If the opinion polls are right, it looks as though Catherine Connolly will win tomorrow’s Irish presidential election by a distance. I believe Heather Humphreys missed a big opportunity: to take on some of John Hume’s mantle and put herself forward as the person who could begin to unite the Irish people, all the Irish people, including the Protestants of Northern Ireland. Based on her record, Catherine Connolly has little or no interest in the North. She has expressed the ... Read more...
If the opinion polls are right, it looks as though Catherine Connolly will win tomorrow’s Irish presidential election by a distance. I believe Heather Humphreys missed a big opportunity: to take on some of John Hume’s mantle and put herself forward as the person who could begin to unite the Irish people, all the Irish people, including the Protestants of Northern Ireland.
Based on her record, Catherine Connolly has little or no interest in the North. She has expressed the daft hope that unity would come during her seven-year presidency. This is cloud cuckoo land stuff, meaningless except to keep her sponsors in Sinn Fein happy. Moderate unionists and the Northern centre ground – ground which Humphreys endlessly said she represented – want nothing to do with a Sinn Fein-led drive to a united Ireland, thus achieving the goal of the Provisional IRA’s campaign of violence. My experience from talking to such people is that they believe if unity is to come, it will have to be a version carefully and painstakingly constructed by the centre parties in the Republic, Fianna Fail and Fine Gael.
As a Monaghan Presbyterian (whose grandfather signed the Ulster Covenant), Humphreys would have been uniquely placed to reach out to Northern Protestants and unionists with a vision of a moderate, centre-led united Ireland. She would have been able to reach places and people even Hume could not have accessed. In one of her television appearances she said she had been talking to people in Newtownabbey, a unionist stronghold in Belfast’s northern suburbs. In contrast, when Connolly was asked who she had talked to in the North, she cited Ireland’s Future, the passionately (some might say fanatically) nationalist group lobbying for a Border poll that would lead to unity. I wonder if Connolly has ever had a serious conversation with a unionist in her life.
John Hume used to say that what was important was uniting Irish people rather than Irish territory. “The real division of Ireland is not a line on a map, but in the minds and hearts of its people”, he said. I believe Humphreys should have boldly made that her primary campaign message: that as president she, an Ulster Protestant, and certainly not Catherine Connolly, a far left republican from Galway, could be an important symbol of a ‘new Ireland’ that would genuinely embrace all the people of the island.
Heather Humphreys also calls herself an Irish republican. That fine journalist Sam McBride wrote in the Belfast Sunday Life earlier this month: “Few republicans would draw on the Presbyterian Church for inspiration, yet that is the well from which Fine Gael’s candidate Humphreys says she draws her republican inspiration. Her republicanism is that of Wolfe Tone, not the Wolfe Tones.”1
McBride reported that in 2016 Humphreys had travelled to Church House in Belfast, the headquarters of Irish Presbyterianism (the largest Protestant denomination in the North) to make a political speech as the Irish government minister responsible for overseeing the 1916 centenary celebrations (which it is widely acknowledged she did very successfully and even-handedly). She told the audience: ‘The very word ‘republican’ makes some of us uncomfortable, because of the way it has been manipulated and misused over the last 100 years. I have previously described myself as a proud Ulster woman, a Protestant and an Irish republican. When I speak of republicanism, I speak of it in its truest sense: equality, fraternity and liberty. Republicanism in its purest form is simply the right for everyone to have their say and the right to choose those who represent us – a principle upon which the Presbyterian Church is based.”
I heard nothing like those resounding (and potentially unifying) words from Humphreys during her presidential campaign. The cautious people in Fine Gael who were running that campaign were clearly too timid to allow her to start re-defining Irish republicanism (or rather going back to its roots) to make it fit for a new, harmonious all-island state. It might have been too radical for both that conservative party and the complacent, ‘north blind’ electorate of the 26-county republic. But wouldn’t it have livened up an extraordinarily dull election, notable for its total lack of big ideas? Wouldn’t it have made people here begin to think seriously about the most important challenge facing this country over the next 10-20 years?
