Ireland’s new president-elect Catherine Connolly has called for the world to respect Palestine’s right to decide its own leadership, saying no foreign power has the authority to dictate who represents the Palestinian people.
Drawing on Ireland’s own experience of colonisation, Connolly said she would be “very wary of telling a sovereign people how to run their country”.
In televised interviews with RTE News and Virgin Media’s The Tonight Show, recorded before her election, she emphasised that “history did not start on 7 October”, urging global leaders to look at Israel’s decades-long record of occupation and atrocities.
Connolly criticised UK Labour leader Keir Starmer for commenting on Hamas, saying, “It’s up to the Palestinian people. What Keir Starmer and other countries should be doing is stopping the genocide.”
She also questioned Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza, asking at what point its “military objectives” were achieved after tens of thousands of deaths, and warned that the world must “take off the blinkers” to recognise “genocide unfolding before our eyes”.
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Produced by: Middle East Eye
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