Catherine Connolly Inaugurated as President of Ireland

A president completely unburdened by the constitutional limitations of her role.

The Irish Left requires its saints, so they crowned her, as they always do with Irish Presidents, with ceremony and sincerity. In the ossuary grandeur of Dublin Castle, in a hall built on the bones of conquered kings, they gathered to watch the anointing of Saint Catherine of Aleppo.

The air hummed with decades of self-regard, that gentle Irish belief since we won our Independence that if the words sound solemn enough, they might conjure more adequate services for the less well off or a better country. The great and good gathered to watch the anointing. The Taoiseach, the Tánaiste, the judges in their funereal robes. A parliament of hypocritical ghouls, breathing the thin, recycled air of the powers of nationhood, here to witness the transubstantiation of a person into an icon. Catherine Connolly, the tenth to bear the title of Uachtarán na hÉireann - President of Ireland.

They stood, the dignitaries, as she repeated the sacred incantations read to her by Chief Justice Donal O’Donnell, the government anointed high priest of the secular liturgy. At half-past twelve, a threshold was crossed. The signature was scrawled; the spell was complete. Ireland had a new president, a new face for a tired body. She spoke of a “powerful mandate,” of a “new republic,” her words echoing in the cavernous stomach of the very establishment she once purported to stand against and proclained she was ashamed of. A home is a human right, she declared, a catechism for the left-wing faithful, a deeply ironic statement given her past employment as cog in the machine that helped to evict people from their homes. Her road to Damascus is via Aleppo, complete.