Connolly’s Brexit views come into focus as election nears

Catherine Connolly ‘spoke the language of Nigel Farage’ on Brexit and has ‘cynically pivoted’ her position on Europe, her Áras opponent Heather Humphreys said yesterday.

Fine Gael’s Presidential candidate said Ms Connolly showed ‘bad judgement’ when she suggested the Remain campaign was guilty of bullying British voters.

In an interview that resurfaced this week after almost ten years, Ms Connolly said she was ‘absolutely full of admiration for the English people who have stood up’ to the pro-EU campaign. She told TV3’s Vincent Browne the Brexit vote had ‘exposed’ the EU and it was ‘open for us to grab that opportunity’.

Ms Connolly insisted this week she was a ‘committed European‘.

At a speech in Dublin yesterday on the subject of the Irish Presidency And The European Union, Ms Humphreys said Ireland needed a President who was ‘not ashamed to be European’ and did not believe the European Union was ‘a threat to peace’.

She added Europe was ‘not the enemy’ but rather ‘the home of our greatest allies and friends’.

Some 82% of voters support Ireland’s continued EU membership, according to an Amárach Research poll this year.

Catherine Connolly. (RollingNews.ie)

Ms Connolly has come under fire for her comments on European issues and controversially drew parallels last month between 1930s Nazi Germany and the current German government.

During a talk at University College Dublin’s Politics Society, Ms Connolly said military spending was being championed to boost European economies and there were ‘parallels’ with Germany in the 1930s, when the Nazis came to power.

‘We’re increasing our spend all over Europe on the military industrial complex. They’re absolutely championing the cause of the military industrial complex in Germany, as a booster for the economy,’ she said.

‘Seems to me, there are some parallels with the ’30s. I don’t wish to depress you. There is hope. And we have voices. And we can use them.’

In response, Germany’s ambassador to Ireland denied his country was pursuing rearmament and said increased military spending was necessary after Russia’s ‘aggression’ in Ukraine and incursions into Polish and Estonian airspace.

David Gill said: ‘Like in Ireland, we in Germany believe that people of every country have the right to live in peace and security.

‘The German position is that Europe has a shared responsibility to stand against those who threaten peace.’

Yesterday Ms Humphreys said she ‘applauded Germany and France for standing up for Ukraine’ and was ‘disappointed and worried when the UK voted to leave the EU’. She said she had worked to ‘protect our peace process and our place in the EU’ while others ‘took to their feet in the Dáil to attack Brussels and support Brexiteers’.

Heather Humphreys. (RollingNews.ie)

In 2018, during a visit to the Dáil by then-European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker, Ms Connolly said she ‘condemned the European Union’ for its approach to ‘militarisation and refugees’.

She said: ‘If we are to learn anything about Brexit, which certainly poses an enormous challenge for this country but a positive one with solutions, it is to realise that many of the countries in Europe, including Ireland, are saying that they are unhappy with the way democracy is happening in Europe.’

She said it was a ‘scandal’ that the EU was ‘becoming a fortress Europe’ by ‘going down the militarisation route’.

Ms Connolly this week defended her decision to vote against the Lisbon and Nice treaties, saying: ‘It’s indicating the concerns that I and lots of people had. In voting “no” we had to vote a second time on Nice and on Lisbon and we were given absolute, solemn promises in relation to our neutrality that seem to mean nothing at the moment.’

Ms Connolly accused Fine Gael of ‘engendering fear’ and running a ‘negative campaign’ against her foreign policy. Ms Connolly has been repeatedly accused of taking an ultra-hard-left stance against the EU and the US.

* This article was originally published on Extra.ie.