In June 2018, Catherine Connolly travelled to Syria as part of a group which included fellow TDs Maureen O’Sullivan, Mick Wallace, and Clare Daly.
Throughout her campaign, Ms Connolly has consistently described the visit as a "fact-finding mission."
It is well documented that the group visited a Palestinian refugee camp near Damascus, and the city of Aleppo.
At that time, a bloody civil war in Syria was in its seventh year. President Bashar al-Assad’s regime had control of key urban centres, including Damascus and Aleppo, which he held with military support from Russia and Iran, and the help of various militia factions.
His forces and those aligned to him had been battling a disparate number of rivals, including ISIS, other hardline-Islamist militias, pro-democracy rebels, and Kurdish secessionists.
Assad was being widely condemned in the West for war crimes, including the use of chemical weapons, targetting of civilian infrastructure, and widespread use of torture.
Over the course of the war, tens of thousands of people were arbitrarily detained or had been forcibly disappeared by Assad, according to human rights groups.
Millions of civilians were displaced by the war.
Western governments and the EU had imposed strict sanctions on Assad's government in response to his actions, particularly to the use of chemical weapons.
The UN Human Rights Office estimates that 306,887 civilians - 1.5% of the total pre-war population of Syria - were killed between March 2011 and March 2021 due to the conflict.
Catherine Connolly has repeatedly said she has "never, ever hesitated in [her] utter condemnation of Assad, publicly and privately."
Yet some details of her trip remain unclear or have only emerged in recent days. So, what is known of her trip to Syria under Assad’s regime during the civil war?
Who organised the trip?
During TV and radio debates, Ms Connolly has been asked who organised the trip to Syria.
She told RTÉ’s News at One on 13 October that it was arranged by a group of community activists, including Dublin-based activist Rita Fagan.
Speaking earlier on RTÉ’s This Week on 31 August, she explained the group had received a visa, which "had to be approved by the Assad government."
"We flew into Beirut and then to Damascus, was to go to the Yarmouk Palestinian camp."
In an interview on RTÉ television on 15 October, Ms Connolly said "it was organised for us by somebody who organised trips to the West Bank every year. It was a tour, we got a visa to cross the border. We had a tour guide with us."
Who funded the trip?
When asked about who funded the trip at the outset of her campaign, Ms Connolly said: "I paid for that trip."
It later emerged that the funding had come from her Parliamentary Activities Allowance (PAA), a tax-free publicly funded allowance for party leaders and Independent TDs, provided to support parliamentary work, including research.
In her 2018 PAA filing to the Standards in Public Office Commission (SIPO), she reported spending a total of €35,639.47 on "expenditure on research and training." Among the six listed entries, €3,691.72 was listed next to 'Syria’ on the filing.
In a subsequent interview with Virgin Media television, Ms Connolly said the original question around funding was whether Syria or another organisation had funded the trip.
Asked whether she personally funded the trip or whether the taxpayer did, Ms Connolly said: "The taxpayer funds my salary, the taxpayer funds the three allowances I get, one for travel, one for an office, which I back up, and then this particular one, which allows for research and policy."
Who did the Irish group meet?
The first place the group went after they flew into Beirut, was to Damascus and then on to the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp, Ms Connolly said.
Yarmouk is a Palestinian refugee district in south Damascus, and was home to around 160,000 people before the war broke out in 2011.
The majority of residents descend from Palestinians who were forced to flee their homes during the 1948 Nakba – ‘The Catastrophe’ - which saw the forced displacement of Palestinians from lands now within the modern borders of Israel.
In the first years of the war, Yarmouk was the site of battles between Free Syrian Army-aligned Palestinian rebels, Islamist anti-Assad groups, and pro-regime Palestinian factions.
According to UNRWA, in those years, airstrikes forced the majority of residents to flee.
By July 2013, around 18,000 people who had remained were placed under siege by forces loyal to Assad.
Among the regime-allied forces which imposed the siege was the Free Palestine Movement (FPM) and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP-GC).
The residents who remained in Yarmouk were totally cut off from humanitarian aid, food and medicine for months, UNRWA said.
While the regime imposed a siege, battles also raged between the various factions inside. Mortar, air attacks and street battles forced civilians to shelter indoors and even underground.
During a brief truce, UNRWA finally was allowed to supply some aid in January 2014.
The siege was quickly reimposed and would continue with varying levels of intensity for several years more.
Two months later, a report from Amnesty International said "Syrian forces are committing war crimes by using starvation of civilians as a weapon of war. The harrowing accounts of families having to resort to eating cats and dogs, and civilians attacked by snipers as they forage for food, have become all too familiar details of the horror story that has materialised in Yarmouk."
By early 2014, around 130 people had died from starvation and dehydration, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights and Amnesty International.
In April 2015, ISIS – which held territory nearby - infiltrated the camp through government lines with help from a hardline Islamist faction inside.
Heavy street fighting erupted, and the group soon controlled almost 80% of the camp. Further battles inside ebbed and flowed until early 2018, by that point Assad had regained control of much of Syria.
