Unscrambling the results of Ireland’s presidential election

The scale of Catherine Connolly’s victory in the Irish presidential election was historic, thus she will have plenty of scope to say things that might cause discomfort for those in Government writes Dick Roche.

EUalive’s columnist Dick Roche is a former Irish Minister of State for European Affairs. His columns can be found here.

Just short of 1.66 million voters cast their ballot in last Friday’s Irish presidential election. Turnout at 45.83% while low was up by almost 2 points on the vote in the 2018 Presidential elections.

The election produced an emphatic victory of Catherine Connolly. President elect Connolly – the quiet-spoken, non-party, left leaning, and Irish speaking former Deputy Speaker of Dail Eireann, the lower House of the Irish Parliament, won almost two out of every three valid votes cast in the election.

The election result was a disaster for the Taoiseach Micheal Martin and a humiliation for his party, Fianna Fail. It was a serious rebuff for Simon Harris the deputy prime minister (Tánaiste) and Fine Gael the party he leads.

When the official result in the Irish Presidential election was announced in Dublin Castle on Saturday evening it came as no surprise. For much of the election campaign the only question was how big the Connolly victory margin would be.

The magnitude of the Connolly victory signals a clear shift in the mood of many voters away from the traditional politics that have dominated Irish politics for almost a century. Quite how permanent it will be is another matter. There are many ways of reading any election result.

Three very different election campaigns

On 16 July Catherine Connolly, an independent member of Dail Eireann announced that having been promised the support of more than 20 members of the parliament she intended to contest the Presidential election. The initial support came from the Social Democrats, People Before Profit and from non-party members. The Labour Party ‘signed on’ to her presidential campaign at the end of July. The Green Party followed suit in early September. On 20th September Sinn Fein announced that it would not directly contest the election and would instead support the Connolly campaign, a decision described by the Sinn Fein leader as a ‘gamechanger’, a description borne out in the election results as discussed below.

Connolly’s campaign focused primarily on her vision for the office of President. She spoke of using the office to advocate for peace and unity in Ireland, to challenge the ‘normalisation of homelessness’, to support marginalised communities and challenge income inequality. A striking part of Connolly’s messaging focused on Ireland’s tradition of military neutrality. She spoke of using the office of President to build on Ireland’s traditional policy of neutrality”, to advocate against militarisation, to become ‘a moral voice’ against the normalisation of war and violence and to focus on climate change.

In addition to her political message Connolly also brought an extraordinary life story, that resonated with voters, to the election. The ninth child in a family of 14 with 6 sisters and 7 brothers Catherine Connolly was raised in a social housing estate in Galway on Ireland’s west coast. She achieved university qualifications in psychology and German in University College Galway and a master’s degree in clinical psychology at the university of Leeds. After qualifying in 1981, she worked as a clinical psychologist for a number of years, returned to University, took a law degree, studied at Kings Inns and became Barrister in 1991. She moved into local politics in 1999, was elected Mayor of Galway in 2004 and won a seat in Dail Eireann as an independent TD in 2016.

In addition to attracting the support of practically every political actor on the left in Ireland’s political spectrum, Connolly managed through her campaign messaging to bring voters who would not see themselves as of the left into her ‘camp’.

On 15 July Fine Gael, part of the EPP Group announced that the party nomination process for the Presidential election had closed and that having received the required number of nominations the name of former MEP and EU Commissioner Mairead McGuiness would go forward for ratification at an event in September. Seen as a potentially strong contender Ms McGuiness was forced to withdraw from the contest on medical advice.

On 2 September the party selected Heather Humphreys, a member of the Irish Parliament from 2011 until her retirement in 2024 who had held a number of Ministerial appointments to replace Mairead McGuiness as its candidate.

The Humphreys campaign lacked the energy and the focus of the Connolly campaign. Much of it focused negatively on Connolly particularly on her work for banks as a barrister following Ireland’s financial crash and on a decision to employ an assistant who had served a prison sentence handed down by Ireland’s special criminal court. She was also forced to spend time defending unpopular decisions taken by governments in which her party served.

