Presidency race is no walk in the park
IRISH presidential elections are not for the faint hearted. There have been two in the past 38 years and both were dominated by smear campaigns, dirty tricks, personal attacks and the digging up of the pasts of number of candidates.
Poll topper Davis Norris bowed out of this year’s campaign when letters he had written 15 years ago seeking leniency for his ex-partner in sentencing for statutory rape resurfaced.
And recent history suggests there may be more twists before this campaign ends in October.
Here are some of the most memorable examples:
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The 1990 campaign and its battles between Brian Lenihan and Mary Robinson was the dirtiest of all.
After Robinson — the Labour candidate — enraged conservative Ireland by commenting that she supported the sale of condoms, Fianna Fáil’s candidate, Lenihan, was miles ahead in the polls.
But an old interview he had done with a student of politics would come back to haunt him. In the interview with Jim Duffy he had admitted that he and several other prominent Fianna Fáil politicians rang President Patrick Hillery in the Áras in 1982 and put pressure on him not to dissolve the Dáil for Garret FitzGerald, which would have allowed Charlie Haughey to form a new government.
This got back to Fine Gael during the presidential election and Garret FitzGerald used it to trap Lenihan on Questions & Answers.
Mr Lenihan told the audience: “I want to assure you that never happened.”
Duffy then produced the tape and Lenihan then went on the Six One news and pleaded with the Irish people to believe him, stating that “on mature recollection” he had not phoned President Hillery and his account to Duffy had been wrong.
The opposition put down a motion of no confidence in the Government and the Taoiseach, Charles Haughey, forced Lenihan to resign as Minister, leaving his presidential hopes in ruin.
Just as Lenihan’s campaign began to recover from the controversy, his Fianna Fáil colleague, Padraig Flynn, stepped in with an intervention which finished any chance he had left of becoming president.
In an interview with the Saturday View, Flynn launched a personal attack on Robinson that backfired spectacularly.
He said she had “new clothes and new hairdo and newfound interest in the family... but, you know, none of us who knew Mary Robinson in previous incarnations ever heard her claiming to be a great wife and mother”.
The sexist comments ensured that Mná na hÉireann turned out in force on polling day to elect Ireland’s first ever woman president.
The 1997 campaign didn’t produce the same drama as the Robinson and Lenihan battles years earlier. But it was not without its moments of controversy.
Labour looked like they had a perfect candidate in Adi Roche. But the “Angel of Chernobyl” was soon depicted as a “Stalinist” and she dropped from the most popular in the polls to second last in a number of days.
It all started when ex-staff of the Chernobyl Children’s Project claimed she was volatile and insulting and she was forced into denying she was “Stalinist” in her approach to the organisation.
A well-orchestrated dirty tricks campaign saw claims her brother had been sacked as an army officer in 1969 for alleged involvement in a republican terrorist group, something that turned out to be untrue.
Roche later said she had been “torn apart by the dogs”. She came fourth in the election.
Just seven weeks before polling day, Fianna Fáil’s chosen candidate, Mary McAleese entered the race.
A series of leaked documents detailed conversations she had with Department of Foreign Affairs officials years earlier.
They were used by her opponents to suggest she was a Sinn Féin sympathiser — something politically explosive at the time. This resulted in widespread criticism, with journalist Eoghan Harris saying she would be “a ticking tribal time bomb” as president.
McAleese’s handling of the controversy was seen as key to her success. It gave her an opportunity to articulate her views on Northern Ireland politics and she won plaudits for her grace under fire.
She won a landslide victory in a presidency that culminated in the successful state visits of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth and US President Barack Obama.
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