The outspoken new Irish president on Israel and NATO was inaugurated today and already the knives are out for her, writes Mick Hall.
Catherine Connolly, the new president of Ireland, at her inauguration on Nov. 11, 2025. (Government of Ireland)
By Mick Hall
Special to Consortium News
CN at 30
As Catherine Connolly was inaugurated as Ireland’s 10th president in Dublin Castle today, efforts intensified to undermine the country’s neutrality as it weighs moves to punish Israel for genocide.
Connolly, 68, was elected after winning over 63 percent of the vote in a landslide victory last month, her robust defence of anti-war and anti-genocide positions resonating with the Irish electorate, while causing alarm in Western corridors of power.
These are signs that the victory of the anti-imperialist left has served to galvanise establishment forces, both at home and abroad.
A former White House national security advisor, Robert C. O’Brien, writing in The Wall Street Journal last week, warned the Trump administration would “no longer tolerate countries that reap the benefits of America’s economic strength and military power, while pursuing policies that undermine American interests.”
“Ireland’s President-elect embodies the antagonism towards American interests,” he wrote, adding:
“Ireland is finding its voice in international affairs, but it’s one that seems increasingly hostile to US interests. Ireland is the most antagonistic country to Israel in the Western world … Ireland was one of the first Western democracies to recognise a Palestinian state unilaterally, and it is at the forefront of allegations of ‘genocide’ against Israel. Meanwhile Dublin courts Chinese investment with no mention of Beijing’s human rights record, economic coercion or regional aggression.”
In January, Ireland formally intervened in South Africa’s case brought against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) which alleges a breach of the Genocide Convention. Ireland has also remained out of NATO, refusing to militarise with most of the rest of Europe.
Ireland is indeed facing growing pressure over its refusal to align with the imperial West. Even its civil society bodies are coming under scrutiny from U.S. neo-conservatives.
Graham Chimes In
Republican lawmaker Lindsey Graham over the weekend threatened consequences on the Football Association of Ireland (FAI), which voted overwhelmingly for its board to request that the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) immediately suspend Israel from European competitions.
Members of Irish soccer’s governing body had cited violations by Israel’s Football Association of two UEFA provisions – to implement and enforce an effective anti-racism policy and Israeli clubs playing in occupied Palestinian territories without the consent of the Palestinian Football Association.
Graham promised to “make those who participate in this effort to marginalize Israel in sports, and elsewhere, pay a heavy price when it comes to access to the American economy.”
In July, Graham also joined U.S. envoy to Israel Mike Huckabee and other U.S. lawmakers in criticising the Irish government’s plans to ban trade with businesses operating within illegal Israeli settlements.
The Israeli Settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (Prohibition of Importation of Goods) Bill 2025 was first tabled in 2018, passed by majority votes in both the Seanad (upper house) and the Dáil (lower house), but had been stalled by successive governments after “veiled threats” of economic consequences by U.S. lawmakers, which have included Irish-Americans like Peter King.
Graham in July said he hoped “Ireland will reconsider their efforts to economically isolate Israel.”
“I do not believe these efforts would be well received in the United States and they certainly would not go unnoticed,” he said on X.
The bill is expected to be watered down by the centre-right Irish coalition government, to head off coercive moves by the U.S.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu between U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham, left, and
U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, on a trip to the Golan Heights in March 2019 for a briefing by an Israeli military commander on the situation in the region (Matty Stern/U.S. Embassy Jerusalem)
Connolly a Formidable Anti-war Voice
What they may not be able to water down is the voice of Connolly.
She replaces Michael D. Higgins, another former Irish Labour Party member, who served two seven-year terms and whose criticism of Israel over the past two years contributed to Israel withdrawing its ambassador from Dublin in December 2024.
Connolly may prove even more strident in her public foreign policy positions.
In the lead-up to the Israel import ban vote on Oct. 24, she had pointedly criticised NATO “warmongering” and Israel’s genocide in Gaza. She also voiced support for a border poll over Irish reunification, as outlined in the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement that brought an end to decades of political violence in the north of the partitioned island.
