Tánaiste urges middle Ireland to 'lend' vote to Heather Humphreys
Presidential candidate Heather Humphreys with minister for finance Paschal Donohoe at Jameson Distillery, Dublin. Picture: Stephen Collins/Collins Photos
Fine Gael leader Simon Harris has rejected the idea that his party's presidential candidate Heather Humphreys cannot win next week's election.
According to the most recent polling, Ms Humphreys trails independent Catherine Connolly by 18 points, but the Tánaiste said there were still a huge number of people undecided and that he would be asking them for to "lend" their vote to Ms Humphreys.
“We saw in the last opinion poll, there's lots of people who are looking at the presidential ballot, and they're saying, ‘I thought there would be more choice’," Mr Harris said on Friday.
"Now we're getting to a stage where this day week, people will have a binary choice to make between two female candidates, two good people, but two good people with a very different view of our country.
"I think a lot of people are thinking this through very carefully. And I think they might be saying, ‘Well, who is most closely aligned with my views?’
“And that's very much why we're in the space of asking middle Ireland to lend us their vote.”
Ms Humphreys, speaking later on RTÉ's , said that she would speak up as president, but that she did not regret going into government.
She denied that her campaign was lacking energy.
"My campaign is actually full of energy. I spent 10 years at the cabinet table, and I had given it everything. So it was time to let new ideas and fresh blood to come in. The role of president is a different role... I would give it 100% now, if I am fortunate enough to be elected."
Earlier in the day, Ms Connolly had said that she did not know she would be meeting a pro-Assad militia leader when she visited Syria in 2018.
Ms Connolly was pictured in the same group as Saed Abd Al-Aal, who led a pro-Assad armed group in Yarmouk.
In the presidential debate on RTÉ Radio 1 — the last radio debate of the election — Ms Connolly said that she was not aware of who he was and his presence was not an endorsement of the Bashar al-Assad regime.
The reported on Friday that one of the men Ms Connolly met in Syria was a leader of a group charged with killing Palestinians in a refugee camp.
Asked if she was aware of this, Ms Connolly said: “No, I wasn’t.
“That’s no endorsement of the regime. I’m on record for condemning the regime, I did not meet with [then-president Bashar] Assad.
"Our Taoiseach met with Assad," she added, referring to a 2009 meeting Micheál Martin had with the former dictator when he was foreign affairs minister.
Speaking at Farmleigh on Friday, Mr Martin hit back at the comparison.
“I think the context of Catherine Connolly’s visit was much different in terms of the people that she met, particularly those who persecuted Palestinians in the refugee camp. Clearly no advanced research went into that.”
Mr Harris said that Ms Connolly had “misrepresented and mischaracterised the Taoiseach’s visit”.
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