The 2025 presidential election campaign had more than its fair share of viral moments, from the disarming keepie-uppy video, to the distasteful Joe Brolly impression. But political campaigns are won by building momentum and a sense of inevitability over weeks and months. Starting with the most rudimentary metrics, Catherine Connolly led the field, with 10 times Heather Humphreys’s following on Instagram and TikTok. Yet even those figures understate how completely she dominated the online campaign. Three moments, in particular, go some way to illustrating how this was achieved.
1. ‘Run a marathon pregnant?!’
Connolly’s interview with How to Gael – a bilingual, female-oriented podcast – showed the power of cross-platform storytelling. We think of podcasts as audio, but in 2025 they’re also major sources of social media video. The podcast cut its hour-long conversation with Connolly into five stylish videos that together reached more than 1 million views on Instagram alone. One clip, captioned “Run a Marathon Pregnant?!”, has already passed half a million.
The How to Gael videos and podcast, which slip easily in and out of Irish, also tap into the often underappreciated Gaeilge and bilingual part of the social web that has both reach and social currency.
Podcasts were not just a way for the Connolly campaign to reach young people. RedC polling in 2024 found that one in three Irish people aged 25–34 listen to podcasts weekly, but among the “ABC1” category of higher earners listening rates are almost as high, and the medium is growing in importance for retired listeners too. Connolly’s podcast appearances, which I count as amounting to over seven-and-a-half hours of content, included Sean O’Rourke and the more youth oriented Blindboy.
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2. #Smearthebejaysus
While the Humphreys campaign took pains to assert that Ivan Yates had nothing to do with her, his declaration that her campaign should “smear the bejaysus” out of her rival became an instant meme among Connolly’s supporters. It sparked a hashtag where people shared ideas for “sins” they could pin on the candidate; “Catherine Connolly skipped part of Ulysses” one post read. “I heard Catherine Connolly gives out those little boxes of raisins on Halloween” went another. There were hundreds more.
Moments like this never reach beyond the terminally online and the most politically engaged, but they can act to galvanise supporters. They give entry points to tacitly support candidates in a fun way, adding to that sense of momentum. And this particular meme may have also built a shared language among supporters for when the attacks did inevitably come, softening their bite.
3. Debate parody videos
Clips from the TV and radio debates are often repurposed by candidates and news organisations as content; something to clip and edit and push out on social media. But during this election campaign, parodies of these videos have been getting greater reach than the originals, as content creators play with the trope to get both laughs and political points across.
Comedian Aoife Dunne produced a pair of sketch videos for Instagram and TikTok with the caption “How Catherine Connolly is questioned vs Heather Humphreys”. The videos feature Dunne playing the role of interviewer against an RTÉ-esque background, throwing softball questions at Humphreys while grilling Connolly. Across the two platforms they amassed about 1.5 million views in six days, prompting other creators to make their own parodies.
Content like this is gold for political campaigns; it leverages the audience and reach of influencers who know the language and norms of the platform, and know how to play the algorithms. It gets serious points across in a funny way. The parody video by Dunne, who has a background in human rights law, weaves in many of the attacks that have been levied against Humphreys, like her support of fox hunting. It also added to the sense that she was fighting back against an establishment.
What has been most striking about this campaign, much more so than any one moment, is how much of the online discourse has been outside of candidates’ official campaigns. The Connolly campaign won the internet because it got creators to talk about and for her, building the strongest currency in modern digital marketing: social proof.
[ Thanks be to Jaaysus: final debate wraps up a God-awful presidential electionOpens in new window ]
In previous elections, Fine Gael has paid platforms to get its content into people’s feeds, but this time around online political ads have been disabled, and very few people choose to amplify that content or create their own about Humphreys. By way of example, Humphreys’s campaign proudly foregrounded political endorsements from previous female tánaistí like Frances Fitzgerald and Mary Harney. But videos about these fell very flat online.
In contrast, Connolly was promoted by a range of progressive influencers, creating a cultural resonance we are more used to seeing in US elections than in Irish ones. We’d have to go back to the big social referendums of the 2010s to find this level of cultural engagement in a political process by people with online cultural capital.
Like referendums, and like US presidentials, this election ended up being a binary choice – and perhaps that goes some way to explaining Connolly’s dominance online. Artists and cultural influencers tend to lean progressive in this country, and are increasingly vocal on political issues. Yet that has rarely translated before to a gathering momentum any one party or candidate in a general election – perhaps because of internal divisions on the left.
The alignment across the political left around one candidate this time gave influencers a single progressive candidate to back. There is a clear lesson here: the left can win the internet, if they can put their internal divisions behind them.
