The presidential candidates have spoken, now the people will decide

SINN Féin will decide who the next President of Ireland will be.

And the irony is that it won’t be Martin McGuinness.

One has to assume that the latest three polls, all taken at much the same time and showing a remarkable consistency, are right. And what they say is very simple. This is a two-horse race that could well go right down to the wire. Right now it looks as if it will take the elimination of five candidates. The last one of those standing is likely to be Martin McGuinness, and it is his transfers that will decide the outcome.

You already know who I’ll be voting for. Michael D Higgins has stood for equality and fairness, in Ireland and around the world, every day of his working life. He has precisely the values we need in a President in a time of austerity. If anyone can act as a social conscience for a government grappling with decisions about where to cut and how much, he can — and no one who knows him would ever doubt that about him. And he brings vast experience to the job, the kind of experience that will enable him to deal with whatever political complexities and constitutional nuances the job throws up.

And while I’m wearing my heart on my sleeve, I might as well tell you that I’ll be voting a strong number two for Mary Davis. She has the same capacity as Michael D to exert a social conscience, and has spent an energetic and extremely competent lifetime breaking down barriers.

Mary Davis can claim credit for example (though I’ve never heard her do it) for persuading the leaders of countries like China and Russia to share a platform with people with intellectual disabilities, and to finally begin to open their eyes to the evils of institutional care in their own countries.

I won’t be able to bring myself to vote for Seán Gallagher, I’m afraid. I’ve only met him once, and he seemed a very nice man. Mind you, he has an oddly familiar phrase for every occasion. In the speech I heard him make he talked about how a teacher had a huge influence on him when he was a struggling child. This teacher had taken him to one side and said “Seán, I have something I want to share with you — if you can dream it, you can become it”. This phrase, Gallagher said, had become a mantra for him throughout his life.

I was curious about the phrase, and looked it up afterwards. You’ll find it easily enough. It’s widely attributed to a man called William Arthur Ward, who died in 1994. Someone is building a website dedicated to the memory of this “author, educator, and motivational speaker”, whose works and phrases are widely quoted, apparently, in the Readers’ Digest and other worthy publications. The good Dr Ward had dozens of these useful quotations — like “a warm smile is the universal language of kindness”, or “a cloudy day is no match for a sunny disposition”.

Maybe Gallagher’s teacher read the phrase in the Reader’s Digest and passed it on to the young and impressionable boy, or maybe Gallagher has just misremembered where he heard it.

The thing I really don’t understand about him is why he doesn’t run as what he really is — a Fianna Fáil candidate. He says again and again that people shouldn’t be criticised for belonging to a political party, but he seems so ashamed of his own membership of Fianna Fáil that he’s running as a closet member of the Party instead. As the saying goes, Fianna Fáil runs through him like a stick of rock.

The only possible conclusion, despite his wide-eyed innocence about the whole issue, is that he made a calculated decision that he couldn’t possibly win as a Fianna Fáil candidate and therefore decided to bury his past.

I’ve known people over the years who have resigned from political parties on an issue of principle, or because they fundamentally disagreed with something their party had done. I’ve even known people who left their political parties because they felt they’d been mistreated in some fashion. Seán Gallagher is the first politician I’ve ever come across who decided to disavow his political past because it was inconvenient to his career.

I have a funny feeling that if I decided to repudiate the party I’ve been a member of all my adult life, and everything I’ve always believed in, just because it got in the way of some career decision, I’d have a difficult time living with it. But I’m equally sure that I wouldn’t be let get away with it. If I was parading myself around in this election as an independent candidate in this election, for instance, I’d be greeted with hoots of derision every time I made the claim.

In the time and space available, I should probably tell you, for the sake of completeness, that I will also be voting yes in both referenda. I’ve read the concerns expressed, mainly by distinguished lawyers (who have their own very particular view of the world) about the proposal to allow Oireachtas enquiries and investigations.

YES, giving those powers to the Oireachtas will require a change in culture and a much more non-partisan approach to the work. But the change is long overdue. Parliaments everywhere have the power to carry out investigations in the public interest. They are carried out in full view — often on live television — and in open democracies they don’t result in kangaroo courts.

There is nothing in the proposals in front of us that will either weaken the independence of our judges nor undermine anyone’s right to go to court to vindicate their constitutional rights. And I have to say there is something spectacularly ludicrous and self-serving about a group of independent TDs, who only a few months ago lectured us all about the irrelevance of the Dáil and the crying need for reform, now telling us that TDs shouldn’t be given the power to enquire into matters of public importance.

Anyway, I’m just telling you how I’m going to vote, and why — I’m not going to tell you how you should vote. But if it’s not too much of an impertinence, I am going to tell you that on Thursday, your vote is the thing that matters most.

The election campaign we’ve just seen has had its ups and downs. There haven’t been too many high points, I suppose. But the process has worked so far — it has given us seven candidates of different shapes and sizes to choose from. There’s just one last step to take now. We make the Presidency ours, beholden to us the people, by going out to vote. It’s a unique opportunity to help shape, in some small way, the future of our own community.

Let’s make the most of it.