The left wins the presidential election in Ireland by a landslide
Original article by Vijay Prashad republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.
Both Catherine Connolly and Michael D are unabashedly left-wing, absorbed by the struggle for people to live with dignity in Ireland itself and gripped by severe global challenges, particularly those posed by US imperialism.
Catherine Connolly (born 1957) only became involved in active politics in 1999. Michael D. Higgins, the outgoing president of Ireland (2011-2025), encouraged Connolly to join the Labour Party and stand for election. Both Connolly and Higgins (known in Ireland as Michael D) come from Galway, a city on the west coast of Ireland. Connolly was born there, the ninth of fourteen children — seven girls and seven boys — in a working-class family. Her mother died when Catherine was only nine, and her father, a home builder, relied on his older children to care for the younger ones. In this household, Catherine Connolly developed a keen sense of service and discipline, which included involvement in local Catholic charities such as the Legion of Mary and the Order of Malta. This was, as she describes it, Connolly’s road to “her socialism”.
As a lawyer in Galway with a young family (two boys), Connolly ran for and won a seat on the Galway City Council in 1999, later becoming mayor of Galway from 2004 to 2005. Michael D had been mayor from 1990 to 1991. Just as she followed him to City Hall, Connolly has now followed Michael D to the presidency of Ireland.
Ireland is a country divided by British colonialism: most of the population lives in the Republic of Ireland (population 5.2 million), while a part of the island’s population lives in the northern counties still controlled by the United Kingdom (population 1.5 million). There are between 50 million and 80 million people around the world, mostly in the Americas, who claim Irish descent (the most famous person, now featured on an Irish stamp, was Che Guevara). Half the population in the six northern counties have Irish citizenship (while there are nearly three million diaspora Irish with citizenship), making them eligible to vote for the president.
While the president strictly speaking represents the Republic — and even then, in a largely ceremonial role — the post has been shaped by its previous nine holders as a pulpit from which to speak for all of Ireland. Micheal D, a poet as well as a politician, has transformed the post, shaping it into a moral lectern from which to advocate for Ireland’s role in the world based on larger values. This is a post that Catherine Connolly will undoubtedly enjoy.
Both Catherine Connolly and Michael D are unabashedly left-wing, absorbed by the struggle for people to live with dignity in Ireland itself and gripped by severe global challenges, particularly those posed by US imperialism. Connolly said she first entered politics twenty-six years ago because of the housing crisis, the “defining social crisis of our time”. This remains the most important problem for young people in Ireland, many of whom find it impossible to rent decent accommodation near their places of work.
In the 1990s, Ireland’s economy boomed through the liberalization of finance, earning the country the nickname “Celtic Tiger” (a phrase first used by a Morgan Stanley analyst). A low corporate tax rate and membership in the European Union allowed the country to attract tech money and real estate investment. This drove up housing prices, which have not collapsed despite the bust of the Celtic Tiger after the 2008 credit crisis (Ireland suffered a similar fate as Iceland, but with less prison time for its own banking elite). It is estimated that the country suffers a housing shortage of a quarter of a million units, that a new teacher in Dublin would have to use their entire salary to pay rent for a modest apartment, and that while wages rose at 27% between 2012 and 2022, property prices increased by 75%. Connolly spent most of her campaign focused on the direct problems faced by the Irish people, although the presidency can only lift issues into the public debate and advise the elected government.
When I visited Michael D in the presidential residence in 2014, he was gripped by the waste of human resources on war and war-making to the exclusion of solving problems of human life. He was interested in why so much of social wealth was being spent on warfare, when it was clear that war-making (such as with the US War on Terror) merely created more problems than it solved. We discussed the issue of Irish neutrality and how Ireland had slipped from that core principle by allowing the US permission to land warplanes and CIA planes at Shannon airport, the closest airport to Galway. Connolly will follow Michael D into the presidential office with this same concern. She has made vital statements not only against US war-making, but against the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians. In June, Connolly called Israel a “terrorist state”. It is likely that these sorts of statements will continue to be made from Dublin.
