Humphreys and Connolly make pitch to voters in final presidential TV debate

The two candidates for the presidency of Ireland have made pitches to undecided voters in the final TV debate of the campaign.

Fine Gael candidate Heather Humphreys and her rival, Catherine Connolly, a left-wing independent TD, faced off in RTE’s Prime Time on Tuesday evening.

The set-piece aired three days before voters across the Republic of Ireland go to the polls on Friday to elect a successor to the outgoing president, Michael D Higgins.

Former cabinet minister Ms Humphreys opened the debate by condemning as “absolutely awful” the violence that flared on Tuesday evening elsewhere in Dublin outside a hotel that houses asylum seekers.

“We’re seeing members of An Garda Siochana (Irish police) have been attacked with stones and with such things,” she said.

“And can I just say that if anybody knows anybody at those riots tonight, please tell them to go home. This is not what we are as a country.”

Ms Connolly described the disorder outside the Citywest Hotel as “deeply disturbing” and “upsetting”.

The disturbances outside the hotel came after an alleged sexual assault in the vicinity in the early hours of Monday morning.

Ms Connolly said: “It’s deeply disturbing and I think it’s time for leadership from politicians and indeed, as president – but I’m not president tonight – to use our voices to show leadership and to actually analyse what’s happening here and stop conflating things.”

In respect of her presidential bid, Ms Humphreys said she would strive to “unite people” if elected to serve as Ireland’s head of state.

“I bring a lot of experience to the job,” she said.

“I’m a mother, I’m a grandmother and I have three young grandchildren, and when I look at them, I look and I want to see what kind of a country I want this to be.

“I want it to be an inclusive country. I wanted to be a respectful country, and I want it to be a country where they are safe. As, I said, I bring a lot of experience. I’m a centre-ground person. I’m a middle-of-the-road person, like most Irish people.

“I’m not to the far left, I’m not to the far right.

“So, I’m saying to the people at home tonight: please consider me to be your next president and I promise that I will not let you down. I do not promise perfection, but what I do promise is I promise honesty, I promise compassion and I promise service.”

Setting out her stall, Ms Connolly insisted she represented a “different type of Ireland” as she characterised Ms Humphreys as a “more of the same” candidate aligned with the outlook of recent governments.

“I look forward to serving as president of this country,” said the Galway TD.

“It will be an absolute privilege to do that. And I say to the people who are listening and watching that I will do so with humility and with pride, and I will serve the people of Ireland to the best of my ability.

“What makes me different? Well, all women find it difficult to say ‘I’, but I believe that I have the characteristics to make a president.

“I have the characteristics that reflect what people value in Ireland: care, compassion, solidarity, standing with those who have less, are less well-off than ourselves. I represent a different type of Ireland.

“Unfortunately, Heather is more of the same in relation to what the governments have done repeatedly over the years.

“I will be an absolutely independent president with an independent mind.”

During the debate, Ms Humphreys said that she wished Ms Connolly had clarified her past work as a barrister “much sooner”.

It was put to the independent candidate that she has not answered repeated questions about whether she represented banks in repossessing people’s homes.

Ms Connolly confirmed that she had represented credit institutions.

“My personal experience is that county registers and judges bent over backwards to avoid – that’s simply my personal experience – to avoid giving orders for repossessions,” Ms Connolly said.

“The people responsible are the successive governments that refused, except for a very brief period, to put a ban on evictions.”

Ms Humphreys said that she wished Ms Connolly had answered the question of whether she had represented banks “three weeks ago”.

The Fine Gael contender, who is from a Presbyterian background in Co Monaghan, denied that questioning Ms Connolly about her work as a barrister was part of “a smear campaign” as she claimed there were social media posts making “horrible” comments about her family, religion and tradition.

“I wish Catherine had said that much sooner, but she was standing up in Galway City Council, and she was castigating those same banks while at the same time she was representing them. And that, to me, is speaking out of both sides of your mouth,” she said.

Ms Humphreys was pressed on foreign affairs issues. She insisted she does not accept every EU stance and said it “should have acted sooner” in relation to Gaza.

She was speaking after being asked about her pro-European stance, which she said was “unlike Catherine” Connolly’s.

“I don’t accept everything, and nobody does accept everything. That’s what Europe is about. It’s about trying to get consensus, about trying to get agreement,” she said.

