On Monday, I reached out to David Hall.

Hall is the founder of Lifeline Ambulance Services, but he spends much of his time doing other jobs and advocating for other causes. He runs iCare, a not-for-profit company that provides social housing, and also headed up the domestic violence charity Sonas. He was drafted in by the state to help out when the wheels started coming off the disgraced charity Console, and many others.

Also, for more than 15 years, he has worked tirelessly to help distressed mortgage holders through the Irish Mortgage Holders Association. He has tussled with vulture funds, battled repossessions, and consistently battled government policy.

So, last week, as the Heather Humphreys campaign intensified its attacks on Catherine Connolly over her work representing UK banks on repossession cases during the crash, I wanted to canvass his view.

After all, this was the smoking gun designed to resurrect the Fine Gael candidate’s ailing campaign. 

Hall, as ever, had unflinching views. But they were not the views I expected. 

He felt it was a smear campaign against Connolly for doing her professional duty as a barrister. 

“The truth is that Fine Gael in Government failed families in mortgage arrears. They could have banned no-fault evictions. They could have protected homeowners making genuine efforts to pay. They could have funded legal aid for people defending their homes. Instead, they cut legal supports, weakened insolvency protection, and rolled out the red carpet for vultures to profit off Irish mortgage misery,” he said.

He also pointed to the credit union movement, a sector that Humphreys worked in and highlighted extensively during the campaign. The way Hall saw it, they were more aggressive than the mainstream banks in the pursuit of debts. 

“I do not know Catherine Connolly personally, but Fine Gael’s recent attack on her is an unfounded smear,” he said.

Hall was not the only one who spotted the problem here.

The Humphreys campaign was in trouble before it targeted the repossession issue, but the manoeuvre failed spectacularly.

People want their presidents to be above politics. They want the occupant of Áras an Uachtaráin to speak to values and ideals. They want that person to be a counterpoint to the necessary business of day-to-day, “he said, she said” politics. 

They want their president to be presidential. The campaign is not actually a campaign. It is an audition. 

People may disagree with Catherine Connolly’s views, particularly her worldview. But she has acted in a presidential manner throughout this campaign. The attack from Humphreys on Connolly for her work as a barrister was far from presidential. People notice these things, and they react accordingly.

Yes, Fine Gael was unfortunate to lose its initial nominee (and we all wish Mairead McGuinness well). But the campaign failed to articulate a message about what Humphrey’s presidency would look like, or what she was standing for.

That is not to say that Fine Gael alone lost this election. In truth, Fianna Fáil lost it, through one of the most shambolic campaigns mounted in decades. 

Meanwhile, Connolly’s campaign has been impressive, surprisingly impressive. As I wrote last weekend, she has united the left, nullified the centre and dismantled the right.

Part of this comes from what people want from a president as opposed to what people want from a government.

But her campaign has been well marshalled, well resourced, and, despite her failure to answer serious questions time and time again (Syria, Russia…), she has played well in the media. Even her remarks about Germany and Britain, remarks most, I suspect, disagree with, have failed to rattle her march to the presidency.

Her use of social media has been brilliant, particularly on TikTok. Sinn Féin gave her a great ground game and an army of campaigners. A colleague who drove the length of Co Cavan in Humphreys’s former constituency a week and a half ago told me he was astonished to see Connolly’s posters outnumber hers overwhelmingly. This is strong Sinn Féin country.

The support of Ivana Bacik and Holly Cairns, two slightly centre-left political leaders, helped bolster her appeal to middle Ireland, particularly female middle Ireland, and reassured many. 

Ultimately, Catherine Connolly won the presidency because she won the campaign. That might seem an obvious thing to say, but many politicians have lost campaigns and still won the ballot, while others have won the argument and still lost.

As the vote shows, Connolly has appealed to more than her left-wing base. Her landslide win, with 63.4 per cent of valid votes, far ahead of what pre-election opinion polls had suggested – and more than double Humphreys’ 29.5 per cent. For that, the president-elect deserves much credit.

She has come across as the linear successor to Michael D Higgins, even if their personal rapport is somewhat strained. 

If Fine Gael was lacklustre (and in truth, it has a bad history of presidential campaigns and a poor history in recent elections), the Fianna Fáil effort was thoroughly appalling. The leading party of government settled on a man with no political background and with no real idea of why he was running for president. 

Jim Gavin is an accomplished man who has done the state some service, but nominating a political novice, only to see his campaign collapse in such calamitous circumstances, has heavily undermined the party and its leader. 

It also diminished the presidential contest, as it made it a two-horse race – particularly when most people want more than two horses. 

The biggest surprise in this election’s results is not the low turnout – while less than half of voters showing up at their polling stations is a source of concern, turnout actually increased compared to the previous presidential contest in 2018. It is, of course, the tenfold explosion in spoiled votes over the same period. In the 1990s, their number was stuck just under 10,000. In the two previous elections held in this century, this doubled to almost 20,000. On Friday, however, 213,738 citizens placed an invalid ballot in the box, or 12.9 per cent of those who voted.

This has been a strange presidential campaign. The leading party of opposition declined to put up a candidate, instead backing Catherine Connolly. The main party of government saw its candidate withdraw. Fine Gael saw its first candidate withdraw for health reasons and then saw its second candidate fail to resonate.

Others sought to get on the ballot. Maria Steen launched her campaign far too late, while Gareth Sheridan seemed utterly ill-prepared.

Ultimately, the first candidate in the race won. She won because, clearly, she appealed more to the people of Ireland than anyone else.

In the end, it was the outsider who read the room best. Catherine Connolly spoke directly, while others talked around. Yes, she spoke much of smear campaigns and anti-media bias. And yes, she spoke all too frequently of a military-industrial complex. But she spoke and people listened.

Connolly did not inherit the office — she earned it. 

Looking ahead, there has been much talk of the future of the “movement” she claims to have launched. This became compromised in the early hours of counting on Saturday, when Labour’s Bacik distanced herself from Sinn Féin, the party that provided many cogs in Connolly’s campaigning machine on the streets and online. The upcoming Galway West by-election will be an immediate test of the united left’s life expectancy.

Another movement, meanwhile, emerged even more quickly around the campaign to spoil the vote. The race to reach these voters began as soon their invalid ballots were counted on Saturday. Whether political forces capable of governing the country or extremist activists get there first could be a defining factor in the evolution of Irish politics in the months and years ahead.

Elsewhere last week…

David McHugh represents some of Ireland’s top athletes and works with blue-chip corporates on sports deals. In the most recent episode of our Sports Matters podcast series, he talked about his life in sport, future trends and why he sold his agency to global giant Wasserman.

Who controls the largest share of €1.9 billion State-backed green energy contracts? That was a question Alice sought to answer by analysing five years’ worth of company data to reveal the owners of the biggest slices in the Renewable Electricity Supply Scheme pie.

Recently named CEO of the Year at the IMAGE PwC Businesswoman of the Year Awards, Carolan Lennon discussed how Salesforce Ireland is preparing for a new world of human-AI collaboration — and why values, not velocity, will shape the future of work.

In a candid public interview before investors and business leaders at an event organised by Cantor Fitzgerald and The Currency, Minister for Finance Paschal Donohoe reflected on his 10 budgets, navigating Ireland through a world of trade disruption and tariffs, and why AI could change everything.