When Catherine Connolly was elected President of Ireland, the shockwaves were felt far beyond Dublin. Her victory was not a symbolic gesture, nor a routine political milestone. It was a direct moral rebuke to the Israeli occupation and to the lobbying networks that have relied on silencing, intimidating, and dictating Europe’s discourse on Palestine for decades.

Those networks understood the danger immediately. Their panic was not about the limited constitutional powers of the Irish presidency; it was about something far more threatening to them: the collapse of narrative obedience in Europe. Connolly’s rise signalled that a European electorate, when fully awake and fully informed, can no longer be manipulated into calling genocide “self-defence” or occupation “security.”

Ireland’s memory of occupation

Ireland knows occupation not from textbooks but from experience. It is a nation that remembers siege, dispossession, and the machinery of colonial power. No media spin, however well-funded, can persuade such a people that the slaughter of trapped civilians is a “right.” That is why the Irish streets overflowed in solidarity with Gaza........

© Middle East Monitor