It’s no criticism of Mary McAleese to say we need a democratic choice

THERE’s a consensus beginning to develop, and I think it’s condescending, patronising, and maybe even a bit dangerous.

You can detect it in large sections of the media and in a good deal of the political establishment. It is that there's no need for a presidential election this year, provided that President McAleese is willing to accept a second term. And the consensus, as well as being all the things I've already mentioned, is totally wrong.

"Hasn't she been a great president?"

"Didn't she surprise us all?"

"Doesn't she represent Ireland very well abroad?"

"Isn't she very warm and friendly and very accessible?"

You hear all these things about President McAleese all the time, and I don't disagree with any of them.

President McAleese once spent some time with my daughter, Mandy, and treated her throughout as an equal.

She has spent many hours with disabled people and others who are frequently marginalised, and I admire her greatly for that.

But it's not up to the media, nor to any section of the political establishment, to decide that President McAleese should have her mandate renewed. That ought to be a matter for the people. In fact the people, and only the people, have a right to pass judgement on their elected president. There seems to be a view growing again that the presidency should only be contested when there is a vacancy. That's nonsense and it's totally unfair to the people of Ireland.

We've been through a period where there was no presidential election for 17 years, and it damaged the office and the people's perception of the office. We should none of us be prepared to agree to another 14-year gap.

I should, I suppose, emphasise that all this is written on my own behalf, as an Irish citizen, and not as a Labour party activist. There are many in the Labour party who want to see an election, and there are some who are doubtful so what I am not doing in this piece is setting out a party position. Some won't believe that, I know. But I was intrigued to remember that as I write this, it's actually the 14th anniversary of the day back in 1990 that Dick Spring gave a radio interview saying that he was so convinced of the importance of a presidential election that he was prepared to run himself to ensure that there was a democratic contest.

He achieved his objective that year by ensuring that there was indeed a contest among Mary Robinson, Brian Lenihan and Austin Currie. That contest not only ended the Fianna Fáil stranglehold on the office of the presidency, but it also gave a new meaning and, at the very least, symbolic importance to the office.

We all forget now, seven years after she was elected, that our current President was by no means the unanimous choice of the people back then.

In fact she was far from the unanimous choice of Fianna Fáil, and some of the scars left behind from her selection still ache.

She wasn't a member of the party at the time, though she described it as her "natural homeland." She beat Albert Reynolds and Michael O'Kennedy to the Fianna Fáil nomination, and then went on to win the highest office in the land in a campaign that was among the toughest and most bruising that most political activists can remember.

So lest there be anyone who thinks that it wouldn't be fair to our president to put up a candidate against her, let them remember that she has shown us already that she is no wilting violet when it comes to an election campaign.

She has two options now, assuming she wants to run again (and I think that's a reasonable assumption).

Under the Constitution, she can nominate herself or she can agree to be nominated by 20 members of the Oireachtas. Of course, anyone else who secures the support of 20 members of the Oireachtas or of four county councils can run against her. And in principle, that's the way it should be.

But there are other good reasons apart from the principle of a democratic mandate. The office of president develops or stagnates in direct proportion to the involvement of the people. We, the people, have to decide not just what kind of person we want, but what kind of office.

And I have to say that it seems to me that President McAleese has been a very good person in office, but that the office itself has diminished during her tenure.

FOR many years, the office was an honorific one it was the greatest honour we could bestow on elder statesmen. It gradually also developed a representative role, especially abroad. Under President Robinson it took on a much more pronounced activist and participative role, within the limits of the Constitution.

Under President McAleese that activist and participative role, while not abandoned, has taken second place to the much more traditional and conservative representative role.

President McAleese has performed that representative role exceptionally well, at times brilliantly. But I would argue that the role of the office needs to be continuously stretched, and 14-year terms are no way to develop anything. The day she secured the nomination within Fianna Fáil, she said herself that "the next presidency would straddle the second and third millennia in an Ireland that was now very complex." Most of the time since (though not all), the approach of the office under President McAleese has been a bit more comfortable than complex.

But I didn't set out to write this piece with the intention of criticising President McAleese. That wouldn't be justified in the first place she has been a fine president, and has earned the loyalty of the people. What she has not earned (and hasn't claimed either, to be fair) is the right to be assumed into a second term without any questioning or asserting of a mandate.

Just by way of getting my own biases out of the way, I would love to see Michael D Higgins nominated for the office, and would consider it an honour to work for his election. No, I am not saying this at his request or with his knowledge, or with his approval. But he can bring a track record of ideas, of debate and protest on issues of social justice throughout the world, and also of action (in the arts, in the revitalising of the film industry, in the defence of free speech, in the promotion of the Irish language).

Whoever else was involved in a campaign, the inclusion of President McAleese and Michael D Higgins, with no doubt candidates of other parties and none, would make for a potentially very exciting period of political discourse.

Anyone setting out to beat President McAleese would have a tough battle on their hands. But isn't that how the best democratic decisions are made? And as we know, presidential elections in Ireland have a way of throwing up the result least expected at the start. The only thing they all have in common is that when the people get the right to choose, the people win in the end.