Fortune favours the bold – and delivers a large serving of cold comeuppance to the complacent. Catherine Connolly got very, very fortunate in her opponents but she was also bold enough to make her own luck.
At a personal level, Connolly thoroughly deserves her landslide victory. She started out as a political sole trader with a somewhat quixotic ambition to be president. She had no national base and, outside of Galway, only a vague public profile. Yet she kept her eyes unblinkingly on the prize, brought the five parties of the notoriously fractious left behind her and stayed serene under the relentless pressure of being the front-runner in a race whose recent history has made the Grand National look like a donkey derby.
In the end, she even made it look easy. Once Jim Gavin withdrew from the campaign on October 5th, it was pretty much all over bar not very much shouting and
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