PADDYSTINE IS AN APPROPRIATE NAME FOR ISRAEL-HATING IRELAND

Paddystine’s new president

While the current crop of Western leaders is unlikely to heed the litany of anti-Jewish complaints by Catherine Connolly, she is set to be a major component of the global movement to isolate and weaken Israel. 

 

By Ben Cohen 

 

JNS

Oct 31, 2025

 

 

Catherine Connolly (C) smiles as she arrives at Dublin Castle, after being declared the winner in the Presidential election to become the next President of Ireland in Dublin on Oct. 25, 2025.

 

I can think of three people who will be delighted by the victory last week of pro-Hamas candidate Catherine Connolly in the Republic of Ireland’s presidential election. Two of them I can name: Zena Ismail and Lena Seale. The third person is unidentified, so I will go with “man on the bus.”

All three have engaged in violence against Jews this year in the name of defending Palestinians. In March, Ismail and Seale assaulted Israeli businessman Tamir Ohayon while he was drinking with a colleague in a Dublin bar, with Ismail disgustingly spitting on him for good measure. Then, in July, the man on the bus attacked a Jewish passenger while ranting about “genocidal Jews.” A woman on the bus who attempted to rein him in was also subjected to abuse for defending “genocidal Jews.”

This thuggish, Nazi-like behavior now enjoys official sanction. Were Connolly not the holder of a public office, I can easily envisage her engaging in similar actions—or at least egging on those who do.

Despite having only entered the presidential contest in July, when the widely favored candidate Mairead McGuinness withdrew due to ill health, Connolly won by a landslide with 63% of the vote. Her triumph is a testament to the hold the keffiyeh cult has over the Irish imagination, which still nurses grievances over the legacy of British colonization and which sees its own independence struggle as a mirror image of the Palestinian one. As is the case elsewhere in Europe, pro-Hamas demonstrations are frequently staged in Dublin and other Irish cities, with thousands of attendees eagerly embracing the ludicrous identity of “Paddystinians.”

These mass outbursts have been stoked by the Irish government, which has actively endorsed false accusations of “genocide” against Israel and has advanced an “Occupied Territories Bill” through parliament that severely restricts trade with the Jewish state. Against this background, it’s legitimate to ask whether Connolly will be worse than her long-serving predecessor, Michael Higgins, whose carefully choreographed avuncular style belied his habit of promoting outlandish antisemitic conspiracy theories, such as the claim that Israel seeks to build settlements in Lebanon, Syria and Egypt.

To my mind, the answer is yes.

A representative of the far left, Connolly has denounced Israel as a “terrorist state.” She has defended Hamas in the face of the insistence of the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany and other Western states that the Iranian-backed terrorist organization be denied a role in the governance of a post-war Gaza.

Describing Hamas as “part of the fabric of the Palestinian people,” she is not averse to issuing her own “Paddystinian” statements. “I come from Ireland, which has a history of colonization,” she told the BBC earlier this year. “I would be very wary of telling a sovereign people how to run their country.”

One of the core doctrines of Palestinianism is that “Palestine” is the only issue that matters and that other international crises—from Ukraine to Kurdistan to Sudan—are either politically suspect or simply irrelevant. As Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur for the Palestinians, expressed it at an Oct. 30 briefing organized by the U.N.’s Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, “Palestine today is the stage to prove whether or not we will live in a truly decolonized world.” The message sent to the residents of the city of El-Fasher in Sudan, who last week were driven from their homes amid bestial atrocities committed by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), as well as to the thousands of Ukrainian children illegally abducted by the Russian invaders, is that they don’t count.

In fact, Russian imperialism is not just exempted. In Connolly’s case, it receives a full-throated endorsement. An uncompromising backer of Irish neutrality that was famously on display during World War II, she opposes greater Irish contributions to the defense of Europe. She has additionally criticized NATO’s eastward expansion, accusing the alliance of playing “a despicable role in moving forward to the border and engaging in war-mongering,” believing that the greatest threat posed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine is the “militarization” of Europe.

As Rachelle Moiselle, a keen observer of the Irish scene, has observed, Connolly also has a nasty habit of referring to Ukraine as “the Ukraine,” as if the country is a geographical feature rather than an independent state allied with the West. So much, then, for not telling “a sovereign people how to run their country,” unless you believe, as Connolly clearly does, that Ukraine is a province of a Greater Russia.

Perhaps Connolly’s greatest offense was her homage to the now-deposed Syrian President Bashar Assad in 2018. Standing in the rubble of Aleppo, relentlessly bombed by the Russian forces supporting Assad during the civil war, she offered her solidarity to this exemplar of Arab dictators, despite Assad reducing the Palestinian neighborhood of Yarmouk on the outskirts of Damascus from—as one Palestinian witness memorably put it—“a thriving neighborhood of hundreds of thousands of people into a desperate population of 18,000 waiting to die.”

Connolly is unlikely to stick to the traditional role of the Irish president as a figurehead, opting instead for the activist profile adopted by Higgins and first pioneered during the 1990s by Mary Robinson. While the current crop of Western leaders is unlikely to heed her warnings and complaints, she is set to be a major component of the global movement to isolate and weaken the State of Israel.

She will not be alone. Pedro Sánchez, the Spanish Prime Minister, sits in her camp, as will—assuming he wins New York City’s mayoral election—the Hamas shill Zohran Mamdani, to name just two of her erstwhile comrades.

As Israel’s main ally on the world stage, the United States needs to tighten political and economic pressure on Ireland, which, in the estimation of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, “runs a trade surplus at our expense.” As for the American Jewish community, they should steer clear of vacations in Ireland and refrain from buying Irish products. For one thing, it’s not safe to be a Jew there. For another, with Ireland pushing a boycott of Israel, we should have no qualms about urging a boycott of Ireland in response.