She told an often hostile media that Hamas formed “part of the civil society of Palestine” and that only Palestinians should choose who governs them, a rebuff to the Trump administration’s 20-point neo-colonial ‘peace’ plan. Connolly bluntly stated that Israel was an out-of-control state committing a genocide.
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When scrutinised over her attitude to the Western proxy war in Ukraine, the former barrister and psychologist said the conflict could only be resolved by diplomacy and that German rearmament reminded her of the military build-up in the 1930s.
Her elevation to Ireland’s constitutional figurehead and its moral voice on the world stage was the result of a disparate opposition’s ability to form a collective voting bloc, possibly learning from previous mistakes.
In June last year, Connolly joined a panel alongside other veteran activists, including former northern civil rights leader Bernadette Devlin Aliskey, in support of Clare Daly’s failed bid to retain her European Parliament seat.
The staunch NATO critic lost, disadvantaged by smears carried by media outlets that suggested she was a Russian asset and by several other leftist candidates also standing.
This time, unity among the left saw Ireland’s biggest party Sinn Fein, as well as Labour, People Before Profit and the Social Democrats, getting behind Connolly.
Getting her elected to what is largely a ceremonial role may prove vitally important as a means of countering pro-war and anti-genocide narratives in the country, which are being pushed heavily by establishment media.
From Threats to Threat Inflation
These narratives are now coming thick and fast.
A report entitled Peak Ireland by security-state aligned London think tank Policy Exchange, released on Oct. 30, argued that Ireland was freeloading “off the security umbrella provided by the US, the UK, and other European states.”
But, it said, the country was vulnerable to U.S. tariffs and trade negotiation shifts, as it continued to challenge Washington’s foreign policy settings. Its contents were covered by Ireland’s major news outlets.
Interestingly, former U.S. national security advisor O’Brien wrote the foreword to the report.
In his Wall Street Journal op-ed, O’Brien too criticised Ireland’s “pitiful investment” on defence, which amounted to 0.2 percent of GDP.
“Ireland lacks key technical defenses, like radar systems and efficient cyber and human intelligence networks, leaving the country open to espionage and cyberattacks from Russia, China and extremist nonstate actors,” he wrote.
https://t.co/4s2DW9JgIM pic.twitter.com/vvffBEnHrE
— Barry Andrews MEP (@BarryAndrewsMEP) November 6, 2025
Several media outlets found ways of writing stories around these talking-points, referencing concerns by unnamed Irish and European military and security leaders about the country’s ability to carry out security operations after it takes up the six-month rotational E.U. Presidency from July next year.
Of specific concern was Ireland’s lack of radar and defence capability when hosting the European Political Community summit next year, usually attended by up to 50 leaders. It was reported that a delegation from an unnamed Baltic country raised concerns about security with Irish officials at a meeting in Dublin last month.
The stories were hinged, or maybe unhinged, on a manufactured fear that Russia is sending drones deep into European airspace to probe nations’ defences as part of a hybrid warfare campaign.
Claims that drones were being launched from tankers used by Russia to transport its oil – its so-called ‘shadow fleet’ – were repeated uncritically. No evidence has been presented for this.
Mystery drones have recently closed Brussels Airport, with similar issues reported in Denmark in September.
The reporting forms a long line of narrative-driven stories seemingly designed to engineer fear and justify a more militarized and NATO-aligned stance by Ireland.
Ironically, Irish Defence Forces gave away its key radar systems used to direct anti-aircraft missiles, known as Giraffe, to Ukraine earlier this year. The Irish Times reported the Government is now purchasing at speed a multi-million Euro counter-drone system.
Neutrality Under Threat
The inauguration of Catherine Connolly. (Government of Ireland)
What lies at the centre of these propaganda pieces is a desire to bring Irish politicians and the public to an intellectual position the logic of which would undermine the rationale to retain the country’s neutrality, a position it has maintained since the state was established in 1921.