While not a winning campaign Humphreys received 424,987 votes, 29.46% of the votes cast in the Presidential election – the best result for any Fine Gael presidential election since 1973. That result was not strong enough to quell criticism of her party’s leadership as discussed later.

On 30 August, after months of speculation as to who would be the Fianna Fail party candidate Micheál Martin, announced that he was supporting Jim Gavin, a former successful manager of Dublin’s Gaelic football team, for nomination. The announcement took most people by surprise. While well known in some sporting circles Gavin had no political experience and no known political party connections. His support for Jim Gavin as candidate was seen as an effort by Micheál Martin to bypass the normal nomination processes, to impose a candidate of his choosing on the party and as means of preventing the former party leader and former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern from entering the election and resurrecting past controversies.

Gavin’s nomination was formally agreed by 41 votes to 29 at a meeting of the Fianna Fail Parliamentary party on 9th September. The Gavin campaign was a train wreck from the outset. On 5th October Gavin announced he was withdrawing from the campaign following revelations that he had failed to refund €3,300 in rent overpaid in 2009. The withdrawal came eleven days after the official close of nominations for the Presidential election meaning that Fianna Fail, [part of Renew Europe] could not nominate another candidate. It also meant that Gavin’s name remained on the ballot papers.

The collapse of the Fianna Fail election campaign was followed by a dramatic fall in the party’s rating in the opinion polls. A poll published in the closing days of the election showed the party rating down five points to 17per percent with Micheal Martin’s personal ratings down 11 points – his lowest rating in five years.

A historic win

The scale of Catherine Connolly’s victory in the election was historic. She won 914,143 votes, 63.4% of the total valid poll, by far the largest number of first preference votes cast for any candidate in any of Ireland’s ten contested Presidential elections. Her first preference vote was higher than the 56.5% first preference vote for Eamon De Velera, the primary author of the Irish Constitution and founder of Fianna Fail, in the 1959 Presidential election or of the 55.8 % vote of the outgoing President Michael D Higgins in 2018.

Connolly won the election in all but one of the 43 electoral constituencies in Ireland. Heather Humpherys the other ‘standing’ candidate won the majority vote in the Cavan-Monaghan her ‘home’ constituency. The third candidate whose name appeared on the ballot paper, Jim Gavin, Fianna Fail, came a poor third in all 43 constituencies.

Voter protest

In addition to the historic vote for Catherine Connolly, another striking feature of voting in the Presidential election was the extraordinary number of voters who went to the polling stations and spoiled their vote rather than support any candidate.

When the ballot boxes were opened at the counting centres on Saturday 25th October over 213,000 ballot papers – over 12.9 per cent of the total poll – had messages written on them, were incorrectly completed or marked improperly and therefore declared invalid.

In the 2024 General election just 0.7 per cent of the votes cast were ‘spoiled votes’ In the 2018 Presidential election the figure was 1.2 per cent.

The extraordinary number of spoiled votes was a measure of voter discontent at the limited number nominated to contest the election. Between 1990 and 2025 there had been an ‘opening’ of the opening up of nomination process for Presidential elections( https://eualive.net/irelands-drama-filled-presidential-election/ ) allowing candidates from outside the political parties to contest presidential elections.

When nominations closed for the 2025 election only three candidates had ‘made it onto the ballot paper – the lowest number in a contested presidential election since 1990 or since 1978 when the fact that Gavin whose name was on the ballot paper had withdrawn from the election is taken into account.

What was widely portrayed as a deliberate effort by the main political parties – which controlled the nomination process – to limit the candidate choices available to voters led to a campaign urging voters to protest by spoiling their votes as a protest.

In addition to its overall impact the spoil your vote campaign impacted particularly on the Fianna Fail vote. In multiple constituencies the number of spoiled votes exceeded the number of votes cast for Gavin. In 10 of the 11 constituencies in County Dublin more people spoiled their vote than voted for the Fianna Fail candidate.

