Heather Humphreys is trying to defend herself. Unfortunately for her, she’s also defending the Government at the same time.
It’s Thursday morning and the Fine Gael presidential candidate is in her kitchen at home in Newbliss, Co Monaghan – a short drive from the Border – being interviewed over the phone by a local radio station.
Pitted against Independent Catherine Connolly on Friday’s presidential ballot, Humphreys has been on the back foot as the establishment candidate, forced to account for the record of her party, which has been in Government since 2011.
The presenter is grilling her on a range of topics – from the lifting of a ban on no-fault evictions to the current Government’s commitment to cut childcare fees.
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Humphreys’s Ulster drawl carries through the back door of the kitchen to the yard outside where The Irish Times and her Yorkshire terrier Rusty are listening in.
Humphreys has agreed to a wide-ranging interview. (Catherine Connolly cancelled a previously arranged interview last Monday and has repeatedly declined requests to reschedule since.)
The local radio interview has run a little late and this reporter has arrived a little early, agitating a watchful Rusty, who starts to bark.
“There was no political interference in this case ... Oh sorry, there’s a dog barking here,” Humphreys says in the live radio interview, as a campaign aide captures Rusty and casts him outside.
This busy morning is typical of Humphreys’ home. An aide says Humphreys likes a busy house as the hub of her family; her daughter Eva and granddaughter Charlotte also drop by.
But there is a feverish edge in the house this Thursday morning.
The night before, bad news started to filter through to the Fine Gael campaign that an opinion poll in The Irish Times on Thursday would have Humphreys lagging Connolly by a daunting 18 points (20 per cent for Humphreys to 38 per cent for Connolly).
The mood within the campaign that night was dismal.
By Thursday morning, following publication of the poll, the team is trying to rally and embrace its underdog status.
Journalists were reminded that Michael D Higgins had been 15 points behind rival Seán Gallagher in a poll the week of the 2011 presidential election. However, the outcome of that campaign hinged on an implosion of Gallagher’s campaign.
[ The activist in the Áras: How Michael D Higgins shaped the presidencyOpens in new window ]
So how does she plan to recover ground in the final week of the campaign?
“I’m just going to keep talking to the people and keep getting my message out there and asking them to put their trust in me. It’s all I can do,” says Humphreys.
The last week of her campaign will be spent trying to court electorally idle Fianna Fáil voters.
The Fine Gael candidate hopes “Fianna Fáil people will see that perhaps I am the candidate most aligned to their views.”
Her team are hoping for more high-profile public Fianna Fáil endorsements over the coming days.
The morning of the interview, former taoiseach Bertie Ahern said that he would vote for Humphreys. The endorsement becomes an attack line for her opponent. It is seized on by the Youth for Connolly campaign, which posts the news alongside the lyrics of the song by musician CMAT that talks about the harm done by the “big boys” and the “Berties”, invoking ghost estates and male suicide during the financial crash.
Would some people not want an endorsement from Ahern?
“To be fair to Bertie, I didn’t know him when he was in politics, because I wasn’t involved in politics then, but what I do know about him is that he made a huge contribution to the peace process, and nobody could ever, ever, ever take that away from him,” Humphreys says.
She rolls her eyes at the mention of Ivan Yates, the commentator who now infamously said that Fine Gael should “smear the bejaysus” out of Connolly as a campaign strategy.
“If he was on the radio, I wouldn’t even be listening to him. I’d probably turn him off. That’s all I have to say about Ivan Yates,” she says.
But Fine Gael’s strategy does appear to be focused on spending more time telling voters that Humphreys is not Catherine Connolly rather than telling the public who Humphreys is.
“Well, sometimes it’s very hard when you get these fast-fire questions coming to you, and it’s all about what you have done,” she says.
After the morning radio interview, Humphreys is clearly disappointed that she was asked so many questions about the Government’s record and so few about her own campaign to be president.
“That’s it, that’s life,” Humphreys says with a shrug, before quickly slipping from candidate to hostess. “Now, did you get a scone?”
I’m sorry if she didn’t think I did enough, but I genuinely tried my best
— Humphreys on criticism from Lucia O'Farrell
She says that “establishment” is not a bad word, but she prefers “experienced”. She laughs when asked if having been a government minister is a curse rather than a blessing in this campaign.
Last month, The Irish Times revealed that Lucia O’Farrell was “terribly disappointed” that, as a TD and minister, Humphreys did not support the family’s campaign for a public inquiry into the 2011 death of her son Shane in a hit-and-run by a man who was out on bail at the time.
Humphreys puts her hand on a stack of documents and her phone and says: “I checked my records.”
“I made a number of representations [to justice ministers] and anything she asked me to do, I tried to do it,” she says.
“I’m sorry if she didn’t think I did enough, but I genuinely tried my best.”
But why didn’t she attend a 2018 vigil outside the Dáil for Shane O’Farrell? If she had her time again, would she?