Still, Yarmouk remained outside his grasp.
That April, a major regime offensive to regain control of Yarmouk was preceded by a massive Russian and Syrian army air bombardment, levelling entire neighbourhoods.
By mid-May 2018, the regime forces regained control. The UN said it estimated 5000 civilians left during the offensive.
The following month, the Irish delegation arrived.
The Irish delegation
"We were shown around by Palestinians. We had conversations with them. We exchanged the little gifts we had. And I came back with an absolute horror of war, of the Assad regime, which I had before I went there," Ms Connolly told RTÉ’s This Week programme on 31 August.
Some reports were carried in Palestinian and Syrian State media of the visit at the time.
They say the delegation was "accompanied by the head of the Free Palestine Movement, Saed Abdel Al-Aal, to see the extent of the destruction and devastation that befell the homes and property of civilians."
Asked if she knew about Saed Abdel Al-Aal's background when she met him in Yarmouk, Ms Connolly told Morning Ireland on 17 October: "I didn't know that, and you have no control when you go to a country like that as to who will come into your presence or not."
"That's no endorsement of the regime. I'm on record for condemning the regime," she said.
"People came up and spoke to us as openly as they could within a dictatorship," she added.
Ms Connolly's campaign has previously said they were shown around Yarmouk by members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP-GC).
That is another pro-Assad group active in the camp, it has been designated terrorist organisation by the EU.
Last year, German and Swedish authorities arrested members of the FPM group, suspected of committing crimes against humanity in Yarmouk. If charges are upheld, they will stand trial for homicide, torture and deprivation of liberty in relation to the siege of Yarmouk.
Photographs posted to social media recently by the Irish-Syria Solidarity Movement (ISSM), taken from reports from the time appear to show Saed Abdel Aal of the FPM with the Irish group in a decimated Yarmouk.
Mick Wallace and Clare Daly can be clearly seen in one image, while Maureen O’Sullivan and Catherine Connolly can also be seen, although they’re obstructed from full view.
In an open letter published on 9 October, the ISSM, who describe themselves as a "non-political, non-denominational, non-governmental" campaign group concerned with the plight of civilians in Syria, claimed that by being photographed with these people, it "legitimised and endorsed them."
Trip to Aleppo
Ms Connolly also says the group met with Sister Brigid Doody, a Salesian nun from Limerick, who lived in Damascus for decades prior to her death in 2023.
Later on the trip, in the city of Aleppo, the group was given a tour by the Aleppo Chamber of Industry and specifically a man called Fares Al-Shehabi, who had been under EU sanctions since 2011 for providing "economic support to the Syrian regime."
Mr Al-Shehabi later tweeted in 2017 calling for death of a 7-year-old girl in Aleppo. Bana al-Abed had a Twitter account with over 200,000 followers, which was run by her mother, and gave updates on the situation in Aleppo.
In response to a tweet reading "Dear World, it’s better to start 3rd world war instead of letting Russia and Assad commit HolocaustAleppo." Al-Shehabi responded "it [i]s better this little witch die[s] before she starts with her sponsors WW3."
The group, including Ms Connolly, was pictured with Al-Shehabi in Aleppo.
The Aleppo Chamber of Industry posted the images on Facebook. A translation of the caption said a group of Irish "parliamentarians, academics and public figures" met with Fares Al-Shahabi, head of the Chamber of Industry.
Al-Shahabi, it said, "gave them a comprehensive overview of the economic reality in Aleppo, showing what Aleppo has been subjected to systematic targeting of terrorists and their supporters in recent years" and hoped that "members of the delegation to convey the truth of what is going on in Syria and Aleppo to their people."
When asked if in hindsight she regretted meeting Al-Shehabi, Ms Connolly said: "Certainly in retrospect, when one looks back and sees the comments that he made and you see them, absolutely, this man is utterly unacceptable to me."
What was the outcome of the trip?
Catherine Connolly has said the trip "empowered me, enabled me, and made me stronger as a voice for peace, and to use our voice at every level in every situation to empower what's going on."
In December 2018, Ms Connolly asked the then Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs Simon Coveney to provide to the Oireachtas an assessment of the impact of sanctions on Syria that had been undertaken.
Mr Coveney said Ireland supported EU sanctions against Assad and his supporters, but said the impact of sanctions were "under constant review."
Before Catherine Connolly went on the trip, she had supported the idea of reevaluating sanctions on Syria. In April 2017 she said targetted EU and US sanctions were worsening conditions for Syrians on the ground. Health agencies on the ground said a shortage of medicine and vaccines were "making life absolutely impossible," Connolly said.
Catherine Connolly has continued to defend the 2018 visit as a "fact-finding" mission that reinforced her opposition to war and dictatorship.
However, for groups like the ISSM, questions remain over what facts were actually found, with the group arguing her presence risked legitimising pro-Assad groups implicated in crimes against Palestinian refugees.
