Around the time that a young Catherine Connolly was growing up in a council housing estate called Shantalla in Galway, honing her keepie-uppie skills with a football – those that would later rack up over two million social media views and counting – a grim scene was taking place just outside her family’s home.

The city council was looking to move a Traveller woman into the estate, but faced fierce and even violent opposition from some locals.

An RTÉ report from the time, in 1970, told of how the Traveller woman was pelted with stones as she faced jeering from the assembled crowd during “disturbing scenes”.

As the crowd grew, so did the curiosity to see what was unfolding, but the teenage Connolly was stopped from leaving her home by her father because of the nature of the ugly demonstration.

On the Sean O’Rourke podcast, Connolly said her father “wasn’t looking down on the protest” and was giving his children an “ability to see it from both sides”.

Connolly told her campaign launch in Dublin last month the incident helped her to see issues as an “insider and as an outsider”.

She took another lesson from it: “I also understood why the people were protesting, because of the hypocrisy of the council was to do it in a particular way without consultation.”

That thinking may well have been a factor when Connolly was one of a small number of left TDs who voted against the government’s referendum on the Constitution’s ‘women in the home’ wording last year, a decision that pitted her against almost all political parties but on the side of the majority of voters.

She has said that her whole outlook in life was shaped by being in a family of 14, the loss of her mother at an early age, and growing up in a local authority estate.

Her family was not party political, but had a strong sense of what was right and wrong: “We just didn’t call it [politics],” she said earlier this year. “It was a sense of equality and social justice from a very early age.”

This forms part of Connolly’s pitch for Ireland’s presidency, as she points to a need for “independent thinking” on the big issues facing Ireland and Europe.

She argues she is not, in her opponent’s words, anti-Europe but instead is probing what “direction the compass is going” at a time the EU is under great pressure from Trump and Putin.

“A committed European asks questions,” she told a debate last weekend on RTÉ radio.

She now spearheads a movement that, via a blitz of viral sports clips and a cross-party ground campaign, has united the Irish left for one of the few times in the history of the state, and is intent on representing an Ireland that is progressive, neutral and fair.

Connolly has said that growing up as one of 14 children in Shantalla – Galway’s first social housing estate – helped her to understand social justice and inequality “from the floor” of her family home.

Her father worked as a carpenter for the local shipyard and later as a plasterer and a small builder, but the family was dealt a devastating setback when her mother died while Connolly was just 9.

At the time, the youngest child in the family was just one, while the oldest was 21.

She has spoken about how two of her older sisters stepped up to look after Catherine and the younger siblings. “There was a huge sacrifice on both of their parts,” she told Seán O’Rourke on an RTE podcast earlier this year.

At last month’s campaign launch, the 68-year-old explained how she “learned her socialism” from volunteering with the Legion of Mary, discovering there was “a world outside of me and my siblings”.

The young girl helped with cleaning houses and visiting hospitals and she ended up doing more volunteering as she got older with the Order of Malta – where she learned of the “very helpful” parts of life (some of which included boyfriends).

After spending her early college days “doing as little as possible” but just enough to pass her exams – earning a degree in psychology at the University of Galway, followed by a Masters in clinical psychology in the UK – she later found her passion in law, qualifying as a barrister in 1991.

Connolly and those who know her have often said much of her law work was in family cases but, as has emerged in recent weeks, some of it was also working in bank repossessions. She told Virgin Media this week that she recalls the courtroom being full as families fought to hold onto her homes, scenes she herself attributes to a “failure of government policy”.

In 1999, Connolly first entered Galway City Council having been elected for Labour.

One former opponent-turned-ally from that time is Daniel Callanan, who shared the council chamber with Connolly from 2004, after he was elected for Sinn Féin.

While the city has a progressive reputation, Callanan said it would have been a different story when Connolly first entered the council chamber 26 years ago. Out of 15 councillors, Connolly was one of just four women.

Callanan recalled having his own run-ins with Connolly in the chamber after she was elected Mayor of Galway in 2004.

“She had very strong views but she stuck to her strong views and I had great respect for her,” he told The Journal.

"People say she was aggressive, and she probably was, but she had to be. It was a men’s club but it was also heavily dominated by Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the PDs. She really had it tough in that chamber, it was very fractious."

