Battling for the ceremonial impotence of being an earnest President
If that were to happen, media would be thrilled, because media currently regards the presidential election as pretty close to Hamlet without the prince, or Cinderella without the princess, and the arrival of a previously unimagined candidate would set fire to the context.
We do, of course, currently have more than enough candidates to be going on with, even if some of them haven’t yet harvested enough county council eggs to make a presidential omelette: Michael D, Mary Davis, David Norris, Sean Gallagher and now Gay Mitchell.
And there are even more defeated or surrendered aspirants, one of whom is Mairead McGuinness, who, while young enough to run again for the presidency, must know that her later attempts, if they happen, would be helped if she could work out why she didn’t make it this time. And that’s not going to be easy.
Pat Cox’s defeat was at least explicable. At a time when half the nation wants to give the EU a smack in les chops, selling Mr Europe to the electorate would have been tough, and the Fine Gael electoral college decided against taking on that task, for many reasons. But none of the plethora of theories as to why Cox fell at the first vote explains why McGuinness fell at the second. She had been out on the stump for months, is Fine Gael to her back teeth, does the European gig without losing contact with her own voters and was a TV personality more recently than Cox was.
Nobody knows for sure and nobody will ever know. Which means that McGuinness is in a much more infuriating position than is Avril Doyle, who slid out under the wire and went home early once she realised she hadn’t a prayer. Mairead, however, had a prayer.
Never mind prayers, she had promises, proposers and the wind at her back.
Indeed, it could be said that, as she arrived, garbed for photographs, into the Saturday afternoon sunshine of the Regency Hotel where the convention was being held, she had everything.
As she left, just a few hours later that same day, she had nothing. Not even an explanation. Certainly no answers to the questions that must have been bubbling in her head: Had she peaked too soon? Did Mitchell win because he arrived late into the contest? Because his campaign stressed Christian Democracy? Because of his service to the party? Because of his fierce fighting capacity? Because of being from Dublin? Because of his personally-revealing speech? Because male members of the small electorate believed it was time to Park a man rather than a woman?
Answers came there none.
Fine Gael has now united around Mitchell, conscious that in the 90 years of Irish statehood, a Fine Gael candidate has never been elected president.
If they are to write an end to that situation, they must first of all stop boasting about being the biggest party in the state.
That sounds great to committed Fine Gael members who have never been able to say it before. To the rest of the population, it’s like an ex-smoker who insists on telling you how well they feel since they converted. You let on to be impressed, but you really want to tell them to take their well-being and stuff it.
More to the point, repeated claims of size and scale could activate that bit of the electorate that feels “they have enough now”.
Far from creating an impelling reason for electing a Fine Gael president, the repeated pointing out of the size of the party and the scale of their Dáil majority could quickly cement them into that most hated of entities, The Establishment. Once any party becomes The Establishment, with The Establishment’s sense of entitlement, a sizeable cohort of voters gets skittish and goes looking for an appealing anti-establishment figure. Add that to the section of the public which always goes for the alternative option, and David Norris’ chances could be greatly improved.
People don’t vote the same way in a presidential election as they do in a general election — because they’re smart: they know they have nothing much to lose by self-expression; because, since Dana found the county council route to nomination, it’s much less of a three-party contest; because they like to feel they’ve made a statement about themselves by casting their vote. Thousands of Fine Gael women abandoned Austin Curry and voted for Labour’s Mary Robinson in order to feel they were making a statement about women, about the future and how they perceived themselves.
The chances are, of course, that it will be a man who is elected this time around, since, of the potential female contenders, only Mary Davis is still standing. Although it would be more true to say not standing, but sliding, since her candidacy has not grabbed either media or public imagination. She’s defined as the woman who ran the Special Olympics. That’s no more than she was a month ago, and if she cannot find a way to become ‘sticky’ in public awareness, she would be well advised to do an Avril before the contest really gets going.
Sean Gallagher has a quite different problem. He’s likeable, identifiable, driven and competent, but is caught between a rock called Fianna Fáil and a hard place of the same name. His background is in that party and they could save themselves a lot of angst and time by endorsing him. However, given the toxicity of the Fianna Fáil brand, giving him their overt support would be like seeing a man struggling at sea and helpfully throwing him an anchor. And that’s not even addressing the fact that they haven’t got enough money to paint up the anchor before they toss it at anybody.
FINE Gael and Labour have identical challenges. They have to help internally-liked candidates become liked — a lot — by external voters who hardly know them. Fine Gael has to help Mitchell throttle back on an argumentative instinct which has served him well up to now, but which is not a strength needed in the presidential role. Likeability is a more important presidential prerequisite than is the capacity to prove a point.
Labour has to find a way to stop Michael D sounding like a parody of himself. Today FM is currently running an ad drawn from a Matt Cooper interview with the Galway man. It sounds like a skit starring Mario Rosenstock. The answers have the over-the -top quality of inspired mimicry. In fact, though, the man answering the questions is actually Michael D himself.
Wasn’t it Henry Kissinger who said that the viciousness of academic in-fighting was inversely related to the scale of the rewards? Ditto with the presidency. The campaign to elect someone to a role of ceremonial impotence is twice as nasty as any campaign electing someone to a position of power. As we’ll see. That background noise you hear is of knife-sharpening.
