Presidential candidates should get ready for campaign of nasty business

Presidential elections now come with two great myths attached to them, writes Terry Prone. 

The first is that the capacity for ordinary Joe and Josephine Soaps to get nominated by local authorities is — like the very election itself — a profound exercise in democracy. The second is that we, as upstanding right thinkers, loathe and despise the nastiness that has come to characterise these elections.

The first myth starts with the belief that no incumbent president should ever be allowed to get away with a second term without having to fight for it and beg for it.

If he or she did just waltz back into the most boring overpaid job in Ireland without us getting the chance to exercise our rights, our democratic arm might atrophy. This version of reality positions Leo Varadkar, Micheál Martin and Brendan Howlin as close to Marechal Petain as collaborators determined to stop democracy having its say.

So all hail whoever, a couple of decades back, discovered the right to go around the country, bore county councilors and defeat party political leaders who are prepared to give Michael D a free pass back into the Áras. Whoever discovered the county council route to presidential contention, according to this theory, has enriched the lives of county councilors, media, and the rest of us by allowing us to hear exciting alternative thinkers.

Seriously? Let’s be honest here that theory has considerably less objective data to support it than does the Pastafarian theory of life which requires its aficionados to wear colanders, at least on ceremonial occasions. (An ordinary sieve will do on casual Fridays.)

Stunning exposition of unexplored thinking didn’t happen during the ritual tour of county councils; visionary rhetoric was there none. None of those listening was left dreaming dreams or seeing visions.

In fact, if we’re to be brutally honest, many of the county councilors were lucky if they could still see straight after courteously listening to the greatest load of variegated twaddle ever inflicted on them. In some cases, that twaddle was accompanied by unverifiable but doubtful claims. It’s difficult to work out, for example, how Kevin Sharkey could physically have painted the number of works of art he claims to have sold in recent years. And then there was the one claiming to be an investigative journalist.

In this paper a fortnight ago, Mick Clifford, with the understated regret of one media professional reluctant to fillet another, nonetheless established that Gemma O’Doherty’s claims have little to support them. She also gave out hell to several of the councils she was wooing for votes, an approach to marketing which, in fairness, is innovative. It’s also completely crazy.

Then we had the out-by-the-side-of-it candidates. One woman in pink nicknamed Bunty Something got ten-and-a-half minutes of near-fame, and that seemed to be her objective. Then there was the Marilyn Monroe impersonator candidate who is pro-life and pro-Trump and got dug out of some councillors to so vigorous an extent you’d wonder if paramedics and the ERU should have been on standby the day she visited.

It would be difficult, looking back over the past couple of months, to prove, even in debating terms, that this kind of stuff is somehow good for the citizen, who, most of the time, ignored it, except when media wasn’t ramming it down their throats. I figure that most of the people who were clamouring so hard for the presidential election were columnists desperate to fill column inches.

Now let’s address the nastiness bit. Broadcasters are predicting oncoming nastiness as if it was like looting in the wake of an earthquake: Disgraceful activity undertaken for fun and profit, faithfully filmed for wider consumption and condemnation. Peter Casey, one of the presidential candidates, ran counter to this expectation in the first week of the campaign by saying he thought it would be a clean contest.

To which the answer has to be:

Sunshine, you can contribute to the cleanliness of this whole thing by going home and staying home for the duration, because your understanding of what’s clean needs a little examination

Here’s a guy who effectively accused Michael D of creating his own home invasion (when a woman arrived into the Áras, unbidden) to get a bit of PR out of it. Here’s a guy who tweets support of a ruler who’s murdered 7,000 of his own citizens. Here’s a guy who wraps anti-Semitism up in pseudo-admiration. Here’s a guy wanting to know what Sean Gallagher has done for us all in the last seven years, as though standing unsuccessfully for the presidency turned you into an indentured servant of the nation thereafter. If all this is this candidate’s version of clean, then we’re all goosed until this election is complete.

While I’m on the subject of Peter Casey, could someone tell him to give over with the diaspora? None of the Skype emigres think of themselves or talk of themselves as ‘The Diaspora’. The last emotional capital to be sucked out of ‘The Diaspora’ was provided by Mary Robinson’s candle in the window. The last bit of money to be sucked out of it was ‘The Gathering’.

As the eminent historian Kerby Miller has pointed out, unlike the Germans, Italians, and Hispanics who emigrated to the US in the last couple of centuries, all of whom were just egging to get back home, the Irish diaspora weren’t that pushed about returning. Where they had ended up was a lot better than where they had come from, and they were happy to express their Irishness in the odd come-all-ye and burst of simplistic patriotism.

So the message to Peter Casey needs to be “Don’t you go poking at the diaspora. They’re grand. Leave them the hell alone.”

Not that he’ll have a chance at promulgating any of his Donegal-based enthusiasms in the Áras, anyway. Not a snowball’s chance in hell does he have at getting the gig, no matter how nasty and energetic his playbook. The most frequently asked question arising from his candidacy seems to be: “How on earth did a guy with such a capacity to miss the point ever get rich?”

AT this point, all the candidates in next month’s election need to remember the joke upon which Singapore built its economic policy.

Two men are walking through the jungle when they come upon a clearing.

As their eyes adjust to the light, they see, on the other side of the clearing, a tiger staring fixedly at them. One of the men slowly kneels and begins to tightly tie his shoes.

“What are you doing?” his companion asks. “You can’t possibly outrun a tiger.”

“I don’t have to outrun the tiger. I just have to outrun you.”

The reverse of the tiger joke is the reality of this presidential election. Unless the tiger (cue growl from Michael D) gets shot or suddenly develops a terminal case of mange, the other contenders swiping at each other are just wasting money, time and energy to achieve the sum total of zilch. While convincing themselves they’re engaged in a profoundly

important democratic exercise.