – and hasn’t – received for this campaign.
People Before Profit, the Social Democrats and Labour are all backing her, though former Labour leader Alan Kelly has said he isn’t supporting her candidacy and that she has shown nothing but disdain for the party since leaving.
She addresses that topic, as well as the potential Sinn Féin support – and ponders whether the presidential nomination process could be widened somewhat.
Out and about the town, she chats with a selection of people and is utterly at ease meeting and greeting. She doesn’t have any entourage with her apart from a driver.
The first place she goes into is Brown’s Fruit and Veg, one of the town’s real gems. Across Lyster Square, she stops and chats with a couple of semi-interested people going about her business. She gets a particularly warm welcome from Marguerite Burke in the Sue Ryder Charity shop but almost blushes when handed a copy of Mary McAleese’s biography that happens to be on sale there.
She also engages warmly with Bryan Fergus outside his photography shop on Main Street and has a right good chat with Louise Dunne in Treasures just up the way.
There’s also a right good laugh when the group bump into Barry Fitzgerald, son of local Portlaoise councillor Catherine Fitzgerald, of good Fianna Fáil stock.
Barry shakes hands and wishes her well but there’s nm
The feet on the ground here are predominantly local, mostly Brian Stanley supporters and ex Sinn Féin members who left the party after Stanley did in controversial circumstances last winter.
Among the group is Brian’s wife Caroline, a local Independent councillor, former Sinn Féin Kildare South TD Patricia Ryan, who is now part of his staff, and stalwart supporters like Claire Spollen, Eamon McManaman, Stephen Lynch, Joe Coogan, David Farrell and John Murray. Also among the group is Ben Campbell, an enthusiastic young local political activist who has taken the day off from college in UCC.
“That’s something I had to look at, and certainly I got messages to say please don’t leave the Dáil, and you’re an asset in the Dáil and don’t leave the Dáil,” she says when asked about the limited role of the presidency.
“Some people were disappointed with me, other people when they got a chance to talk to me understood what I was doing.
“It took me quite a number of months to make my decision based on a number of reasons, one of them being that.
“But I don’t think it’s just symbolic.”
Around town there is no disguising that familiar buzz and energy of an election campaign.
We’ve still a long way to go to polling day but Connolly was the first into battle and her campaign is certainly up and running.
The Presidential Election takes place on Friday, October 24.
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