Catherine Connolly to visit Syria in 2018 has emerged since the October election.
During the campaign Connolly repeatedly declined to say who had organised the trip to the war-torn country where the Russia-backed government of president Bashar al-Assad was involved in a complex and vicious civil war.
However, two days after the vote, the former TDs and MEPs Mick Wallace and Clare Daly, who accompanied Connolly on the visit, disclosed that they had organised the trip along with Daly’s sister Elaine, a trade union employee who separately ran non-profit tours for people who wanted to visit the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
“We organised that trip ourselves, lads, seeing as you are so bloody interested,” Clare Daly said, speaking on the I4C Trouble podcast she co-hosts with Wallace.
She said the June 2018 trip was arranged with the help of people in Syria that she, Clare Daly, knew from an earlier trip she and Wallace had made in 2017.
During the campaign Connolly repeatedly declined to say who had organised the trip to the war-torn country where the Russia-backed government of president Bashar al-Assad was involved in a complex and vicious civil war.
However, two days after the vote, the former TDs and MEPs Mick Wallace and Clare Daly, who accompanied Connolly on the visit, disclosed that they had organised the trip along with Daly’s sister Elaine, a trade union employee who separately ran non-profit tours for people who wanted to visit the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
“We organised that trip ourselves, lads, seeing as you are so bloody interested,” Clare Daly said, speaking on the I4C Trouble podcast she co-hosts with Wallace.
She said the June 2018 trip was arranged with the help of people in Syria that she, Clare Daly, knew from an earlier trip she and Wallace had made in 2017.
Continue @ Irish Times.
Behind a paywall. Would like to read it, Anthony
ReplyDeleteCheck your email Barry
DeleteWallace and Daly were part of a group brought to Syria in October 2017 by Declan Hayes, an Irish supporter of the then Syrian government who has written for a sanctioned pro-Kremlin website called the Strategic Culture Foundation.
ReplyDelete“I was supportive of the Syrian people as represented by the Syrian government and the Syrian Arab army and all people and factions allied to them,” Hayes told The Irish Times.
“What I was trying to do, primarily, was to get people of influence to go there and see what was being done and make up their own minds.”
Hayes is a former lecturer in business studies at the University of Southampton, who writes about international politics.
Aside from the Strategic Culture Foundation, his articles have been published by the conservative Irish website the Burkean, and his views published on the website of a pro-Kremlin think tank called Katehon. Wort h having a look at his two sites.