Since Éamon de Valera won the prime ministership in 1932 as the leader of Fianna Fáil (the Republican Party), the country has been led back and forth by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael (the Irish Party). Both are now parties of the right (with close links to the political elite in the United States) and have, since 2020, been in a grand alliance for the prime ministership. Connolly ran against Fine Gael’s Heather Humphreys, who put up a very poor show.
Though running as “independent”, Connolly was backed by the broad left: 100% Redress, the Communist Party of Ireland, the Green Party, the Labour Party, People Before Profit, Sinn Féin, the Social Democratic Party, and the Workers Party, as well as a raft of organizations and movements. The backing of Sinn Féin, the second largest party in parliament, was crucial; the party brings to bear the weight of the republican tradition, which is focused on the unification of Ireland, and the weight of the party’s working-class roots in the cities where the housing question is paramount.
While Connolly has said that she will represent the entire country, she will be largely the voice of the working-class and the oppressed — not the Irish landlords and bankers. Nor will she be kind to US imperialism and its allies.
Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are On Cuba: Reflections on 70 Years of Revolution and Struggle (with Noam Chomsky), Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism, and (also with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of US Power. Chelwa and Prashad will publish How the International Monetary Fund is Suffocating Africa later this year with Inkani Books.
This article was written by Globetrotter.
Though running as “independent”, Connolly was backed by the broad left: 100% Redress, the Communist Party of Ireland, the Green Party, the Labour Party, People Before Profit, Sinn Féin, the Social Democratic Party, and the Workers Party, as well as a raft of organizations and movements.
Climate change is becoming an insurance crisis
Meilan Yan, Loughborough University and Qiuhua Liang, Loughborough University
Imagine waking up to find your living room underwater for the second time in five years. You try to claim insurance, only to be told your property is now uninsurable. Premiums have tripled. Your mortgage lender is concerned. And your biggest asset, your home, is rapidly losing value.
This isn’t just a personal disaster. It’s a warning sign of a much broader crisis.
The risks associated with climate change are breaking the insurance industry. In the past decade alone, flood frequency has increased fourfold in the tropics and 2.5 times in mid-latitude regions). In the UK, at least one in six people already live with flood risk, heavy-rainfall extremes are increasing, and expected annual damages could rise by 27% by the 2050s.
Insurance claims from extreme weather are surging. The Association of British Insurers (the UK insurance and long-term savings trade body) reports a record £585 million in home weather-damage payouts for 2024.
Climate change is driving more frequent and severe events, pushing traditional insurance models to their limits. Insurers are left with little choice but to raise premiums sharply or withdraw coverage entirely. When insurance becomes unaffordable or unavailable, households are exposed, property values fall, mortgages become harder to secure, and the risk of a wider financial crisis grows.
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Our research into the insurance industry shows that UK resilience is falling behind. Policymakers in the UK tried to avert an insurance crisis by launching Flood Re in 2016, a joint scheme between government and insurers designed to keep insurance affordable for households in high-risk areas. It was meant as a temporary bridge, due to close in 2039 once stronger flood defences and better land-use planning are in place.
But progress has been painfully slow. In January 2024, the House of Commons public accounts committee reported that the government’s £5.2 billion flood defence programme is 40% behind schedule and expected to protect just 200,000 properties by 2027 — far short of its original 336,000 target.
By 2025, Flood Re has been under mounting strain. Reinsurance costs had have risen by £100 million in just three years, and policy uptakes have jumped by 20% in a single year – both signs that private insurers were retreating from high-risk markets.
In July 2025, Flood Re’s CEO, Perry Thomas, warned that the UK’s overall flood resilience have worsened since the scheme’s launch, as mortgage lenders, housebuilders, and successive governments have “failed to pull their weight”.
When insurance becomes unaffordable or unavailable, households are left exposed and property values decline, making mortgages harder to obtain. This erosion of coverage threatens the wider financial system: banks rely on insured property as collateral, but without cover, that collateral rapidly loses value.
If the government fails to meet its climate adaptation targets, as many as 3 million UK homes could become effectively worthless within 30 years.