In widely reported remarks in early November, Ukraine’s first deputy minister for foreign affairs, Sergiy Kyslytsya, said neutrality was “a thing of the past.”
Speaking at the European Commission’s offices in Dublin, he warned Russia could flood far-off nations with drones or bring its systems down with cyberattacks. He suggested Ireland should follow the path of former neutral countries Finland and Sweden in helping to confront the threat.
Others have been even more forthright, expressing utter contempt for not just neutrality, but Irish sovereignty itself.
A former senior NATO commander, British Rear Admiral Chris Parry, last week told Westminster MPs and House of Lords members in a briefing that any future united Ireland would pose a strategic threat.
He said the loss of Northern Ireland would deepen the threat to Britain posed by Chinese and Russian submarines, and also recommended NATO hold naval exercises in Irish waters, whether Dublin agreed or not.
In a country like Ireland, with its bitter colonial legacy and where many keenly recognise Western war propaganda, comments from the likes of Parry may put accumulative pressure on the Irish government to compromise on neutrality, but such remarks will also likely antagonise large sections of the Irish public.
Unpicking Triple Lock
Key to dragging Ireland into NATO-captured EU security arrangements is the unpicking of its Triple Lock, designed to keep Ireland out of Western imperial interventions.
The Triple Lock means no more than 12 Irish Defence Forces members can be sent on an overseas mission, unless there is a United Nations Security Council mandate, approval from the Irish government (Cabinet), and approval from Dáil Éireann (the Irish parliament).
The Irish government therefore cannot move unilaterally, even if it manages to get a majority vote through Parliament and regardless of how much pressure is exerted from the E.U. and powerful NATO countries to circumvent the U.N.
European NATO nations are pushing plans to insert ‘peacekeepers’ into Ukraine, an arrangement Russia has signaled it will reject as part of any negotiated peace settlement.
Taoiseach (Irish Prime Minister) Micheál Martin discussed peacekeeping and prospects for a ceasefire with Zelensky by phone in September.
Although the Irish Government has not linked the two issues, it may not be a coincidence that it is bringing forward legislation to ditch the need for a Security Council mandate for peacekeeping missions, making it a Double Lock instead.
Connolly herself could speak out over the issue, putting pressure on the Government to agree to a referendum to change the Triple Lock, something the Government claims is unnecessary, as it supposedly does not compromise neutrality.
Connolly cannot legislate, only exercising discretional powers like the ability to send a bill to the Supreme Court to test its constitutionality. But there is nothing in the Irish Constitution that restricts anything she says in public.
One Irish outlet has reported the Government is planning for a visit from Zelensky, possibly in December. It remains unclear whether Connolly would receive him in the event of any such visit. If she did, there would be a risk for both parties.
A public engagement would invariably be used to put further pressure on Connolly to assume a more NATO-friendly position.
However, Zelensky risks being told some home truths in front of any cameras, primarily that diplomacy is the only way forward and that any other approach, including inflating threats posed by Russia, carries the unacceptable risk of an all-out war between European nations and Russia.
Connolly will likely act as a necessary and principled political bulwark against attempts to further propagandise Irish society and browbeat its population into renouncing its anti-colonial and anti-war instincts, as NATO threatens to consume it.
Mick Hall is an independent journalist based in New Zealand. He is a former digital journalist at Radio New Zealand (RNZ) and former Australian Associated Press (AAP) staffer, having also written investigative stories for various newspapers, including the New Zealand Herald.
Views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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Ireland is the light that will lead the west BACK to civilization,
Do NOT read if TRUTH upsets your sensibilities!
Sorry to disappoint Netanyahu and his Trumpian ilk.
Difference between Ethnic Groups and Theocracies
The Jews, like Christians and Muslims, are only one people in the sense that we are all of the one human species. None of the 3 aforementioned religions are practiced in only one specific geographic area of planet Earth.
An ‘ethnic group’ is a category of people who share a mindset, real or misperceived of common cultural origin or heritage; while a ‘theocracy’ is another mindset form of government, where religious authority holds supreme power.
