Catherine Connolly, the smiling woman who has replaced Michael D Higgins as Irish president, looked good at the Dublin General Post Office commemoration of the 1916 Easter Rising.
Published: 9 April 2026
Despite her left-wing sympathies, she wasn’t frightening any horses.
She followed protocol in saying nothing contentious as she performed her ceremonial duties.
The only quote I’ve seen attributed to her that day was something appropriately meaningless about “championing our culture in an open and inclusive manner.”
The same, of course, was not true of factional republican commemorations across the island.
AI tells me reports indicate that at least 5-8 distinct groups or coalitions across the island actively participated last weekend in commemorations with parades, wreath laying, speeches, and gatherings.
Sinn Fein’s, of course, was the largest, with Mary Lou McDonald, who had to be silent in Dublin, addressing an audience in Arbour Hill cemetery where 14 of those executed in 1916 are buried.
“We stand here, in this sacred place, to again attest who we are: Irish socialist republicans committed to the reuniting of our country and our people in peace, fraternity and harmony,” she said.
“We believe in equality, in economic justice and in workers’ rights. In an Ireland free of racism, discrimination, sectarianism, and bigotry… We are anti-war. We are anti-imperialist.”
That’ll keep them busy.
Derry was the top venue for – among others – Republican Sinn Fein, the Irish Republican Socialist Party, Saoradh, Republican Network for Unity, the Workers’ Party and the National Republican Commemoration Committee, which had hundreds of participants, a masked colour party and various paramilitary adornments for their ‘Unfinished Revolution’ national event, and there were lots more held locally.
But the plethora of so many ill-attended competing events just illustrated the disunity of republicans and how little anyone in the south cares about Irish unity.
With their combined efforts the left and Sinn Fein got Connolly into the presidency, but the most recent poll in the Sunday Independent shows unity didn’t even make the list of the top 18 priorities of the Republic’s electorate.
Fianna Fail’s Micheál Martin and the Social Democrat Holly Cairns top the party leaders’ approval ratings.
However, the threat to the established parties from the left should be giving moderate opinion worrying indications of the trouble that might lie ahead.
President Connolly has shown in the list of nominees to the Council of State she’s just published that she has the potential to be a serious problem.
Apart from Linda Ervine, the Belfast Protestant and Irish language enthusiast whom I like and respect, the majority of her nominees are academic lawyers who with one exception appear to be what the commentator Eoin O’Malley christened the “equality industrial complex that dominates academia and has driven its descent into mediocrity”.
Colin Harvey of Ireland’s Future, anyone?
Connolly seems quite as left wing as her predecessor and is already taking more public interest in foreign policy than she should.
There are independent-minded lawyers in the south, but this crew all appear to be singing from the same hymn sheet as the president, and indeed the British prime minister, who see national law as subservient to international human rights dogma.
Ireland’s enthusiasm for progressiveness may yet become as insidious an enemy inside as nationalist extremism.
