Catherine Connolly is a Thundering Disgrace

Connolly's historical amoralism.

The Irish Times had a bombshell of a headline today for its readers. Irish presidential candidate “Catherine Connolly compares German arms build-up with 1930s”

In a moment that can only be described as a spectacular misfire of historical judgment, Catherine Connolly has stepped into the ring and landed a punch that somehow managed to confuse the ghost of 1930s Nazi Germany with the reality of 2025. Speaking at a UCD politics society gathering—which naturally leaked her remarks—Connolly found it prudent to drag modern-day Germany into some Orwellian alternate timeline where rearming to fend off current Russian fascist adventurism somehow mirrors the chilling militarism of Nazi-era Europe. To suggest that Germany’s current efforts to bolster its defences are even remotely akin to the warmongering ambitions of the Third Reich reads less like sober political analysis and more like a far-left pro-Russian history book tossed in the wash with a conspiracy theory pamphlet. Russia’s brutish aggression has forced Europe’s hand, requiring a defensive posture that is reactive, measured (debatable) and utterly detached from anything resembling European fascist revivalism. And yet, here we have Connolly, offering a mad and bad conflation that has left diplomatic circles in Dublin blinking in disbelief, and Irish politicians scrambling to untangle a historical mess that no one asked for.

A creeping malaise has infected certain corners of Irish politics—a tendency to mistake moral grandstanding for strategic clarity, and to offer a curious indulgence to autocratic pro-Russian revisionists in the East. The symptoms? Eloquent speeches about “neutrality,” long sighs over military expenditures, and a curious silence about the fact that, at this very moment, the Russian Federation under Putin is committing war crimes in Ukraine and is trying to redraw the map of Europe militarily.

At a time when Ukraine burns, the Baltics and Poland nervously count their ammunition, Europe reawakens to the danger on its doorstep, and Catherine Conolly and her ilk persist in treating Russian aggression as a diplomatic misunderstanding rather than an act of war. They warn that bolstering European defence is tantamount to “normalising war,” as if self-preservation were the true sin, not fascist Russian conquest. The symptoms of Connolly's historical illiteracy are everywhere: a studied neutrality, the tincture of pious detachment, and the conviction that if only we all stopped spending so much time troubling Putin’s tender feelings—if only we stopped defending ourselves so ostentatiously!—the world would right itself, and the Germans could go back to baking sourdough. Here, “defending Europe” is code for “selling out our principles”; “collective security” is reduced to a Russian laundered phrasebook of arms dealers and Wall Street ghouls. They recast collective security in the face of persistent Russian aggression as the hobby of military-industrial lobbyists, hinting darkly that, behind every €650 billion spent, the 4th Reich is waiting in the wings.

This is not mere naivety from Catherine Connolly; it’s a kind of secondhand Kremlinism, an involuntary recitation of narrative lines derived entirely from Russian state TV, if Russian state TV were re-edited by the Galway Socialists and issued as a teach-yourself-peace course to first-year political science students. When someone warns that raising European defence budgets is “normalising war,” what they actually mean is that resisting an invading army is just so, well, gauche—something for Americans, not civilised “end of history” Western Europeans. The polite pacifist east of Dún Laoghaire all agree: it is always better to focus on Western hypocrisy, never on Russian fascist imperialism.

Fast-forward to the recent row over European and Connolly’s observations about European defence budgets, revived with the full, ghastly force of Godwin’s Law by today’s clerics of appeasement. Europe, they imply, is on the verge of transforming itself once more into the Third Reich—because Europe, terrified by actual Russian tanks, is now budgeting for more tanks. Never mind what century we’re in, never mind what ideology or government Germany actually has. History isn’t something you reckon with; it’s a blunt instrument with which to batter the present.

Lost in this entire melodrama is actual compassion, or, for that matter, reality. While political appeasers sermonise about the sacred neutral soul of Ireland, Ukrainians bleed for a principle—the principle that imperium must meet resistance, that some aggression truly deserves a bullet and not a debate. But Catherine Connolly’s response is to see “the military industrial complex” everywhere, a bogeyman dragged out of the 1980s and dusted off for a world far too complicated for her slogans to parse; the real horror, in their mind, is that some countries are not willing to give peace a chance in the face of Russian aggression.

Pity that their moral purism is a luxury purchased with Ukrainian suffering. You don’t have to worry about a Russian mechanised column bombarding Galway; neutrality is a fine notion when the blood is on someone else’s hands, in someone else’s street, murdering someone else’s children. But these proponents of “balance” persist, insisting that if all sides could only be brought to heel, preferably the European-funded side. To “normalise” bothsidesism is to sell out reality itself for the quick fix of a clever line and the applause of a room that doesn’t have to worry about the next air raid or drone strike. It’s not their children being murdered by Russia.

So, who is it, exactly, threatening Europe’s peace in 2025? Is it the Bundeswehr’s accountants, the Polish quartermasters, or the soft-handed Eurocrat ordering another round of ammunition for protection? Or could it be the country massing divisions on its neighbour’s border, annexing territory, shutting down airports with drones, or launching cyber attacks even against neutral Ireland and openly promising more?

The Russian ambassador to Ireland has even threatened Ireland

Russian Ambassador to Ireland, Filatov, with all the dignity of a drug dealer, declared Ireland an “accomplice” in robbery because Europe has finally begun to chip away at the vast ill-got hoard of frozen Russian assets, fattened from oil money and the slow industrial suffocation of captive states. What is theft, anyway, to a country that stole Chechnya twice, that stole Crimea in broad daylight, that is still gnawing through the ribs of Ukraine in its never‑ending appetite for empire? Russia, with its imperialism built on the ruins of apartment blocks, civilians bombed in their kitchens, cities razed until they turn into dust patterns visible from space, dares to howl about criminality. They burned Grozny to the ground and called it pacification. They ship whole families into frozen exile and call it security. They torch theatres, hospitals, schools beneath artillery fire, but in their diplomatic language, this is not war crimes—it is “a special operation.” There is a grotesque irony here. A Russian state built on centuries of imperial expansion, gulags, and looted territories, now indignantly howling because Europe is belatedly daring to hold it to account.

The only honest politics is the politics that names the threat and resists it. Catherine Connolly and her supporters, with their nostalgia for neutrality and navel-gazing, are simply congratulating themselves on their moral purity while history and fascist violence are once again rolling across the plains of Europe in the name of Mother Russia. Irish presidential candidate Connolly fiddles while historical accuracy burns.

(Google thundering disgrace, Irish President, I don’t go there lightly)