They are fundamentally different concepts: one describes a social group, and the other describes a system of rule.
But neither has anything directly to do with differentiation of biological and/or physiological differences between the one homo-Sapiens species, known today as human beings.
Key Defining Criteria
Rule by Clergy/Religious Officials: The head of government and other high-ranking officials are typically members of the clergy or selected by religious authorities, not purely through secular elections.
For instance, in Vatican City, the Pope (head of the Catholic Church) is also the absolute monarch. The Pope may be the head of the Catholic Church, yet the institution of the Catholic Church is definitely not a nation state.
A nation-state is a country where a single, dominant ethnic or cultural group—the “nation”—forms the basis for the state’s identity and is largely contained within its geographic borders. (The so-called Israeli state has never had precisely defined boundaries) It combines a political entity (the state) with a shared cultural identity (the nation), creating a sovereign territory with its own government, defined boundaries, and a population with a common sense of history, language, or traditions.
By this interpretation alone, of only one fact in the aforementioned paragraph, Israel is definitely NOT a nation-state.
A nation-state is qualified as being one people, when a nation, or a group with a shared history, culture, and language, has a single, independent government controlling a specified territory.
Is Israel a country with high cultural homogeneity? (For that matter, is the United States of America a truly united Nation?)
Israel is not a country with high cultural homogeneity; it is a diverse, multicultural society with a wide array of religious, ethnic, and cultural groups. The population includes Jewish communities with origins across the globe (Ashkenazi, Mizrahi, Ethiopian Jews, etc.), a large Arab minority (Muslim, Christian, and Druze), and other communities.
Reasons for Israel’s cultural diversity
Diverse Jewish population: Israel’s Jewish population is not monolithic. It includes:
Jewish immigrants and their descendants from all over the world, bringing different customs and traditions: Different levels of religious observance, from the secular to the ultra-Orthodox.
A mix of ethnic Jewish groups, such as Ashkenazim (of European descent), Mizrahim (of Middle Eastern and North African descent) as well as Sephardic Jews who originated from the Iberian Peninsula (modern-day Spain and Portugal), with their name coming from the Hebrew word for Spain, “Sefarad”.
The very early historical name for what today is Spain was Hispania, a term used by the Romans for the entire Iberian Peninsula. Before the Romans, the ancient Greeks called the area Iberia. This community’s history in the region goes back centuries, but many were forced to leave Spain during the Spanish Inquisition in 1492. The expelled Jews dispersed throughout the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and eventually the Americas, preserving their unique culture and traditions in their new homes.
So much for ultra-Zionist Nut’s-and-yahoo’s “self-satisfied supremacists” (SS) notions of one Aryan people – (in Nazi ideology) of or denoting white non-Jewish people, especially those of northern European origin or descent, typically having blond hair and blue eyes and regarded as a supposedly superior racial group.
If alarm sirens are not retroactively echoing in the ears of Jewish memory in Palestine today, it is because Israelis have become falsely immune, and thereby oblivious to their intended conduct of attempting to ethnically cleanse – by whatever means necessary; the genocide of late not excluded, that they have been perpetrating on Arab Palestinians for more than a century and a quarter now – dating back to before the first formal Zionist convention of 1897.
Note: The devilish details being confirmed, with the assist of Google AI Overview being paraphrased.
Compare and contrast, a land of the brave and a land of the free.
Just over two-thirds of the US voting-eligible population participated in the 2024 national election. Of this two-thirds Trump received 49.8%, less than half of the total two-thirds who did participate. It means, in reality, that less than a third of the country’s total voting-eligible population of 155 million people, actually cast ballots for him to be President.
“As you sow so you shall reap”. The country (and the world) is now reaping the consequent results, of what it has sown!
Is this what passes for democracy; where an estimated 89 million Americans, or about 36% of the country’s voting-eligible population, opted not to participate in the 2024 general election, according to a US News & World Report.
