Presidential debates of all shapes and sizes have outstayed their welcome

TONIGHT’S Frontline is the last Presidential Debate.

Isn’t it?

Please, let it be so. It’s beginning to feel like cruel and unusual punishment.

We’ve had more Big Debates than anybody could want. We’ve had standing-up big debates and sitting-down big debates.

We’ve had debates with audience participation and debates where the audience was barely permitted to breathe in and out. We’ve had debates with the Constitution being waved, debates with a shelf books being waved, debates with Catholicism and murder sitting side by side in the same sentence and even the TG4 debate where the presenter’s Important Folder had a starring role.

At the weekend, we had Charlie Bird’s Big Debate, which was surprising on many fronts.

It was surprising because Gay Mitchell was funny, because David Norris got dug out of a line of pumpkins and because Michael D insisted that Dana got specific. Michael D wouldn’t be a man much given to specifics himself, but when Dana said the Labour Party was out to secularise us all, Michael D demanded specific evidence.

Sean Gallagher kept it simple, learning every questioner’s name and using it while saying the same things he always says. Martin McGuinness didn’t learn anybody’s name. He doesn’t need to. He has one set of names he uses all the time, starring Nelson Mandela and Bill Clinton. But tiredness is telling on Martin, so now he mostly uses just refers to Peter Robinson. He name-checks Peter Robinson so often, he clearly thinks every mention wins him votes. He doesn’t get it that, Down Here, when we hear Peter Robinson, we go “Remind me who he is, exactly?”

It was lucky Charlie Bird’s Big Debate wasn’t broadcast at 6pm, because the whole lot of them would have had to down tools for the Angelus, one of the vital questions coming from the audience taking the killer-blow form of asking each of the participants where they stand (or kneel) on the Angelus.

They’re all for it, you’ll be glad to hear, seeing it as a great opportunity to pause and reflect on the day. (Never mind that the vast majority of Muslims might like a quite different time of the day and a quite different call to prayer and might find the Angelus redolent of a specifically Catholic ethos and therefore exclusionary of their needs.)

Mary Davis even loves the Angelus pictures, confusing those of us who hear it on radio and are never home at 6 to be enthused by the images. (I think I remember a farmer pausing, mid-haymaking, and looking reverently skywards as he clutches his stook, but that could be an Avonmore ad and not the Angelus at all.) They don’t agree on much, our Presidential hopefuls, but at least an approving consensus has emerged around the Angelus.

Bit like the prayerful consensus that emerged on TG4 about the Irish language. They’re all for that, too. No, really, they are. Truly, they are.

You might think, since only Michael D can speak it fluently, then the rest of them are not that committed to it, but you would be wrong.

Manfully and womanfully, they faced up to the issue and promised that they were going to take remedial action. They would halt in the Áras only long enough to drop the luggage in the hall and say hello to the help before heading to the nearest Gaeltacht to become lucid and fluent in Irish.

Because they are a truthful lot, we can be sure the winner will deliver on the promise, unless the winner is Michael D, whose fluency means he can concentrate on unpacking. But it will be SO interesting to see how many of the losers still go for Irish language courses after Thursday. The chances are that most of them will forget about Irish the minute the election result is in.

These Big Debates have damn all to do with democracy and everything to do with broadcaster positioning. If RTÉ TV has one, TV3 and TG4 have to have one apiece. If TV has one, radio has to have one. If mainstream media has one, Google has to have one.

Because there are so many, candidates get a kind of debate-blindness, which leads to oddities like David Norris getting worked up about tractors being repossessed. Not as worked up as he got about the pumpkins, though. Those pumpkins were lined up on stage in a row and the TV cameras were taking their pictures, which aggravated the normally good-humoured Senator no end. He said the pumpkin motif was trivialising the debate, which seemed a bit harsh, since the organisers could’ve gone for ghosts or skeletons, given the season that’s in it. When it was pointed out to him that his own team had promoted the pumpkins, he was jolly about it.

Not that Charlie Bird wanted anybody jolly. Charlie was taking the whole thing very seriously. He seemed to think all of the presidential contenders should have been visiting the people laid off by Aviva and TalkTalk. Not just visiting them, but, he said fiercely, “looking them in the eyes.”

What a horrible thought. Dear God, haven’t the Aviva and TalkTalk lads got enough problems without Presidential wannabes in front of them, ready to obey Charlie’s instructions to “look them in the eye”? There have to be laws against that kind of thing.

BUT that wasn’t all he demanded of them. Dana’s just been smote with a blow-out in non-mysterious circumstances, Michael D is limping after a broken leg sustained in Columbia (the worst kind of broken leg) David Norris has Hepatitis Something and Sean Gallagher is crippled with back pain, yet Charlie Bird wanted them to first lead the Gay Pride parade and then roll up their sleeves and clean out bedpans in A&E.

Well, OK, he didn’t get insistent about bed-pan duty but he clearly wanted all seven to prove they were really Presidential by a spot of A&E volunteering. The astonishing thing is that, like Barkus, they were all willing.

Now, the guys and girls in the Gay Pride parade are in the whole of their health and can defend themselves, but the thought of seven Presidents-to-be arriving in the Mater A&E ready to randomly assist is a step too far. Someone should get James Reilly to issue an injunction preventing invasion of our already overcrowded emergency departments.

They may be lovely people, but if you’re sitting on a hard chair nursing your outraged appendix or prostrate prostate, you don’t want to have to make small talk with Mary Davis or Gay Mitchell. Or have them look you in the eye.

In his autobiography, “Just Joe,” Joe Duffy tells a tiny heartbreaker story about how, as a child, he saw an impoverished neighbour on a bus being accidentally outed as a recipient of free food and how she walked away with her most valuable possession intact: her dignity.

At least four of the seven contenders for the Presidency will walk without hope through the next three long days. Their task will be to do it with dignity.