Catherine Connolly’s landslide victory in Ireland exposes Europe’s growing moral blindness as open hostility toward Israel becomes mainstream politics.
In a stunning display of how far Europe’s political conscience has drifted, Ireland has chosen Catherine Connolly — a far-left, openly anti-Israel politician — as its next President, replacing Michael Higgins, himself notorious for slandering the Jewish state.
Connolly, who secured 63% of the vote against center-right Fine Gael candidate Heather Humphreys, may preside over a largely ceremonial office, but her victory carries dangerous ideological weight. For years, she has vilified Israel with inflammatory, fact-free rhetoric, branding the Jewish state as “terrorist” while whitewashing Hamas’s atrocities.
In September, Connolly shocked the civilized world when she called the Hamas terror group “part of the fabric of the Palestinian people” — words that echoed Hamas propaganda more than democratic values. Even after the massacre of Israeli civilians, she refused moral clarity: condemning Hamas “on one hand” while accusing Israel of “genocide” in Gaza on the other — a grotesque inversion of truth.
Connolly, 68, a former barrister turned politician, has also denounced the European Union’s defensive posture toward Russia, labeling it “militarization.” Critics say this exposes her pattern of appeasing aggressors while demonizing democracies.
Her predecessor, Michael D. Higgins, was no stranger to controversy either. Higgins previously accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of violating “international law” and sneered that Israel’s criticism of Irish antisemitism was a “gross defamation.” In response, Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar retorted sharply: “Once an antisemitic liar — always an antisemitic liar.”
Israel’s decision to close its embassy in Dublin last year now appears prescient. The Connolly presidency cements Ireland’s drift into a hub of institutional hostility toward Israel, cloaked in the language of “human rights.”
That Connolly chose International Holocaust Remembrance Day earlier this year to again attack the Jewish state underscores the moral decay gripping parts of Europe — where remembrance has turned into revisionism, and antisemitism now marches under the banner of “progressivism.”
