Votes are still being counted but it is already clear that Catherine Connolly has won the presidency by a huge margin.

Connolly's victory will be confirmed at Dublin Castle this afternoon. Hugh, Jack Horgan-Jones and Ellen Coyne are there and sat down to discuss the emerging results and what they mean. How did Catherine Connolly get her campaign so right and Fine Gael theirs so wrong? What does the unprecedented level of spoiled votes really signify? And how will the government parties interpret and respond to this loss?

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Cormac McQuinn and Jack Horgan Jones join Hugh Linehan to talk about the final day of campaigning before voters go to the polls.

They look at how the Connolly campaign has managed to create momentum that sustained her push for the Áras since July and why the Humphreys campaign did not live up to expectations.

Finally they pick their high and low points of the campaign.

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The two remaining candidates in the presidential election came into the final televised debate of the campaign needing different things.

Well behind in the polls, Heather Humphreys needed to come across convincingly while landing some blows. Catherine Connolly needed not to slip up. So how did they do?

On today’s episode of The Irish Times Election Daily podcast Ellen Coyne, Pat Leahy and Hugh Linehan analyse how the battle-weary candidates handled questions from hosts Miriam O’Callaghan and Sarah McInerney and whether the programme will have moved the dial for voters ahead of polling, now just two days away.

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Harry McGee and Jack Horgan-Jones join Hugh to talk about today's news from the presidential campaign trail:

A concert in support of Catherine Connolly's campaign brought top musical artists and thousands of young people together in Dublin's Vicar Street on Monday night. The event also brought together Sinn Féin’s Mary Lou McDonald, the Social Democrats’ Holly Cairns, Paul Murphy of People Before Profit-Solidarity and Labour’s Ivana Bacik, who were photographed hand-in-hand on stage. Could the left's new-found unity be an image of the political future?

The panel also look at the ongoing fallout from 'the video' and ahead to tonight's RTÉ debate.

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Ellen Coyne and Pat Leahy join Hugh to talk about the all the latest from the presidential election campaign.

There is one topic dominating the campaign today, or two related topics: Catherine Connolly's record as a barrister who worked on behalf of financial institutions in the aftermath of the property crash, and Fine Gael's negative campaigning around that record. A video posted by Fine Gael to social media and an interview Humphreys gave to a Sunday newspaper drew attention to the issue but also drew a huge negative reaction, from Connolly supporters but also from those who believe Connolly should be above such criticism due to how barristers are assigned cases.

Ellen assesses Fine Gael's tactics. Who is their video really aimed at: voters or journalists? Meanwhile Pat has been speaking to members of the Bar to find out whether Connolly has any case to answer.

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With Catherine Connolly showing an unprecedented lead for a presidential candidate one week out from polling day, could her campaign only be derailed by something extraordinary at this stage?

Cormac McQuinn and Harry McGee join Hugh Linehan to discuss Connolly’s seemingly unassailable lead, the repetitive nature of recent debates, and with posters for Connolly and even Jim Gavin outnumbering Humphreys in some Dublin Fine Gael strongholds, could the party be accused of adopting a low energy approach to this campaign?

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Catherine Connolly holds a commanding lead in the presidential election with just over a week to go before votes are cast, according to the latest Irish Times/Ipsos B&A opinion poll.

The poll finds that Connolly, on 38 per cent, has almost double the support of her nearest rival, Fine Gael’s Heather Humphreys, on 20 per cent. Support for the Fianna Fáil candidate, Jim Gavin, who stopped his presidential campaign last week, but is still on the ballot paper, is at just 5 per cent.

Pat Leahy joins Hugh Linehan to talk about the significance of Connolly's lead, the mountain Humphreys now has to climb to win and what her campaign may do in the final week of the race.

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As independent candidate Catherine Connolly and Fine Gael candidate Heather Humphreys enter the final nine days of the campaign, Jack Horgan Jones and Ellen Coyne join Hugh Linehan to launch our daily podcast coverage.

• A motion of no confidence in Simon Harris over controversies in Children’s Health Ireland and waiting times for scoliosis surgery was itself a presidential election event. 

• Meanwhile Heather Humphreys has been on the campaign trail in Monaghan, with Ellen following her. It’s safe ground for the former Cavan-Monaghan TD. But is she spending too much time on home turf? 

• Jack and Ellen compare the Humphreys and Connolly campaigns. Connolly has led in the latest polls, but who has the momentum? 

• The Humphreys campaign is seeking the support of disenchanted centre-left voters, with help from ex-Greens Brian Leddin and Pauline O'Reilly, who this week said they regret their former party's support for Connolly.

• The two-horse race means intense focus on the nature of the two candidates. Could that mean the result will be more divisive than presidential elections past? 

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Hugh talks to Ronan McCrea, professor of constitutional and European law at University College London, about his new book, The End of the Gay Rights Revolution. McCrea believes that the achievements of the most successful civil rights movement of the last few decades may be more politically fragile than most people assume. He argues that these successes were largely an incidental dividend of the wider sexual revolution rather than a standalone victory. What law and culture give quickly, he says, they can also take away.

The book traces the shift from decriminalisation to equality, the AIDS-era turn to pragmatism, and the post-marriage-equality problem of purpose. McCrea contends that movement overreach, mission creep to ever-broader agendas, and a reluctance to confront awkward truths leaves freedoms exposed to changing demographics, populism and a revived moral conservatism. The conversation asks what a strategy of consolidation rather than perpetual expansion would actually look like and whether it carries costs as well as benefits in a world where history rarely moves in straight lines.

The End of The Gay Rights Revolution is published by Polity.

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