Here's a letter I sent to the Irish Times, in reply to a recent column by long-time political journalist and commentator Olivia O'Leary. In her article, Ms O'Leary made a moronic argument that Heather Humphries, the Fine Gael drone-candidate for the presidency, could bring her Protestant background to bear on Irish politics. Ms O'Leary seems to think that all Irish Prods are radicals and dissenters like Hubert Butler, and that nothing thicker than a cigarette paper separates the tradition of William Hazlitt and Thomas Paine from the 'tradition' of the Orange Order (of which Ms Humphries' husband is a member). Ms O'Leary, funnily enough, thereby homogenises and essentialises all Irish Protestants. How thick is that?
October 6, 2025
Dear Sir
I cannot understand how Olivia O'Leary, a veteran and intelligent political observer and analyst, could see Heather Humphries as representing a 'dissenting tradition' ('Heather Humphries would bring this one vital quality to the role of president, Irish Times, online Sunday October 5, 2025).
Ms Humphries is a TD and ex-minister for the most right-wing major party in the country. She is no doubt a warm and decent person and she is reckoned to have been a competent minister. But she has never been known for advanced or radical or particularly imaginative political ideas or positions.
Ms O'Leary links Ms Humphries to what Ms O'Leary thinks of as a 'dissenting Protestant tradition', of which Hubert Butler was, she reckons, an exemplar. Butler was indeed a remarkable writer and intellectual, cosmopolitan in experience while firmly tied to his Kilkenny roots. He was a liberal republican in ideology. Nothing in Ms Humphries' heritage links her to this. Her husband's history with the Orange Order links her to the opposite of Protestant dissent - to sectarianism and religious supremacism. When has Ms Humphries ever stood out in dissent on any major political or economic or cultural issue? Ms O'Leary makes Humphries sound like eighteenth century republicans like Thomas Paine or Wolfe Tone or William Drennan. Rather she should be identified with Lord Castlereagh.
C'mon, Olivia. Cop yourself on, and don't assume all Irish Protestants are the same.
yours sincerely
Conor McCarthy
