{"id":147638,"date":"2025-10-27T10:40:10","date_gmt":"2025-10-27T10:40:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/147638\/"},"modified":"2025-10-27T10:40:10","modified_gmt":"2025-10-27T10:40:10","slug":"catherine-connollys-historic-win-puts-pressure-on-micheal-martins-fianna-fail-leadership","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/147638\/","title":{"rendered":"Catherine Connolly’s historic win puts pressure on Miche\u00e1l Martin’s Fianna F\u00e1il leadership"},"content":{"rendered":"

Catherine Connolly’s historic presidential victory<\/a> has put pressure on Coalition leaders, with one Fianna F\u00e1il TD suggesting Miche\u00e1l Martin should be replaced “in the not too distant future”.<\/p>\n

On Saturday, Ms Connolly was elected the 10th president of Ireland on the back of 914,143 votes<\/a> compared to Fine Gael candidate Heather Humphreys’s 424,987 and Fianna F\u00e1il’s Jim Gavin \u2014 who suspended his campaign \u2014 with 103,568.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The 213,738 spoiled<\/a> votes have led both the Taoiseach and T\u00e1naiste to suggest changes could be made to the nominations process for the office.<\/p>\n

The result has seen varying degrees of pressure on Miche\u00e1l Martin and Simon Harris from within their own parties, with Fianna F\u00e1il TD John McGuinness suggesting the party needs a new leader soon.<\/a>\n <\/p>\n

Mr McGuinness said steps must be taken to understand how Fianna F\u00e1il stands on 17% in the latest state of the parties opinion poll.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

“[We need] to identify exactly what happened. And that’s easy to do because, right across the country, 62% of people voted for Catherine Connolly, [Heather] Humphreys was half of that, and then Jim Gavin was 7.6%.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“We made serious errors of judgment, and we have brought a big political party back to 17% from a time where we did enjoy, at some stages, 45% of the support of the general public. That needs to be addressed.”<\/p>\n

Asked if this meant that Mr Martin’s leadership should be up for discussion, Mr McGuinness said it should.<\/p>\n

“Of course it is, yes. We can’t talk about the future or about what happened in the presidential election without discussing the type of leadership that brought us to that point.”<\/p>\n

Fianna F\u00e1il sources on Sunday said they believe that while Mr McGuinness is “easy to write off” as a long-time adversary of the Taoiseach, his words “represent how a lot of people are feeling”.<\/p>\n

Dublin South-West TD John Lahart also said over the weekend that the party had to have a discussion about the judgment of the leadership.<\/p>\n

On Monday, transport minister Darragh O’Brien came to Mr Martin’s defence, saying the \u201cvast majority\u201d of the Fianna F\u00e1il parliamentary party support the Taoiseach as party leader.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you look at the 14 years that Miche\u00e1l Martin has led Fianna F\u00e1il, he\u2019s brought the party back literally from the brink, back to be the largest party in government: 48 TDs in the last election just less than a year ago, and he has shown great leadership over the course of that.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Mr O\u2019Brien said an internal review into the election was under way. He told RT\u00c9\u2019s Morning Ireland: \u201cThe last few weeks have certainly been difficult, unquestionably, for Fianna F\u00e1il.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur parliamentary party actually met just over two weeks ago, and we had a full discussion with the party leader and amongst colleagues about what happened, and there was a lot of disappointment unquestionably.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was disappointed. The party leader was [as] well, and that review is under way, and we have to learn from that, and we will.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut whilst we\u2019re doing that, we also have to get on with the work that we\u2019re elected to do for our people, and that is the singular focus that Miche\u00e1l has as Taoiseach and as leader.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Mr O\u2019Brien said there was \u201creal disappointment\u201d but questions about leadership might be \u201clooking at this too deeply\u201d.<\/p>\n

He said: \u201cLearnings need to be made and will be made from that. But I think if you look back, to be fair to the party leader, over the last 14 years, he\u2019s got all of the big calls right in that period of time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dublin Castle U-turn<\/p>\n

Mr Martin had come in for criticism on Saturday from within his own party after two spokespeople separately confirmed to the Irish Examiner that the Taoiseach would not attend the declaration at Dublin Castle<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

However, this decision was reversed, and he later confirmed he would travel from Cork, arriving to speak to RT\u00c9 before the announcement.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Pressed about his plans, Mr Martin insisted that he had initially sought to make an appearance on RT\u00c9\u2019s Six One in Cork before travelling to Dublin Castle.<\/p>\n

\u201cFirst of all, I thought the count was later and I was asked to do the news. I thought I\u2019d do it from Cork, but obviously the count was coming quicker. That\u2019s all,\u201d Mr Martin said.<\/p>\n

Asked why his spokespeople had said he would not be in attendance, Mr Martin said: \u201cFair enough, but I\u2019m here. I came and there was nobody who rang me about it.\u201d <\/p>\n

Fianna F\u00e1il TD John Lahart also said there needed to be a conversation about leadership.<\/p>\n

In an interview with Newstalk on Saturday, Mr Lahart said there was \u201chuge affection\u201d for Mr Martin, whom he said had stood by the party \u201cwhen others left the scene in difficult times in 2011\u201d.<\/p>\n

He said: \u201cBut the party can\u2019t afford the kind of error and errors that were made in the selection process here.\u201d Mr Lahart said backbenchers took the proposal of Mr Gavin in \u201cgood faith\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of this went on the trust in the judgment of what the leader was saying and recommending and this was a really significant error of judgment.\u201d<\/p>\n

For his part, Fine Gael sources said that Mr Harris’s leadership is not under any threat. However, they that “hard questions need to be asked” about the party’s campaign and how Ms Humphreys finished so far behind Ms Connolly. <\/p>\n

According to the latest Business Post\/Red C Poll, Fine Gael’s support is 17%, down 2% when compared to when the Government was elected. Fianna F\u00e1il\u2019s support is down five points to 17%, while Sinn F\u00e9in’s support is up four points since the election to 23%.<\/p>\n

Mr Harris defended a Fine Gael video issued during the presidential campaign raising questions about Ms Connolly\u2019s work as a barrister, saying that it \u201casked the questions many of you [in the media] were asking\u201d.<\/p>\n

Despite Ms Connolly’s victory coming as a candidate of the combined left, Sinn F\u00e9in leader Mary Lou McDonald confirmed there will be no combined candidate in the by-election to replace the new president.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, a man in his 30s arrested over the weekend for an alleged assault on two women canvassing for Ms Connolly<\/a> alongside the Sinn F\u00e9in leader will appear in court on Monday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Catherine Connolly’s historic presidential victory has put pressure on Coalition leaders, with one Fianna F\u00e1il TD suggesting Miche\u00e1l…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":147639,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[9,10,18,13,14,4771,6,19,17,11,12,15,16,5,59,7,8],"class_list":{"0":"post-147638","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ireland","8":"tag-breaking-news","9":"tag-breakingnews","10":"tag-eire","11":"tag-featured-news","12":"tag-featurednews","13":"tag-fianna-fail","14":"tag-headlines","15":"tag-ie","16":"tag-ireland","17":"tag-latest-news","18":"tag-latestnews","19":"tag-main-news","20":"tag-mainnews","21":"tag-news","22":"tag-presidential-election","23":"tag-top-stories","24":"tag-topstories"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115445709510729860","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147638","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=147638"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147638\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/147639"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=147638"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=147638"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=147638"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}