Running for president in Ireland? Prepare to have your past — and your sanity — tested
Maria Steen has suggested that the election should be cancelled and rerun after Jim Gavin withdrew his candidacy. Picture: Sam Boal/Collins Photos
One of the more bizarre comments in a bizarre week of the presidential campaign came from Maria Steen.
Steen attempted last month to get a nomination to run, but she was unsuccessful. In light of what has now befallen Fianna Fáil candidate Jim Gavin, she suggested that the election should be cancelled and rerun. This would give her another bite at the cherry.
Is she serious? Does she not realise that her failure to get a nomination was a close escape from a torturous process that has left others bereft, befuddled, emotionally exhausted, a complete nervous wreck? Does she really want to go through that?
Jim Gavin’s implosion as a presidential candidate this week sent waves through the political system. Fianna Fáil, and in particular Taoiseach Micheál Martin, was left reeling from the experience, its political nous and capital shredded. Fianna Fáil was made to look like a bunch of amateurs.
But what of Gavin? He is a man with considerable achievements, both in sport and in public service. This week’s experience must have left him completely bereft and emotionally sunk. There is no doubt that it will be a while before he is fully recovered and equipped to carry on his life. He doesn’t deserve such a blow, but those are the wages of being a presidential candidate.
As Fianna Fáil TD James O’Connor put it in a statement he released on the debacle: “Six weeks ago, Jim Gavin was a private citizen and an Irish sporting hero with a passionate commitment to community and the GAA.”
That sounds like a preamble to a description of a highly-rated citizen who went on to suffer a catastrophic accident or bitter twist of fate. You might well add to such traumatic incidents the experience of running for president.
Joan Freeman knows all about it. During her career, she has served as a senator and was also the founder of Pieta House, the suicide prevention charity. She ran in 2018 as an Independent candidate.
“What I did not realise then was that fear would become the strongest emotion of the campaign,” she wrote in earlier this year. “Not ambition, not anger, not even hope — but fear.”
That fear was motivated by what exactly would appear in the media the following day, even the following hour.
Presidential elections in modern times have been largely directed towards complete inventories of all candidates’ histories and character.
This inventory can involve a trawl right back through a candidate’s life, honing in on an incident or event that ordinarily would be in the past, with no reason to have it excavated. Then, once the buried “secret” has been hauled into the light, it is presented as if it was a nefarious version of the lost arc.
That’s the situation Gavin Duffy found himself in during the 2018 campaign, for which he had received a nomination. Duffy was not a politician, but he had extensive media experience through his own professional life and as a judge in the Irish version of
During the campaign, a Sunday newspaper revealed that he had been involved in a car crash in 1978 when he was 18 years of age. A motorcyclist had been seriously injured, and Duffy was convicted of careless driving. He had also been uninsured in the vehicle in which he had been travelling, his brother’s car. The whole matter had been dealt with by the courts at the time.
Yet here it was, excavated to be presented as an exhibit of his character as a now 58-year-old man running for president as if a mistake, albeit a serious one, as a teenager rather than his record over 40 years as an adult in various roles was reflective of his character.
Duffy was being advised on the campaign by media strategist Richard Moore, who had seven years previously also worked for Sean Gallagher in the 2011 campaign.
“The thing with Gavin and car accident came out of the blue,” Moore says.
“It was going way, way back. At the time, the only thing I thought there might be an issue over was Gavin’s support for the Meath hunt because there were a lot of anti-hunt people opposed to his candidacy on that basis, and you just have to deal with that kind of thing.”
Pretty quickly, Moore saw the impact that the story was having on Duffy, his demeanour, but most particularly a vital element to any candidate’s campaign: His confidence.
“In my opinion, it had a massive impact on him,” Moore says.
Moore recalls one radio interview where Duffy appeared to be uneasy and not himself. At some point in the interview, he actually brought up the issue of the car accident unprompted. Afterwards, the adviser asked him why he’d done it.