Political fallout

Catherine Connolly’s extraordinary victory is best read both as the election of a left-leaning independent around whom a coalition of the left assembled and as a political rebuke to the two lead parties in the Irish Government.

The election outcome was a particular defeat for Micheál Martin the leader and for his party, Fianna Fail. The disastrous Presidential campaign has left him facing the most serious challenge since he assumed party leadership in 2011. He is blamed for the choice of Gavin as candidate. Criticism of the Taoiseach’s leadership style which has been in the background has come to the surface. In the days since the Presidential election results members of the party have gone on record with their criticism, rumours of a no confidence motion in his leadership have circulated. The party has set up an inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the candidate selection process. The review will be completed by mid-November. Action against the Taoiseach is unlikely to be taken before the report is issued. What happens when it is issued depends on what the report says. One option open to Micheal Martin is to put down a motion of confidence in his leadership when the report is published.

Issues relating to candidate selection have also been raised in Fine Gael, the second party in Ireland’s coalition government.

While Humphreys’ received 424,987 votes, 29.46% of the votes cast in the Presidential election – the best result for any Fine Gael presidential election since 1973, her nomination to replace Mairead McGuiness has been the subject of criticism.

The decision by the party leadership not to support the candidacy of MEP Sean Kelly has been portrayed as a bad mistake by the party leadership. Kelly with an impressive record in EU Parliament elections – he won over 120,000 first preference votes in the hotly contested 2024 EU Parliament elections, a fluent Irish speaker and a former president of the GAA Ireland’s largest sporting organisation with a capacity to attract support from outside the Fine Gael base would, his supporters suggest, have been a better ‘vote getter’ than Humpherys. Kelly himself has complained of being ‘shafted’ by the Fine Gael leadership.

While the problems triggered in Fine Gael are not on the scale of the problems for Michael Martin their potential long term impact should not be dismissed.

In addition to the problems arising from the nominations of their party candidates the leaders of Fiana Fail and Fine Gael have to deal with the anger demonstrated by the number of spoiled votes and the perception by many voters that their choice in the election was suppressed. Fine Gael leadership faces particular criticism for instructions issued to local authority members to block the nomination of independent presidential candidates.

Given that Ireland’s next general election is not due for four years, that none of the parties that form the current government have any reason to rush to trigger an election before the end of the mandate and that Ireland will assume the EU Presidency in the second half of 2026, Taoiseach Micheal Martin and Tánaiste Simon Harris are in a good position to navigate through the recriminations they face at the moment.

The new president

Catherine Connolly will be inaugurated on 11 November becoming Ireland’s 10th President and the third woman to hold the office. The speech she makes at the inauguration will be closely scrutinised. Like her predecessors the incoming President will likely use the occasion to reflect on the topics on which she plans to focus over the next seven years. One issue that will be of particular interest will be what President has to say about expanding the role of the Presidency as ‘a moral voice’, to build on Ireland’s traditional policy of neutrality”, to advocate against militarisation and to challenge the normalisation of war and violence themes from her election campaign that resonated with voters and in particular younger voters.

While the president elect has made it clear that her presidency will operate within the confines set out in the Irish Constitution Ireland’s very elastic interpretation of neutrality – the word is not mentioned in the Irish Constitution – will give the new President plenty of scope to say things that might cause discomfort for those in Government. As a member of Dail Eireann Catherine Connolly raised questions about moves by the current government which she regarded as potentially weakening Irish neutrality. She specifically flagged concerns that moves supported by the two government parties to change the ‘triple lock’ mechanism that for over 65 years has determined when Irish troops may be deployed on missions outside Ireland are a cause for concern. The existence of the triple lock has been used by successive Irish governments to assuage voter concern on the issue of neutrality in EU referendum campaigns.

The campaign of President elect Connolly put the Irish neutrality issue back on the agenda. It is not outside the bounds of possibility that efforts by the current government to change the mechanism could become the subject of tension between the current Government and the incoming President.

Caption: Catherine Connolly at an election rally [Connolly for President on X]