Callanan knew Connolly from anti-war demos and would join her campaign for the Dáil, and now the Áras, after they both went the Independent route.

It’s been cited over the years that Connolly’s membership of Labour ended because, ironically, she was prevented from standing on a ticket for the 2007 general election alongside none other than Michael D Higgins – the man who Connolly hopes to replace in Áras an Uachtaráin.

Her first tilt in 2007 was a non-starter but, four years later, as the country sank into misery amid the financial crash, Connolly came extraordinarily close to getting elected. She missed out by 17 votes, the thinnest of margins.

“It didn’t put her off and if anything energised her,” was how one member of her campaign team put it to The Journal.

While she waited for her next chance, Connolly appeared to have thrown herself into the water charges movement.

In 2013, she brought a motion against the Government’s plans to transfer control of water services from local councils to Irish Water. Local media reports of those years are peppered with contributions from Connolly on the issue, which became a defining issue in the austerity years under the Fine Gael-Labour coalition.

Connolly was also active in other campaigns.

She began mingling with a new generation of activists through the same-sex marriage referendum campaign of 2015 and the Repeal the Eighth bid to legalise abortion. It was during the former that Connolly crossed paths with her current campaign manager Beibhinn O’Connor, who was recruited to work on Connolly’s staff after she became a TD for the first time shortly after.

That February 2016 general election saw Connolly get the second-last seat of the five-seater in Galway West.

Once in the Dáil, Connolly became a leading voice on issues such as the mother and baby institutions. Another of her opponents from that time, the then-Children’s Minister Roderic O’Gorman, told her presidential campaign launch why his Green Party was backing her.

“When you face Catherine across the Dáil chamber, she arrives in and she has the books and she has the notes,” O’Gorman recounted. “You also know she’s read three other reports that show why this report is wrong, and she can also cite the debate in the Dáil in 1972 that actually showed the way everything should have been done.”

Connolly and the movement behind her probably can’t be fully understood without reckoning with the moves by the government and Micheál Martin to remove the Triple Lock mechanism to send troops overseas without UN approval.

Every action brings a reaction and this one has been brewing with greater anger since Martin’s 2023 consultation forum on security and the Triple Lock.

A Dáil clip from two years ago shows Connolly’s depth of feeling, and it’s notably different compared to her cooler appearances on the debating circuit in this campaign. In the clip, she lashes out at the resulting report by the security forum, saying that it “ostracised” people of a pro-neutrality bent.

She demands that Martin resign from his then position as Tánaiste. Her voice rising still, she implores TDs to make neutrality “mean something when we need it in the world”.

Last month, when Connolly told her campaign launch that, “We will steer the country in a different way”, it’s hard not to think she’s talking about the Triple Lock.

The campaign has hit rocky patches, most notably when The Journal reported on her attempts to obtain security clearance for an employee who had been convicted by the Special Criminal Court for a gun crime.

She has also faced repeated criticism for her decision to visit Syria (you can read in more detail about this visit here).

Some supporters believe she has steered through these better than expected. One backer noted how she dealt with the criticisms around her former Dáil employee, reiterating that she was a believer in rehabilitation and going on the attack against the media for reporting on the conviction.

“It was fantastic,” said this Sinn Féin TD. “She didn’t equivocate and stood over it.”

As part of her bid for the Áras, Connolly has brought together the different strands that populate the Irish left – uniting people who are sometimes siloed in disparate campaign machines and putting them to one cause in her bid to steer Ireland in a different direction.

It was some time before her campaign developed momentum, and in reality only took off once Mary Lou McDonald committed Sinn Féin’s support.

She’s since attracted interest from Independent Ireland, a party comfortably on the right, whose co-leader Michael Collins praised Connolly. “Our politics don’t always align, but you can talk to the woman,” Collins said.

The weakness remains whether she can attract enough of any wavering centrist voters in the likes of Labour or the Greens. Tipperary TD Alan Kelly, former Green Party senator Pauline O’Reilly and ex-Green TD Brian Leddin have all declared they will not be voting for Connolly. They’re not alone in their respective parties.

Connolly may be hoping, instead, to activate enough of the voting population to get out, vote and allow her to try and steer the country’s course from the Áras.