For the banking sector, this creates the risk of homes becoming stranded assets — uninsurable, unmortgageable and falling in value — leading to rising defaults and mounting losses. Unless lenders adopt climate-adjusted risk models that integrate physical hazards such as flooding, storms and heatwaves, they risk underestimating the true exposure of their mortgage portfolios.
If these climate-risk-exposed mortgages are mispriced and then bundled into mortgage-backed securities and sold to investors, the resulting shock could cascade through credit markets – like the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, when large volumes of high-risk home loans to borrowers with poor or limited credit histories were repackaged and sold as safe investments. The difference is that this time the crash would be driven by physical climate damage rather than purely financial mismanagement.
A one-way street
Traditional financial crises follow cycles of growth, downturn and recovery, but climate risk moves in only one direction. Rising global temperatures are driving more frequent and severe floods and storms. Without timely adaptation, the damage compounds, eroding property values, undermining insurance and threatening financial stability.
Historical insurance models treated extreme weather as rare “tail risks,” but these events are now more frequent, severe, and interconnected. The tail is becoming “fat,” and shocks ripple across sectors and regions. In short, risk is evolving and insurance frameworks must evolve with it.
Flooding is no longer just an environmental issue. It is a systemic financial threat. Insurers, regulators and lenders must adopt forward-looking models that translate physical climate risks into financial metrics. These models influence market behaviour by shaping how capital is allocated, assets are valued, and risks are priced.
This, in turn, guides investment, planning and adaptation — the process of adjusting systems, infrastructure and practices to withstand and recover from climate impacts.
Effective adaptation measures, such as upgraded flood defences, reduce the future risk of climate-related damage. It’s a feedback loop: better modelling enables smarter adaptation, which in turn strengthens financial stability.
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Meilan Yan, Senior Lecturer in Financial Economics, Loughborough University and Qiuhua Liang, Professor of Water Engineering, Loughborough University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Witch memorials are quietly spreading across Europe
Jan Machielsen, Cardiff University and Paul Webster, Cardiff University
Across Europe, campaigns for national witch memorials are gathering pace. In the Netherlands, a charity recently announced it had selected the design for a monument in Roermond, the site of the country’s worst witch-hunt.
In Scotland, campaigners Claire Mitchell and Zoe Venditozzi published a manifesto, How To Kill A Witch, to continue pressure on the Scottish government for a state-funded monument. Their Witches of Scotland campaign had won an early victory in 2022 when first minister Nicola Sturgeon issued an official apology.
Across early modern Europe (1450-1750), between 40,000 and 50,000 people were executed as witches. Though the age and gender of the accused varied from place to place, roughly 75% to 80% of all victims were women.
Within Britain and Ireland, Scotland saw some of the fiercest witch-hunting. Historians have identified more than 3,800 accusations (84% women), leading to perhaps as many as 2,500 executions.
Despite these stark figures, there are still no official national witch memorials anywhere in Europe, although the Steilneset memorial in northern Norway, created in 2011, comes close.
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The lack of such national memorials does not mean the witch hunt has been forgotten. Its memory has long offered moral lessons for the present.
On the other side of the Atlantic, descendants of those caught up in the infamous 1692 Salem witch trials were among the earliest to commemorate the victims. A cenotaph erected in 1885 by descendants of Rebecca Nurse, one of the Salem accused, may well have been the first.
In Europe, there are similar local memorials. A witches’ well installed outside Edinburgh Castle in 1894 was probably the earliest such memorial in Europe, but most local attempts at memorialisation have been much more recent.
Our project – supported by Cardiff University’s On Campus student internship scheme – mapped memorials around the world and created an inventory of 134 plaques, memorials, sites and museums, which skews heavily towards the 21st century. Of the sites that can be securely dated, nearly half were unveiled during the past decade.
#MeToo, politics and wartime bears
This growth in grassroots interest has several origins. It partly stems from renewed concern at present-day violence, both against women in general but also against suspected witches in the global south. Our research threw up one memorial in the Indian state of Odisha to deter modern vigilantism.
It also coincides with the popularisation of witch-hunting as a political metaphor and the #MeToo movement. The latter not only encouraged women to call out misogyny, in the process it also highlighted how few statues of non-royal women exist.
