Landslide win for Irish leftist presidential candidate; a new book recommendation

There’s a new book out on foreign lobbying and corruption in Washington that I highly recommend, called Devils’ Advocates: The Hidden Story of Rudy Giuliani, Hunter Biden, and the Washington Insiders on the Payrolls of Corrupt Foreign Interests.

We interviewed the author, Ken Vogel, this weekend for Breaking Points.

On Friday, Irish voters went to the polls to choose the country’s next president. As it happens, this summer, I was in Ireland and had the opportunity to interview a lawmaker who had just launched a longshot bid for the presidency, Catherine Connolly. Along with my Drop Site colleague Abubaker Abed — who had only left Gaza for the first time weeks earlier — and The Ditch’s Paulie Doyle, we gathered in a packed and sweltering pub in Dublin (not much air conditioning over there!) for a long conversation mostly focused on Ireland’s conflicted relationship to Israel and Palestine; much of the country’s population is supportive of the Palestinians and their struggle for independence; the government gives lip service to the question, while mostly going along with broader European policy.

Connolly needed a lot of things to fall into place, and one by one, they all did. The ferocity with which she stood up for Palestinian dignity drew her heaps of criticism throughout the campaign from the country’s media and political call, but clearly helped her with the public, who also approved of her social democratic politics. Her main opponent has conceded, and Connolly has won in a landslide. The Irish president is a fairly ceremonial position, though it does have some powers.

Check out our interview here.

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