Last weekend, Ireland elected as its next president a leftwing pacifist in the latest example of how Ireland has bucked the global trends of rightwing populism.
This was not a parliamentary election – although Catherine Connolly, an independent candidate, managed to unite leftwing parties, some previously at loggerheads – behind her. And presidential elections in Ireland are different. The office itself is largely ceremonial, but the figurehead is seen as the conscience of Irish society. The Irish electorate – at least since 1990, when Mary Robinson became Ireland’s first female president (she was followed by Mary McAleese and Michael D Higgins) – has a tendency to choose progressive presidents with intellectual heft. My own theory of who emerges victorious in Irish presidential elections is that they are thematic to the vanguard of prevailing social values: Robinson the feminist, McAleese the bridge builder between north and south, Higgins the socialist poet, and now Connolly, the anti-war president.