It was the sight of a statue of Wojtek, a Polish bear and second world war mascot in Edinburgh’s Princes Street Gardens, that inspired one of the Witches of Scotland campaigners. If a bear could be commemorated, why not any of the thousands of women executed as witches?
Overlaying witch memorials with the geography of the early modern witch-hunt reveals further striking patterns. With 29 local memorials, Scotland accounts for the largest share, followed by Germany with 24 – both epicentres of the early modern witch-hunt.
By contrast, France is virtually absent from our data. There is no memorial in the former Duchy of Lorraine, another notable witch-hunting hotspot, nor any marker in Paris of the sensational and infamous “affair of the poisons” that shook Louis XIV’s court.
Whether to remember is also a political choice. Memorials in the Basque country present witch-hunting as foreign (French and Spanish) impositions, while glossing over the role played by local officials and folkloric beliefs.
Catalonia saw relatively few trials but its nationalist politicians have spearheaded motions labelling the witch-hunt “institutionalised femicide”. In this way, calls for a memorial have become something of a vehicle for progressive nationalism.
How to remember can be fraught. Accusations of kitsch, commercialism and profit haunt museums in particular. Salem’s Witch Museum was once named the world’s second biggest tourist trap.
Perhaps for this reason, many communities have settled for straightforward plaques listing those executed for alleged witchcraft. In a similar spirit, streets in Catalonia and Scotland have been renamed in their memory as well.
Going further raises thorny questions of artistic licence and historical representation. Visual depictions risk perpetuating stereotypes about warts, noses and pointy hats.
On the other hand, portraying witches as alluring ignores a substantial body of research linking witchcraft fears to young mothers’ anxieties about the postmenopausal body. For those reasons, a monument on a Belgian roundabout of a naked witch “flying to freedom” on her broomstick surrounded by traffic sparked much debate among our project team.
Acts of remembering inevitably entail acts of forgetting, and there are pitfalls here to be avoided. Stronger, more centralised states saw less witch-hunting, not more. State and church-issued pardons and apologies may thus downplay the role that communities played in witch persecutions, including other women.
Remembering is never simple. Yet, as one of history’s most infamous forms of demonisation, the early modern witch-hunt will always teach us how easy it is to blame, and how difficult it is to understand.
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Jan Machielsen, Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History, History, Archaeology and Religion, Cardiff University and Paul Webster, Lecturer in Medieval History and Co-Ordinator, Exploring the Past Pathway, Cardiff University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Could tactical voting block Reform in future elections? Lessons from the Caerphilly byelection
Plaid Cymru’s Lindsay Whittle celebrates winning Caerphilly’s byelection. Andrew Matthews/PA Images
Thomas Lockwood, York St John University
Plaid Cymru’s overwhelming victory in the recent Caerphilly Senedd byelection shattered over a century of political tradition. Lindsay Whittle took the seat with 15,691 votes. Labour, which had held the seat since it was created, came away with just 3,713 votes.
Reform came second to Plaid, with 12,113 votes. And while this was an impressive performance, the fact that it failed to win Caerphilly even after vast amounts of time and money spent on the campaign has led to speculation that tactical voting played a part in this byelection.
A big clue that tactical voting was at work in Caerphilly was the recorded turnout. Typically, byelections in Wales have been low-key affairs. Turnouts are low and incumbents generally win. The national average for a Senedd vote in a constituency has never tipped over 50%. In Caerphilly, turnout climbed from 44% in the 2021 election to 50.4% in this byelection.
And while local voters clearly backed Plaid Cymru for plenty of reasons, the extremely low vote count for other parties does suggest at least some lent their vote to Plaid to keep out Reform. The Conservative vote collapsed to fewer than 700 votes and the Lib Dems and Greens, so often the recipients of tactical votes themselves, each took just 1.5% of the votes in Caerphilly.
Anecdotes from the vote count support this. The BBC recounted “extraordinary stories” of habitual supporters of the Conservatives, a pro-union party, voting Plaid to block Reform.