These 36% of Americans abstaining is too significant a proportion of the electorate, in a truly democratic process to go uncounted as in opposition to, at the very least, the electoral process itself.
In the UN Security Council, the veto power means in reality, that just 1 abstention (20% of the eligible total) against the 5 (80%) is definitely not, by any stretch of anyone’s imagination, a democratic process; wherein the total number (193) of purportedly independent, sovereign States have no say, in international decision making directly affecting their interests.
Of the aforementioned 193 States only five are permanent members on the UN Security Council; wherein decisions affecting all member states, are decided.
The veto power requirement means that a single permanent member can block any substantive resolution with a vote of abstention, a power that non-permanent members lack.
Apparently, what is taken as good for the ganders, by themselves, is never usually good for the geese, the rest of us!
The proverb: what is appropriate in one case is also appropriate in the other case in question, doesn’t apply, where so-called democracy has always been pre selective.
Watch someone now launch a squadron of “Russian” drones at Shannon Airport to create the necessary panic in the Irish. They tried it on the Belgians after they inconveniently pointed out the sheer stupidity of the risks associated with confiscating Russian assets to.pay for Ukraines failing proxy war.
Just to clarify, as explained in the article under the Triple Lock any proposed military misson by Ireland must be a UN approved mission. However not only can this be done by the Security Council, but also the General Assembly, as has been seen in the discussions regarding the authorisation of the Uniting for Peace Resolution to halt the genocide in Gaza. Peacekeepers can be sent without passing through the Security Council. This is important as it disproves the government’s narrative that ‘the Russians have a veto over us’ ‘we have lost our sovereignty and need to get rid of the TL’.
The threats against the Republic of Ire. are genuine, but come not from the Russian Federation, nor from the R.O.C. Rather, these threats come from the neo-liberals. I believe there’s a chance that Ire. would be accepted into BRICS, and that they ought to try this solution as soon as possible.
Great idea!
Ireland, with its keen awareness of it’s colonial past, should make all peace and justice advocates with Irish descent very pleased. And give hope to progressives worldwide fighting Europe’s subservience to NATO aggression in Ukraine and genocide in Gaza.
I wish Scotland had independence and a leader like Connolly to get us out from under the malign influence of Westminster and Washington.
It looks like even the SNP is still in favor of a Zionist state. Maybe you could join with them until independence is achieved and then later, challenge them to take a moral stance.
The idea that Russia plans to attack Europe is absurd. I miss the voice of Clare Daley lecturing genocidal European war mongers and am glad President Connolly is standing strong against cowards with war budgets in mind.
Clare and colleague Mick were wonderful representatives of Ireland in the European Parliament but sadly were not re-elected and are greatly missed.
Agree. They are sorely missed.
The utter derangement from reality that officials in the US, UK, and EU manifest in their claims that Russia and China pose a security threat to Ireland is astonishing. The real security threat to Ireland’s independence and sovereignty comes from these deranged Western leaders, as their statements imply and state.
What a hypocritical joke, Chinese human rights abuses and aggression?! Are they serious?! These are the same goons arming Israel. ISRAEL! Have the mega hypocrites seen what Israel has been doing? Why is it okay for Israel but the same thing but less with China isn’t?? The Mega Hypocrisy is amazing!
Jeez, i cannot be more proud of the Irish President, Ms Connelly. Anyone with an IQ above room temperature must surely agree when looking at the genocide and murder applied by Israel and its supporters. The Zionist campaign to erase Gaza so multi billion seaside resorts can be built will remain a stain on the western supprt of this criminal campaign. Time to pull all support and put neten yahoo in the slammer where he belongs.
“Ireland’s President-elect embodies the antagonism towards (CORPRATE) American interests,”
American interests are a stepchild.
Planet Earth and all of it’s human beings must support a true Democracy. Democracy is baked into our DNA.
Hang tough. Ireland. I would not be surprised if the rest of the world joined you. In fact, I would be overjoyed to see people with backbone, ethics and morals stand up as you have done. I love where my hereditary lines come from.