{"id":135781,"date":"2025-10-21T09:54:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-21T09:54:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/135781\/"},"modified":"2025-10-21T09:54:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-21T09:54:07","slug":"harris-says-no-regrets-over-fg-video-on-connolly-record","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/135781\/","title":{"rendered":"Harris says no regrets over FG video on Connolly record"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>T\u00e1naiste Simon Harris has defended the Fine Gael video which questions the work of presidential candidate Catherine Connolly as a barrister during the economic crash.<\/p>\n<p>He said he has no regrets about this when asked on his way into Cabinet as he criticised the Independent presidential candidate.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;No, what I&#8217;ve regret about is we have a presidential candidate who won&#8217;t answer questions,&#8221; Mr Harris said.<\/p>\n<p>He said he fully understands the role of a barrister, but added that it is important people &#8220;are consistent in terms of their public utterances.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;There are lines quoted in the national media today in a national newspaper from people in Galway that describe one of our presidential candidates as ruthless and relentless in her pursuit of family homes.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I can&#8217;t answer that, you can&#8217;t answer that, it would be really good if she answered that.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><b><a href=\"https:\/\/www.rte.ie\/news\/presidential-election\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">Latest Presidential Election stories<\/a><\/b><\/p>\n<p>He said there will be an opportunity for her to answer these questions during tonight&#8217;s debate on RT\u00c9&#8217;s Prime Time.<\/p>\n<p>Mr Harris also said it is a &#8220;much narrower field&#8221; between the two candidates than people expected.<\/p>\n<p>He said Irish people take their vote &#8220;very seriously&#8221; and are thinking things through.<\/p>\n<p>Yesterday, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.rte.ie\/news\/presidential-election\/2025\/1020\/1539536-connolly-barrister-humphreys\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">Fine Gael candidate Heather Humphreys again accused her opponent of double standards for representing banks as a barrister in repossession cases<\/a> while criticising them as an elected representative.<\/p>\n<p>Ms Connolly said that Fine Gael was &#8220;absolutely terrified&#8221; by her growing campaign, has gone &#8220;negative&#8221; and attacked her work as a barrister.<\/p>\n<p>She said the Bar Council had clarified &#8220;on more than one occasion&#8221; how barristers cannot be connected to the people who they represent in court, adding &#8220;but Fine Gael are still resorting to these tactics&#8221;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"T\u00e1naiste Simon Harris has defended the Fine Gael video which questions the work of presidential candidate Catherine Connolly&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":35998,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[9,10,18,13,14,6,19,17,11,12,15,16,5,7,8],"class_list":{"0":"post-135781","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-breaking-news","9":"tag-breakingnews","10":"tag-eire","11":"tag-featured-news","12":"tag-featurednews","13":"tag-headlines","14":"tag-ie","15":"tag-ireland","16":"tag-latest-news","17":"tag-latestnews","18":"tag-main-news","19":"tag-mainnews","20":"tag-news","21":"tag-top-stories","22":"tag-topstories"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135781","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=135781"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135781\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=135781"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=135781"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=135781"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}