“Well, to be fair now, as a minister, I was busy. I really was,” she says.
“There’s been many vigils outside Dáil Éireann. And as a minister, I don’t think I attended any of them. I didn’t purposely not go to it. I don’t even know where I was at that occasion.”
It emerged this week that Humphreys had attended a charity event that is now the subject of a Garda investigation amid concerns about how it was run.
Some of the attendees told The Irish Times there were elements of the event that seemed odd, but Humphreys insists that there was “no reason to be suspicious”. She says it was supported by a local authority, local media and prominent business figures.
“I had retired from politics, and I attended the event in good faith. I bought the tickets, and like everybody else,” she says.
“I got no special treatment. I was the same as everybody else.”
The government’s record on disability rights has been criticised by the Connolly campaign. Humphreys has been questioned throughout the campaign about her proposal to change social welfare payments for disabled people in a controversial Green Paper, which was abandoned within days of Simon Harris taking over as Fine Gael leader in April 2024. Many concluded Harris had been the one to scrap the plan.
“No, it was not his idea. And that is the absolute truth, it had nothing to do with Simon,” Humphreys says. She says that she could see “people weren’t happy” with the plan, so there was “no point” progressing it.
She pushes back against criticism of her 2016 heritage Bill, claiming her critics had suggested she wanted to “cut every hedge in the country”. Her record on hunting and animal rights has also come into focus.
Humphreys describes hare coursing, fox hunting and greyhound racing as “rural pursuits”, which she supports once the “proper controls are in place”.
“Do they want to ban horse racing as well? Where does this stop?”
When Humphreys was minister for social protection, she received a report that recommended making changes to Ireland’s gender recognition laws – the legislation that allows transgender and non-binary people to affirm their gender identity.
Though the report proposed introducing a “system of gender recognition ... for children of any age”, Humphreys was against it.
“I felt, to be honest, that anything under the age of 16 is too young. I really do, because those are very, very formative years,” she says.
“That’s not saying that we shouldn’t show compassion – and I absolutely believe in treating people with compassion and respect – but I just think that it could cause problems later in life, and maybe a decision could be made that would be regretted, that’s not reversible.”
When Humphreys worked in banking in the late 1970s and early 1980s, she says it was a “male bastion” where female ambition was discouraged, which frustrated her.
But why wasn’t she ambitious enough to compete with Mairéad McGuinness for the Fine Gael nomination?
“I wasn’t going to go up against Mairead,” Humphreys says, explaining that the former MEP is a “friend”.
Her support of women also comes under question in light of her role as director of elections for the failed family and care referendums in 2024.
The referendums were defeated for a broad range of reasons, but the care referendum was criticised by aspirant stay-at-home mothers who felt the government was not supporting work within the home.
Humphreys says the proposal to amend the Constitution to say that the Government would “strive” to support care was “where it fell down”.
“‘Strive’ to support – that word wasn’t strong enough,” she says.
She says “we should be supporting women better to be in the home, if that’s what they want to do”.
Humphreys’s campaign started with her facing questions about her husband’s membership of the Orange Order more than 50 years ago.
“I was kind of surprised, to be honest with you, to be asked about something that my husband was doing before I met him,” she says.
[ ‘Gotcha’ claims about Heather Humphreys’ husband have no place in modern IrelandOpens in new window ]
She points out that, at the time, the Orange Order was seen as an organisation that represented cultural identity. After the Troubles started, its membership declined.
According to Humphreys, Jarlath Burns, the GAA president, contacted her to sympathise about the line of questioning she had faced.
“He said to me: ‘Heather, I’m very sorry that this happened,’” she says.
When Burns took over as GAA president in 2024, he made an effort to try to appeal to the Orange Order community and said “we have to respect all of the culture that exists in Northern Ireland”.
“He says: ‘I know so many decent, respectable people who are members of the Orange Order. And it’s a pity that the conversation is going that way,’” she says.
In her campaign, Humphreys has highlighted her background as a Border county woman of a Presbyterian background and tried to model herself on Mary McAleese, with Fine Gael trying to advance her as a unity candidate.
In a nod to that background and a Protestant domestic stereotype that has featured in her campaign, she confirms that she does indeed keep her toaster in a kitchen cupboard; an aide opens a cupboard to reveal said toaster.
When Humphreys talks about the Border, she gestures out the window of her home to where it sits, just six miles away. She thinks she is “well placed” to have the same kind of unifying conversations with communities on either side of the Border that McAleese did during her years in the Áras.
As the interview nears its end, Humphreys’s gaze falls on the clock. She has to leave for “the other place”, she tells her adviser. She has a national media interview that lunchtime and then a campaign event in a Meath farmyard packed with supporters.
The last week is going to be the most relentless of the campaign for Humphreys, given Connolly’s commanding lead.
“I’m asking people to support me, to vote for me on the day of the election, because I am asking for their trust, because I won’t let them down,” she says.
“I won’t let them down.”