“He said he’d been waiting for the question on it the whole time,” Moore says. “That, of course, had an impact on how he was coming across in the interview.”
Media performances in presidential elections have an elevated significance. The office at issue has practically no executive powers. There is nothing on policy that can be interrogated in any meaningful way. The electorate is so large, it cannot be humanly canvassed.
That leaves everything down to character, and one central feature is how the candidate comes across in public. Hence, if you’re losing on air, you’re in serious trouble.
The scrutiny is such that nothing is off limits, including family. Adi Roche, in the 1997 election, was subjected to what she subsequently described as a “shockingly dirty campaign”.
Roche was then and continues to be the force behind Chernobyl Children Ireland, which caters for children huge affected by the nuclear disaster at the Belarus nuclear facility in 1986. Her brother, Dónal de Róiste, had been dismissed from the Defence Forces in 1969 under a cloud, 28 years earlier prior to Roche's presidential tilt.
He was never officially told of the reason for his forced retirement, and was never subjected to a court martial, but it was suggested to him that it was to do with an alleged association with republican militants.
(A review of his case in 2022 finally found that his dismissal was an “unfair process” that was “not in accordance with the law”).
But in 1997, the incident was dragged up as if, by association, it represented some negative reflection on his sister’s candidacy. Roche was left with not just her own distress that this was dragged up, but the reality that the family had been dragged into it.
The media dig deep and long to find nuggets from a candidate’s background. Depending on your point of view, that is either digging the dirt or ensuring that the public are fully informed about the choice they are about to make.
The nature of the election means that anything which gets uncovered is subject to what Richard Moore calls presidential inflation.
“Because there is so little to write about, no policy or anything, all shaking hands and kissing babies, in the absence of anything serious, everyone focused on the individual,” he says.
“So any small, and to be fair, in some instances big, issues become inflated by the focus on the presidency. Some of these issues you wouldn’t bat an eye at them ordinarily, but it’s all inflated.”
Independent candidates are usually far more in danger of having their past raked over and inflated. Serving, or retired, politicians will be accustomed to some scrutiny so they might see it coming.
This was reflected in the current campaign when various nuggets were aired about Catherine Connolly’s past, including a controversial trip to Syria. She answered everything calmly and stood by her decisions, even if the answers weren’t complete. There is every possibility that, had she been new to politics, she would not have fared as well.
It’s not just the media that go digging into the past like a fleet of JCBs. In the 2011 campaign, Mary Davis, who had done trojan work for the Special Olympics organisation in various roles, put her name forward.
At some point, one of her team was informed that a voter had been contacted by somebody on behalf of Fine Gael who said that Davis was “a failed Fianna Fáiler” who had been appointed to several “quangos”.
At the time, the Fine Gael candidate Gay Mitchell was foundering in the polls. A party spokesperson would comment on an allegation that they had been testing out “negative messages” with focus groups.
Davis, who had never been in Fianna Fáil, felt compelled to issue a statement outlining the boards she had been a member of. She was, in effect, being totally unfairly cast as a so-called “quango queen”, hovering up fees from State bodies.
By any standards, Gavin’s blast from the past was of a more serious nature. If all the reports are accurate, his issue on the retention of rent money was not known to Fianna Fáil when they nominated him. If Fianna Fáil had, it would have known that it was likely to emerge during the campaign, considering all that has tumbled out in every campaign all the way back to 1997.
There is one common feature to all the candidates who got burned, some of them badly, in presidential campaigns. They all have had a record of public service in one form or another. Most came to prominence through roles in charities designed to assist citizens in various ways.
To that extent, their candidacy was based on their moral rectitude and public service. And yet they often emerged with their characters assailed, minor foibles inflated beyond reason, and often the subject of patently false allegations.
Running for president is a noble aspiration. It’s also undoubtedly the case that it’s not good for your health.
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