7 days ago
FactFind: What do we know about Catherine Connolly's visit to Syria in 2018?
A VISIT TO Syria by Catherine Connolly has been referenced frequently since she became the first candidate to publicly declare this week that she would run in the upcoming presidential election.
The trip, which involved visits to areas controlled by the since-toppled Assad regime as a civil war still raged across Syria, has been cited as a potential source of controversy.
Irish-Syrian are reported to have urged the Labour Party not to back Connolly's attempt to get on the ballot, the Irish Times
reported today
.
While facts about the trip had been scant, Connolly answered questions from reporters about the trip at her campaign launch on Wednesday.
What exactly did she say, does it tally with what we had already known, and why does it have the potential to become controversial?
The facts
Connolly went to Syria in June 2018, along with TDs Clare Daly, Mick Wallace, and Maureen O'Sullivan.
Images of the politicians were posted on the social media channels of Syrian organisations and news outlets on 27 June that year.
These images indicated that they visited the city of Aleppo, as well as the ruins of Yarmouk, a Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus that was destroyed during the civil war.
Both those areas were controlled by the Assad regime during the time of the delegation's visit.
Bashar al-Assad subsequently
fled to Russia
in late 2024, collapsing the Syrian government and ending his family's 50-year rule over the country.
The new Syrian government, run by a coalition of rebels led by Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), has promised a new
constitution and elections
, though their first months of rule have been
marred by violence
.
Speaking in the Dáil
in July 2018, Mick Wallace said that 'a group of Independents 4 Change travelled to Syria last week'.
(Connolly and O'Sullivan were in a technical group with Independents 4 Change, though were not members of the political party).
Daly then confirmed 'we spent the past week with some of our colleagues in Syria'.
Both TDs mentioned the visit to Aleppo, though neither mentioned Connolly by name. Nor was Connolly mentioned by name in Syrian social media posts, though she can be seen in photos taken at Aleppo.
Catherine Connolly, Clare Daly, and Mick Wallace in Aleppo in 2018.
In
an interview
with the Dublin Gazette published on 12 July, Daly is described as visiting Syria with 'other Independent TDs – Mick Wallace, Maureen O'Sullivan and Catherine Connolly – along with around 15 other people, including some who had been involved in the Irish Palestine Solidarity campaign'.
Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Connolly confirmed that she was one of four TDs who went on the trip, along with 'a number of community activists'.
Who was involved
Although the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign is frequently mentioned in news reports referencing the trip, it did not officially have any involvement.
In a statement to
The Journal
, the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign said: 'The Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign (IPSC) did not organise, endorse, or participate in, any trip to Syria and has no specific knowledge regarding the trip in question.
'The IPSC does not arrange fact-finding delegations to any states, nor does it engage in trips sponsored by states or quasi-state actors. We were not contacted or invited on this, or any other trip to Syria, and we have never had any contact with the former or current Syrian governments, nor with anyone acting on behalf of either.'
In an email to
The Journal
, a spokesperson for the campaign also clarified that they were unsure if any IPSC members took part in a private capacity.
They noted that people sometimes say they are part of 'the 'Irish Palestine solidarity campaign' or whatever, when what they actually mean is they're part of the wider Palestine solidarity movement in Ireland'.
A spokesperson for Connolly said that the trip had been coordinated by a number of pro-Palestinian activists.
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During her speech in the Dáil in July 2018, Daly indicated that the TDs all paid for themselves (none had declared the trip as a gift in their declaration of interests for that year).
'For the record, we paid for ourselves, went where we liked and talked to whom we liked,' Daly said.
On Wednesday, Connolly also stated that she had funded her own trip.
Motivations
Given her lack of public comments on the trip, it had until this week been unclear exactly what Connolly's motivations for going were.
However, she did make comments on a previous trip to Syria taken by Daly and Wallace's in 2017.
Speaking against sanctions on Syria in the Dáil
in December 2017
, Connolly mentioned that previous trip taken to Syria by Daly and Wallace.
'I thank Deputies Wallace and Daly and the small number of others who accompanied them to Syria and saw for themselves the circumstances on the ground. Perhaps the Minister will listen to them. There is no propaganda here,' Connolly said.
'It is following a visit to Syria and a tremendous amount of research that we stand here tonight to say we do not support the sanctions.'
The EU lifted all economic sanctions against Syria
in May 2025
after the fall of the Assad government.
However, Connolly on Wednesday clarified that she went on the 2018 trip 'for the purpose of fact-finding' and initially attempted to visit a refugee camp outside Beirut in Lebanon, though had been unsuccessful.
Connolly said that during the trip she met 'no member of [the Syrian] government', and confirmed she had been at the refugee camp in Damascus, as well as Aleppo.
'We met the chamber of commerce,' she said. 'We had a meeting with Unicef. We went into a convent and met a nun.'
She summarised, 'On no occasion had I anything to do with the government, nor did I utter one word of support for Assad.'
A spokesperson said Connolly has had no contact with the Assad regime since.
Christina Finn
/ X (Formerly Twitter)
Controversy
There is some controversy over the trip, as certain groups have argued that visiting areas in Syria under the Assad regime could be stage-managed propaganda.
Daly denied that this was the case in her Dáil speech.
What we know
Photos published on Syrian social media accounts show Daly and Wallace being shown around the Yarmouk refugee camp by men dressed in military fatigues.
A spokesperson for Connolly said that these were members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP-GP), which fought on the side of Assad during the civil war. The PFLP is now, and
was in 2018
, designated a terrorist organisation by the EU.
The Irish tour group was also shown around Aleppo by the pro-Assad commentator Fares Al-Shehabi, who was described as the head of the city's chamber of commerce.
Al-Shehabi, who appears in photos with Connolly, had been
put under sanctions
by the EU for supporting the Assad regime.
The
year before
the Irish delegation's visit, he posted on social media that a seven-year-old who said Assad was committing a Holocaust should die. He would later go on to say that anti-Assad journalists
should be raped
.
Speaking in the Dáil
the week after the trip, Daly called for the government to issue a visa to Al-Shehabi 'so that he might come to Ireland as a businessman and Sunni Muslim who believes in secular values and talk about what has happened in Syria'.
A spokesperson for Connolly said that the tour and its itinerary were arranged by a travel agency that had been active in Syria for decades. Meeting with Al-Shehabi was 'not an endorsement', a spokesperson said, and Connolly 'wasn't entirely aware of who he was' at the time.
The spokesperson also said that, before, Connolly only had a idea of what a refugee camp was, but the trip 'opened her eyes to the reality of displacement.'
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