The results are in; Catherine Connolly won the Irish Presidential election of 2025, gathering 914,143 - or 63% - of the vote. There is a lot of talk of spoiled ballots (including from me) - but - this win is historically comprehensive. Catherine Connolly has garnered the highest percentage
Over the last few months I have tried to dig out and get on the record some of the hidden and more ephemeral aspects of this election. Here is a recap of what we covered.
This video is worrying; it shows a combination of both intent and skill in building out very deceptive content, in a way that resonates with Irish audiences.
Aoife Dunne's "Sorry now" video is one of the most subtle yet devastating pieces of political content I have ever seen.
By burying the lede and handing over airtime, have Fine Gael committed an own goal?
Our politics is a techno-coloured pick-and-mix, this election is a Soviet department store
Fianna Fáil unlikely to get the €250k back from the state they would have if Jim Gavin had run
Have the dates on Google's Fidesz ads changed in its ad archive?
Google appears to have deleted its political ad archive for the EU; so the last 7 years of ads, of political spending, of messaging, of targeting - on YouTube, on Search and for display ads - for countless elections across 27 countries - is all gone. We had been told
3 good reads and some Linkedin news you can use
What the first political ads tell us about how the campaign might look
We need to start looking at this kind of performative violence as an endemic byproduct of the attention economy
Irish Politics
How do you run a political campaign without digital ads? I asked two of our best campaign gurus what we might expect.
I really, really hope this isn't the start of a whole thing. Elon Musk has tweeted about the race for the Aras in the most profoundly ignorant and stupidly dangerous way possible. The tweet is screenshot below; in it Musk sub-tweets another tweet claiming Simon Harris "ordered
elections
We finally have a date: October 24th. Between now and then, The Briefing will run twice weekly: short, data-led analysis of campaign dynamics, plus curated reads on elections and tech policy. No horse race, just what the campaign reveals about our democracy, our economy, and our digital future.
We've had a load of elections around here lately - we're in our stride - so why does the looming Presidential Election feel so... weird? We're about 10 weeks out (we think - there is still no date) and it feels like both no-one
Data Centres
Some incredible new investigative reporting from The Guardian revealed today that Irish based Microsoft data centres are likely involved in a population scale Israeli military effort to surveil and plan airstrikes on Palestinians. The reporting is here - it is by Harry Davies and Yuval Abraham. They found that the
Last night - a Friday night, in July - Meta announced that it would “no longer allow political, electoral and social issue ads on our platforms in the EU in response to new regulation”. The first thing I thought of when I read this was that scene from The Office
For the last few weeks a group of us from the neighbourhood - parents with kids around the same age - have been gathering on a patchwork of picnic blankets on a designated evening. It is so simple and yet feels like a miracle. Out there in the multiverse is
Europe
All going well, I will be on The Tonight Show this evening to talk tech and tariffs. Sharing my thoughts here; please do reply / email me with your own if you think I'm wide of the mark. The tariff triple threat The Irish state faces at least three
This is the first of a new series of recommender newsletters. I'm starting with two recent podcast listens I've really enjoyed, each looking at the precarious world of tech stock valuations, and reflect on what it can mean for all of us. As always you tell
It is easy to look rich if you raid the family silver.
I have a piece in the Irish Times today about Elon Musk's performative vandalism of the US government. He has unleashed a band of inexperienced twenty somethings - some reportedly still teens - to "disrupt" government. And it is profoundly idiotic (not the same choice of
A.I.
What Keir Starmer’s recent policy announcements show about his hopes and fears for AI, and the potential folly of his FOMO