What has happened in Catherine Connolly’s first year in office?

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

The Hard Shoulder, with Ciara Kelly and Shane Colman, on Newstalk, with Ciara.

Shane Coleman (0:08)

Now, a year ago today, President Catherine Connolly was inaugurated, but has anything changed since political editor of the Irish Times, Pat Leahy, has been writing about this?

Pass, the president on her inauguration day spoke about articulating a vision for a new republic. Have we seen a new republic since she became president? Or was that asking a little bit too much?

Pat Leahy (0:33)

Well, if we have the new republic looks a lot like the old one. If you ask me, Shane, yeah, I was writing about this today, just kind of contrasting that sort of very high-flown rhetoric in her, not just during her campaign, but in her inauguration speech a year ago today. And I talked to a lot of people on and off the record for this piece, who would have been very much in Camp Connolly last year. And nobody is prepared to criticise her on the record. Everybody had the most fulsome praise for her. But there is a sense, I suppose, when you talk to people on background, that I think they feel that she has been a little quieter than they expected her to be. And those words about articulating a vision for a new republic, a republic worthy of its name, she went on, where everyone is valued and diversity is cherished and sustainable solutions are urgently implemented and a home is a fundamental human right.

I don't think many, even her most ardent supporters would say that that is not just a republic that has been brought in to being in the past year, but that she has really set out how it might be achieved or what its principles should be in the last year, you know.

Shane Coleman (2:01)

There's a line in your piece in The Irish Times today, you quote a person saying she doesn't love the limelight like Michael D did. Is this key?

Is that the key thing? Maybe A, she doesn't love the limelight and B, she maybe gets the limitation and understands the limitations of her office.

Pat Leahy (2:21)

I mean, I think we have to be careful in comparing her to Michael D, even though comparisons are, of course, inevitable, because at this point, what we are doing is comparing one year of Catherine Connolly to 14 years of Michael D.

But I do think there is something in what you say, that her approach is different. One person that I spoke to told me about it, that his idea of the presidency, and he knows it well, is that the personality of the incumbent becomes the character of the office in a way. And she is a very different person. Despite sharing some of Michael D's politics, she's a very different person to him.

She is reserved by nature. She is lawyerly. She is careful in a way that Michael D probably wasn't. And Michael D viewed himself as a public intellectual. He was described in the piece today as a sort of a lighthouse in national debate for a certain type of left-wing thinking. And with the best will in the world, I don't think you could say that she has fulfilled that role or that she has emulated that role. She will have her own style of presidency, that's for sure. But I think it is not as, in the way that Michael D's interventions used to delight people on the left, used to quoted in the piece today, an article that the People For Profit TV Paul Murphy wrote last year, talking about how Connolly would be a thorn in the side of the political establishment and that commentators who used to talk about Michael D overstepping the limits of the role, that they would continue to write. I think you might have written a few of those columns yourself, Shane. I might have. I know I did, but we haven't really had much cause to write them in the last year.

Shane Coleman (4:20)

No, no. There was one early skirmish and you refer to it in your piece.

Pat Leahy (4:25)

Yeah. So the week before Micheal Martin went to Washington for the St. Patrick's Day trip to visit Donald Trump, she made a speech in which she talked about, even though she didn't mention the US or Israel by name, she talked about the attacks on Iran as flagrant violation of international human rights law. She called them deliberate assaults on international law. And she said, we have to call these out, we have to name them as such, she said, without euphemism and without equivocation. And I think a lot of people at that time thought, yes, here we go. This is what we expected from her. This is in the vein of Micheal D. The following week, the government kind of answered back in a way that it never did with Micheal D. We asked the government press secretary at the weekly cabinet briefing about this. And whereas previously, when we might ask such questions of the government press secretary after a Micheal D outburst, they just wouldn't comment. In this case, the Taoiseach spokesman said, it's important to recall that responsibility for international affairs rests with the government. And I think that was a sort of a signal to the oris that if she was going to criticize the government, that the government would certainly answer back. And really, you know, we haven't seen any further tension since then.