Ms Connolly said that “when I become president” after Friday’s poll, she said it would be “a different role for me” than as an outspoken TD.

She said that Ireland is a small country that should “speak truth to power”.

Asked about what she would say to President Donald Trump about the situation in Gaza if he were to visit Ireland, she said: “If it’s just a meet and greet, then I will meet and greet.

“If the discussion is genocide, that’s a completely different thing.”

She said she doubted that “Gaza will be on the agenda” during a meeting between an Irish president and the US president.

Ms Connolly was also pressed on a controversial trip she made to Syria nine years later in which she encountered pro-Assad figures, including a militia leader accused of starving Palestinian refugees.

She insisted she had not been naive to participate in the trip.

“There was no naivety on my part in relation to a dictatorship, the Syrian regime,” she said.

“I’ve never had any doubts about the Syrian dictatorship, unlike countries that supported it.”

On the questions raised by Lucia O’Farrell, who has long campaigned for her son Shane, who was hit and killed by a car driven by a man who should have been in jail, Ms Humphreys said she “genuinely” made representations on her behalf.

Ms O’Farrell has claimed Ms Humphreys did not do enough to support her family’s campaign.

Asked about the issue, the Fine Gael candidate said: “I did send her out the correspondence that I received from the ministers at the time. So I did my best, and as I said, I’m sorry that I wasn’t able to deliver what they wanted at the time.”

Ms Connolly was challenged about a woman with a gun conviction she hired.

She insisted the woman could not “walk around the Dail on her own”.

Ms Humphreys has said “you can’t have rehabilitation without accountability” in relation to the hiring of the woman, an issue which has been raised several times during the campaign.

“What we need to know is, why did this woman get access to our national parliament, to Dail Eireann, without the necessary Garda clearance?” she asked.

“That is a serious risk. It was a serious risk, in my view, to our national parliament.”

Ms Connolly said that Ms Humphreys had previously said it was common to sign someone in for three weeks while Garda clearance is pending.

“We’re now accepting that it’s a normal procedure while the application is ongoing, and so we now have accepted that nobody raised that this woman was a risk,” she said.

“TDs sign in people all the time. I signed her in and signed her out.

“She can’t walk around the Dail on her own. She gets a pass every single day. She has to be accompanied by me going around. She has to be in my office. She cannot walk around the Dail.”

Ms Humphreys was later asked about her support for fox hunting and whether she believed it was cruelty to animals.

“Well, fox hunting, among other things, is a rural pursuit, and I support rural pursuits, and people who engage in them,” she told the RTE debate.

“I don’t fox hunt. I’ve never been at a fox hunt, but that’s part of our culture, it’s part of our heritage, and has been there for many, many years. And I support it.”

She added: “Cruelty to animals in my book is somewhat different to fox hunting. It’s a rural pursuit and there’s a lot of foxes around, as we know, and people go hunting the foxes and once the controls are in place, and once the rules are abided by, I support rural pursuits.”

Ms Connolly said she had “huge difficulty with fox hunting for the sake of it”.

“Although I do understand the context of it, I have great difficulty (with fox hunting), and I’ve expressed my opinions in the Dail in relation to it,” she said.

“However, foxes are not a protected species, and that’s a gap. They’re also a threat in terms of wildlife, in terms of sheep and so on.

“So I think we need to look at it in a slightly different, a broader lens as to what how do we control foxes in a humane way? How do we do that in terms of ecology and in terms of animal welfare.”

Asked about the Irish language, Ms Humphreys said although she does not speak it fluently, she had been “brushing up” her skills before the “throes of Brexit”, and said she would return to learning Irish in Donegal.

She said the similarities between Ulster Irish and Scottish Gaelic would be emphasised as a “unifying force” if she was president.

“If I was elected President, I would try to bring people together. I would try to say to them that you see in history where the clergyman came from Scotland, and they came into Ulster and they preached (in) Gaeilge or (in) Scottish Gaelic, and there’s a unifying force there.”

Ms Connolly, a fluent Irish speaker, said she had never criticised anyone for not using the Irish language.

“I myself learned it, I went back after school, and it was an absolute privilege to be able to do that in Galway and go back and learn it. Indeed, I’m still learning.”