Humphreys was a poor candidate – inarticulate and unsure of herself – and Fine Gael ran a poor campaign: whether in terms of posters put up, volunteers recruited or the smart use of social media. That made it easy for Catherine Connolly, who came across as a good debater with a warm and calm personality. Her informality, pacifism and left-wing views made her particularly attractive to younger people.
The fact that she was economical with the truth and showed both hypocrisy and extraordinarily poor judgement on a number of occasions did not seem to bother the electorate. She claimed she had paid for a dubious 2018 ‘fact finding’ trip to the murderous Assad dictatorship in Syria herself, but it became clear that it was the Irish taxpayer, through an allowance to cover her TD’s research expenses, who had actually financed it. She made an outrageous comparison between Germany rearming because of the current threat from Russia and the Nazi regime rearming in preparation for war in the 1930s. She employed an anti-peace process Éirigí member in the Dáil who had been sentenced to six years in jail for possessing arms and ammunition in 2014. She refused to admit until the second RTE candidates’ TV debate on Tuesday that she had represented the banks as a barrister in cases in which householders had been dispossessed, while continuing to attack the banks with her politician’s hat on. In Fintan O’Toole’s words: “Connolly has many questions to answer, and she dodges most of them.”
I believe Humphreys’ election would have sent an important signal to that small but growing group of Northern Protestants who might be open to considering Irish unity because of the perfidy and indifference of successive British governments. In the words of a leading lay Presbyterian in the Republic, Professor Sam McConkey of the Royal College of Surgeons, the election of a Monaghan Presbyterian would portray the Republic as “the very opposite” of “the Vatican-dominated theocracy” that dominated unionist thinking for much of the last century. “If Heather were to be the president of the Republic of Ireland, that would, I would say, make it more likely and easier to reach a peaceful transition over perhaps 10 or 20 years to achieve a united Ireland.”2
A Northern Protestant friend (and SDLP member) observed: “If Heather Humphreys wins it would be two fingers to the DUP, who would love her to lose so they can shout ‘anti-Protestant prejudice’ again.”
It has been deeply disappointing to me – a Northern Protestant who would dearly love to see a united Ireland in the medium-term – how little the North featured in either of those television debates, or in the campaign as a whole. Humphreys’ only passing mention of it on Tuesday was when she commended Linda Ervine’s work for the Irish language in east Belfast.
However, maybe Connolly’s election will reveal the real nature of the Southern electorate: almost entirely uninterested in the North, which is deemed irrelevant to the real issues that concern them, while holding to a kind of meaningless aspiration to unity as long as it doesn’t affect their own lives. As Professor McConkey, himself a Monaghan Protestant, observed, unity is “fairly low on people’s agenda.”
P.S.(1) Whoever is elected president tomorrow, they should take up a good idea from Professor Kevin Rafter, professor of political communication at Dublin City University. He doubts whether the new president could follow Mary Robinson and Mary McAleese in being “an honest broker in the promotion of North-South reconciliation” and “enhancing relations with Britain”, given the suspicions of the unionist community. “But she could convene a forum to examine the positives and negatives of unity for the Irish Republic itself, a debate that has not commenced.”3
P.S.(2) I have learned with sadness of the death of my friend and former colleague, Ed Moloney. I worked with Ed on a number of major Northern Ireland stories for the Irish Times in the 1980s, notably the behind the scenes efforts to end the 1981 Maze Prison hunger strike and the 1982 Kincora Boys Home revelations. We also co-authored a 1986 book on Ian Paisley. Ed was the most courageous, determined and meticulous investigative journalist I have ever known. He was one of the greats. It was a real privilege to have known and worked with him.
1 ‘Presidential hopeful more Wolfe Tone than Wolfe Tones’, Sunday Life, 12 October
2 ‘United Ireland ‘easier’ under Humphreys, McConkey says, Irish Times, 29 September
3 ‘Four big issues that will sit in our next president’s in-tray’, Irish Times, 18 October
