David Quinn: If I knew better than to accept an invitation to Assad’s Syria, what is Catherine Connolly’s excuse?
The presidential hopeful showed either naivety or ideological blinkers in visiting the dictatorial regime
Independent TD Catherine Connolly announces her candidacy for the presidency. Photo: CollinsAbout 10 years ago, I received an invitation to visit Syria for a St Patrick’s Day event in Damascus. It was all very strange. It came from an Irish person I assumed had some kind of contact with Bashar al-Assad’s ultra-brutal and dictatorial regime, then governing Syria. He might have contacted me because I think I said somewhere that Syria might suffer the same fate as countries like Libya and Iraq after their dictators fell — that is, if Assad went, it could descend into even greater violence. Sometimes something very bad can be replaced with something worse.