The presidency - Questions that can’t be dodged

THE phoney war over the presidency has finally — and thankfully — ended. In a little over three weeks’ time President Mary McAleese’s successor will be elected.

Only time will tell if all seven candidates can reach polling day without having to reacquaint themselves with skeletons they would far prefer stay silent and undisturbed in dark, half-forgotten corners.

What we do know is that our next president will have far less popular support than any since Mary Robinson was elected our seventh president in 1990. Such a disparate field of contenders will inevitably divide the electorate, sometimes along unexpected lines.

Traditional Fianna Fáil voters may have to swallow a bitter pill — vote for life-long opponents Gay Mitchell, Michael D Higgins or another candidate or support their party’s nemesis — Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness. Some of them will feel they are voting for their party’s future rather than a president because a triumphant Sinn Féin will make their recovery even less plausible than it already seems. The old, tribe-or-State dilemma that played such a corrosive role in Fianna Fáil’s recent past manifests itself one more time. Hoist on their own petard in a most delicious irony.

We can also anticipate a far less charismatic incumbent in Áras an Uachtaráin than we have become used to. Though we have had months of bluster and overreaching ambition we have not had one memorable line much less and sit-up-and-take-notice idea from any of the contenders. Mundane, stiflingly ordinary or suspect candidates, and a deep disenchantment with our political establishment, will take Irish political analysis to places it has never been before when this election is eventually parsed.

Only two candidates — Martin McGuinness and David Norris — have faced anything approaching a professional grilling about their past and that will, rightly, continue. The other five have enjoyed a campaign honeymoon but they can expect that to change. Many legitimate questions about age, funding, links with various organisations, extreme or otherwise, hang over this campaign and will undoubtedly raise more than one hare before October 27.

It is instructive though that the two candidates under the most concentrated focus have adopted more or less the same disingenuous, stonewalling approach.

Senator Norris insists that he has dealt with all of the issues surrounding interventions he made in a former partner’s conviction for statutory rape in Israel. He may have convinced himself of this but maintaining that position will fatally undermine his prospects.

Martin McGuinness, deploying an age-old Sinn Féin tactic, is shooting the messenger insisting that the public is no longer interested in his past. By trying to suggest the existence of a “media obsession” about his part in the outrages of our recent history, Mr McGuinness is trying to put the most legitimate questions about his character off limits.

It would be a dangerous travesty if he, or any other candidate, reached polling day without giving plausible, unambiguous and clear answers to the simplest but most important questions.