Catherine Connolly, a veteran lawmaker on the far left of the Irish political spectrum, was elected president by a landslide margin on Saturday.

Official results showed strong voter support for Connolly as president, a largely ceremonial role in Ireland. She won 63 percent of first-preference votes once ineligible votes were excluded, compared to 29% for her rival Heather Humphreys, of the center-right party Fine Gael.

She has drawn criticism for her views on the Hamas terror group, which she said in September was “part of the fabric of the Palestinian people.” Ireland’s Prime Minister Micheál Martin criticized those comments.

Connolly later maintained that she “utterly condemned” Hamas’s actions and that its October 7, 2023, onslaught against Israel, which started the war, was “absolutely unacceptable.”

But she criticized Israel for carrying out what she said was a “genocide” in Gaza, an accusation Israel adamantly rejects. She has also accused Israel of being a “terrorist state.”

“If we in this Dáil can’t recognize that Israel is a terrorist state, then we’re in serious trouble,” she said in a video shared on her campaign’s Facebook page in June, referring to the lower house of the Irish legislature where she served. She went on to criticize Israel’s strikes on Iran’s nuclear........

© The Times of Israel