Heather Humphreys
SECTIONS OF the Catherine Connolly-led left alliance are frustrated at the genteel refusal of their candidate to respond in kind to what they say has been a scurrilous campaign from the Heather Humphreys/Fine Gael camp, as recommended by Ivan Yates (see p11), as well as sections of the media. The leftists argue that preserving Connolly’s presidential demeanour is one thing but that Humphreys is getting a free pass on a number of issues on which she is highly vulnerable.
From the get-go Connolly has been attacked with unrestrained intensity, beginning with the ludicrous suggestion on RTÉ that Hamas is not part of the fabric of Palestinian society in Gaza – as Connolly simply noted – a line that now looks especially stupid in Gaza and even Israel. Last weekend the Sunday Independent editorialised against Connolly and published a soft-soap interview with Humphreys, as well as an article supporting her and another attacking Connolly.
Meanwhile, FG politicians and their candidate openly attacked Connolly on a variety of issues, especially with the charge that Yates suggested – namely that she would endanger Ireland’s reputation internationally.
Connolly’s resistance to these attacks has been confined to simply defending herself against each one as it came but she has declined to respond with issues that would be at least as damaging to Humphreys.
The most obvious and damaging issue that Humphreys would be anxious to avoid is her 2023 Green Paper on Disability Reform, published in her last year as social protection minister. Senator Tom Clonan, perhaps the most prominent disability campaigner in the state, demolished the “Victorian” philosophy behind Humphreys’ green paper. He explained that its proposal to medically examine disabled people to see how much work each could do was intended to lower payments to them.
Humphreys denied that this was her intention and said the paper was merely a consultation exercise. Clonan met the minister and said later that she had told him she was not for turning on the paper’s proposals.
A detailed account of these arguments and the sequence of events last year was published in The Phoenix (see edition 19/9/25) and it bears out Clonan’s arguments.
Another issue that Humphreys and FG would like to avoid is her vaunted claim to be a proud Irish republican. FG and Humphreys herself have cited her management of the 1916 commemorations as most progressive – or as the kindly Irish Times put it, “sober and balanced”. But the official minutes of the Oireachtas Consultation Group on Commemorations from when Humphreys joined it in early 2012 to the last meeting before she became arts minister and committee chair in mid-2024 reveal quite a different picture.
In this two-to-three-year period, not a single statement or query from Humphreys was recorded in the minutes. She was absent from many of the meetings and, unlike other absentees, usually failed to offer apologies for her absence (see The Phoenix 24/4/15).
The cynical, political reality is that her religion was exploited by FG in this period by appointing her as the boss of the 1916 circus and boasting about it ever since – especially in this presidential contest. But the real work on commemorations in 2016 was done by Fáilte Ireland director John Concannon, who was appointed as project director of the committee, and the then secretary general of the taoiseach’s department, Martin Fraser.
Another controversial issue from her time as protection minister that her campaign would not like to be raised is Humphreys’ failure to stem the flow of unpaid volunteers from Citizen Information Centres (CICs) around the country. This followed convulsions inside the CICs following the Citizens Information Board’s (CIB) decision in 2022 to downgrade volunteers to merely answering phones and admin duties. The CIB wanted to restructure the organisation from localised democracy to a more top-down entity.
Humphreys’ line was that this was a localised issue and not one of overall policy. After some very bad publicity, however, she called in CIB management and a report was commissioned that recommended the restoration of unpaid volunteers to front-line engagement. Since then the damage done to the service has not been remedied and some staff claim it now provides roughly half the service it previously did.
None of this, nor the outrage expressed by Clonan and other disability activists, has prevented Humphreys from mouthing pieties during the presidential campaign about her support for community volunteers.
Isn’t it time that Catherine took the gloves off and knocked the bejaysus out of Heather with some political facts?