The increased turnout and Plaid’s 27.4% swing both suggest a mobilisation, triggered by polling and a wider national narrative which persuasively contends that Reform is ahead of other parties. Does the result therefore imply that Reform can be beaten elsewhere if voters take the right approach to tactical voting?
The limits of Reform’s surge
Reform entered the Caerphilly race with no prior foothold in the constituency. The party mobilised heavily and, it had seemed, effectively. Nigel Farage and other senior Reform figures made multiple visits to the area to campaign for their candidate, Llŷr Powell. Pre-election polls, including one by Survation which had Reform leading Plaid by 42% to 38%, raised expectations of a breakthrough.
And it is true that Reform’s ultimate 36% vote share reflects its growing appeal among disaffected working-class voters. It did capitalise on the same anti-establishment sentiment that has seen the party top UK-wide polls for much of the past year.
Yet, the result also exposes Reform’s vulnerabilities. As with the Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse byelection for the Scottish parliament earlier in the summer, Reform failed to convert intensive campaigning into victory.
The role and reach of tactical voting
Underneath the hype, Farage is unpopular. Polls suggest as many as 60% of voters are opposed to him being prime minister. That presents an opportunity for opponents to unite behind a more broadly acceptable candidate.
In this volatile political era, where voters show little loyalty to tradition, smaller parties like Plaid Cymru, the SNP, Greens and even Pro-Gaza independents could frame themselves as the “real alternative” to Reform. Depending on local dynamics, they could attempt to draw tactical support.
It should be noted, however, that tactical voting cuts both ways. While it denied Reform a victory in Caerphilly, the party could attract tactical support from Conservative voters eager to oust Labour governments.
In England, without equivalents to Plaid or the SNP to siphon anti-establishment sentiment, Reform may consolidate its grip on working-class disillusionment. This trend was evident in Labour’s collapse in the Runcorn and Helsby Westminster byelection in May 2025, which enabled Reform to take the seat.
In Caerphilly, Labour’s vote fell amid grievances including the slow pace of change to improve living standards, policy u-turns and a fatigue with Welsh Labour, which has been in power in the Senedd since its creation in 1999.
Such grievances can be felt across the UK more broadly – with winter-fuel policy u-turns, and a general dissatisfaction with how long it is taking Labour to deliver on promises to improve living standards. Concern about immigration is also used to punish Labour in both the regular voting intention polls and at the ballot box in council byelections.
An anti-Reform majority does exist – and it has shown up in several contests, including in races Reform has ultimately won but on less than 50% of the vote. Harnessing this anti-Reform majority, however, requires a level of co-ordination rarely seen in the UK’s electoral history.
Unlike the 1997 anti-Conservative wave, there is no single opposition brand. Instead, the anti-Reform vote is split across Labour, Liberal Democrats, Greens, nationalists and independents – and, arguably, the Conservatives too.
In Caerphilly, we saw this fragmentation briefly turn into coalescence. This implies that a clear polling trigger, showing Reform ahead in a seat, can focus the minds of voters and drive tactical thinking. It also helped that these voters were offered a Plaid candidate with deep community roots and a strong, progressive message.
What is potentially harder in a general election is the presentation of a local contest as extremely high stakes in the media. Caerphilly drew unprecedented attention precisely because it was being framed as a test case for Reform in Wales, which may explain the level of anti-Reform vote.
In a multi-polar UK, the anti-Reform majority is real – but not pro-any one party by default. Importantly, it is anti-populist, anti-incumbent and regionally variable. Nearly all of the mainstream parties on the centre ground and left wing of politics are claiming to be the real alternative to Reform.
Reform’s path to power lies in building a lead that is too large for tactical voting to overcome, or in electoral systems which reward vote share over seat efficiency. This is why it remains hopeful of success in May 2026 in Wales, where the election is being held under a proportional voting system.
As the UK heads towards the 2026 devolved elections and a likely 2029-30 general election, Caerphilly offers a blueprint for resistance to Reform’s national surge. It also offers a warning for the other parties: stopping Reform is not the same as winning.
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Thomas Lockwood, PhD Researcher in Politics, York St John University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
