Why Gerry Adams is right not to run for the seven-year sentence in the Áras

THE way you answer one simple question defines how old you are, that simple question being “How are you?” or any of its variations, like “How’s life been treating you?”

In your 20s, the answer you’re likely to give is about what kind of degree you got or the year you spent in Australia.

In your 30s and 40s, it’s the career or the children. Most likely the children. It’s more socially acceptable to roll one’s eyes over a mention of three toddlers under five than to announce you made partner. Although, to be honest, most people who make partner while still in the bloom of youth tend to find ways to let the glad tidings emerge.

Once people hit 50, when they meet someone they have not seen for a decade or two, and are asked how they are doing, the answer is a medical litany. Two by-passes and a liver transplant. Or two hip replacements and a touch of diabetes.

I know this because of a party I accidentally gate-crashed last week. I arrived at RTÉ’s radio centre to contribute to Mary Wilson’s Drivetime programme, to find it awash in security bollards, garda officers and VIPs. Flatteringly, the receptionist thought I was one of them. (The VIPs, I mean, not the bollards.)

“You will all be going down together,” she told me.

I could not figure how Mary Wilson was going to cope with more than a hundred interviewees simultaneously, but got distracted by hugs and howyas from some of the celebs, last encountered 10 or 20 years back. It gradually became clear that they were present to register the retirement of Fr Dermod McCarthy from his RTÉ religious affairs post, and that, although they seemed happy to include me in the party, I’d better separate myself and go be a humble reporter. Which I did.

Emerging from the studio, I was three steps up the stairs before I realised a procession was heading down the staircase from the top, led by an army officer. Behind him came the President and her husband. I retreated to the wall, attempted invisibility, and failed. President McAleese swept over to me, embraced me and asked after the health of all belonging to me by name, before heading off to the party. Since she’d encountered me only once before, in a crowd, for 30 seconds, it was a stunning feat of memory, attention and civility.

When I reached the car and turned on the radio, it told me — in one of those coincidences that’s minor-league eerie — that Gerry Adams had just announced he would never, under any circumstances, run for the presidency. First time I was ever in total instantaneous, high identification agreement with the Sinn Féin man. Now, admittedly, Gerry Adams’ chances of being asked to run for the presidency would be just a tad bigger than mine, but I could always do a Dana and run as an independent.

“I may not be the president,” Dana pointed out, after her defeat, in a line provided by the late Jonathan Philbin Bowman, “but I am a precedent”.

The question is to what degree that precedent will inspire others to take on the might of the big political parties when Mary McAleese relinquishes Áras an Uachtaráin. And why anybody in their right mind would want the job.

Rumours are already circulating about prominent women in Irish public life who reportedly yearn and lust for it. Every taoiseach and former taoiseach is assumed to want it, some of them undoubtedly do.

For politicians, for generations, the presidency offered a prestigious retirement home with the odd solemn outing. Like one of those fellowships that require you to give three lectures a year and otherwise hang about ready to be drained of the wisdom you gained in the course of a long political life.

For a brief period, the presidency seemed to hold the same attraction for prominent lawyers, but tribunals, with their present-day promise of prestige, power and presence, and their long-term promise of a place in history, seem to present an attractive alternative. OK, neither Mahon nor Morris get a Phoenix Park residence or overseas trips, but tribunals are a good gig, nonetheless, not least because you don’t have to travel Ireland in a bus beforehand, survive a Prime Time debate and watch your rivals digging in your past to reveal and revive your shame at cogging your homework in secondary school, getting a tattoo of a butterfly on your buttock when briefly blotto, or saying something insensitive about some vulnerable group or individual in a moment of impatience.

The way we appoint the head of a tribunal, as opposed to a president, is a strange paradox. A position allowing a man to unravel the lives and reputations of citizens is awarded based on qualifications and experience, without public interrogation or competition. Yet the position of president, carrying much less power to damage and destroy, can not be so awarded. For some reason, the tradition holds that we will get a better president if we subject the contenders to turmoil, travail and public debate, with — in the case of Adi Roche — a little torture of their immediate family thrown in for good measure.

The one left standing after this gruelling process then gets thumped — if she is a woman — for her hairstyle, her clothes sense and her views, historic and current. It’s so long since we had a male president, God alone knows what will happen the next one. Thing may go back to normal, as defined by a great Dublin Opinion cartoon showing Dev, the week after his inauguration, sleeping in a deck-chair in the Áras grounds, with the one-word caption — “PARKED”. Or the new man may find the rules and level of critical scrutiny have radically changed for his gender, too.

The president is like a child on one of those spiral strings attached to a parent. The child may kid itself it is on its own. The child may initiate progress and may introduce itself to others. The child may be admired, praised and patted. But any time the child loses the run of itself, it gets speedily put in its place by a parental yank on the string. Mary Robinson and Mary McAleese each, in different ways, chafed at the level of control Governments have over their activities and public communications. Mary McAleese pushed the boundaries with remarkable success, mainly because she tends to favour asking forgiveness rather than permission and because her Northern background allowed her to create her own fire-free zone on that area.

Ms Robinson became a feminist icon. Ms McAleese made a major contribution to what she had promised at the outset: bridge-building between communities in the North.

The next president will have a much harder row to hoe, because of the absence of breakthrough issues. They face a seven-year sentence of socialising, speechmaking, listening to groups and individuals praising each other and hugging half-remembered acquaintances.

I’d rather be dead…