Terry Prone: So you’re thinking of running for the Áras... Are you out of your mind?
Mary Robinson arriving at Áras an Uachtaráin on December 3, 1990 for her inauguration as president. Picture: Irish Examiner Archive/Denis Minihane
Well, that ends right here. I’m breaking the unwritten rule this minute, because of what Mick Clifford did on Saturday.
Clifford got a whole page to himself to examine where we are in the presidential election, which is nowhere much. This led him to suggest we go looking for some sporting hero who isn’t Conor McGregor to take up the baton.
I read his piece from start to finish, hoping he’d do the decent thing and talk about me as a putative contender. All he had to do was go: “It is believed that Prone has come under pressure to throw her hat in the ring.”
That one sentence, from a man of Clifford’s eminence, would have done it.
“It is believed” covers more than a duvet because the writer doesn’t have to specify who is doing the believing.
The “coming under pressure” is a classic claim made by people who are egging to get a position. It lets them off the hook of being grossly and self-absorbedly ambitious. They can do a Miss Piggy “Moi?” while gesturing at the unseen hordes demanding volunteer action on their part. Even the hat in the ring thing would have been good, although Clifford, in fairness, isn’t much for cliches and I do not own a hat anyway.
If he had mentioned me, I’d be on every radio programme this morning, modestly acknowledging my solid popularity with the voters, of which I have none, but we’ll gloss over that. Instead, I am forced to tell the truth in this column.
Nobody’s asked me if I’d fancy being president. Nobody. Not friend, not foe. Not in casual conversation, not in the form of a journalist flying a kite. I have been described as one of the most connected people in Ireland, yet not a one of those contacts has even fleetingly, even humourously, even teasingly, mentioned the possibility that I might run for the Áras. Crushed, I am.
Commentators keep going on about how vicious and ruinous to the candidates’ self-esteem is the presidential contest. But what about the previous non-contest, when folks like me sit in their kitchens waiting for the text that goes “This is a long shot, but would you consider a nomination for the presidential contest?”
The rejection may not be as public as when the count is complete and a candidate is told they came in second last, with their reputation in flitters around their ankles, but it’s rejection, nonetheless, leaving you unable to utter the Marlon Brando “I coulda been a contender” line with any credibility.
No, you couldn’t have been a contender, for the good reason that you never even occurred to anybody.
None of which is to suggest that I’d have gone for it, given half a chance. Just that half a chance would have been flattering and made my big sister respect me more. She has always had doubts about me as a result of a failed attempt to teach me algebra.
Sitting at home in unmentioned obscurity means you don’t even get the opportunity to to offer the “wouldn’t have been seen dead” line. Or explain, head tilted self-servingly to one side, that you wouldn’t really have the money.
If you don’t have a quarter of a mill you wouldn’t miss, afterwards, you’d be out of your mind to put yourself forward as a Michael D’s successor. We’ll come back to why you’d be out of your mind to do it, even if you did have that much loose cash.
I have put all these points to more potential and actual presidential election candidates down the years than you could imagine.
Every election, it happens. Someone with a good reputation in some area makes contact, seeking a friendly cup of coffee about nothing in particular. Sometimes you know them. Sometimes you just know of them. They arrive and tell you that they’re coming under pressure to run for the Áras.
What that actually means is that three pals, half-tore in the pub, have said they’d do a better job up there than some of the folk currently being talked about. (Or that they have a more supportive sister than I do.)
You can’t tell them you don’t believe in this pressure, so you ask instead if they’ve considered the moral cost.
They look puzzled, so you put it in proper consultant-speak: “Are you out of your frigging mind?”
They nod wisely and acknowledge that it might be tough, all right. Sometimes they line up the approval of their spouse as a shield. Sometimes they even admit that it was the spouse who recommended that they take professional advice.
“Aha,” one thinks in one’s tiny, withered heart, “your spouse is no dozer but wants a third party to be the one to tell you you’re barking.”
The problem is that most potential candidates, particularly the outliers unaffiliated to any particular political party who emerge from the woodwork around about now, are not just barking but deluded.
Ask them politely why in the name of — why they want to take on this crazy competition, and you know what you get? I swear to God, they look you fearlessly in the eye and affirm in a quiet voice that they want to make a difference. Like Mary Robinson.
Mary Robinson is always the one they pick, just as aspirant podcasters pick Alastair Campbell as their role model. You could tell them to get a grip but instead, you ask the specifics of the difference they’d like to make and to indicate to whom they’d like to make it. Nobody home on either, ever.
You don’t bother to ask how they’d handle a mansion with multiple staff, because the sad thing about Ireland is that nobody thinks they have notions, but everybody does, really, and presidential wannabes would love to be waited on hand and foot.
That’s the bit that ruled me out long before nobody asked me.
One of the better things about being in business is that you encounter your staff in the office, rather than at home. Which means you can be a proper slob there. You couldn’t be a slob in the Áras. Plus, you’d have no freedom. Every day, some high-level servitor would come to tell you that the new ambassador from Whereverthehell would be in at 10.30am to present their credentials and here’s a briefing note about that country.
Not only are you not in charge of what you do on any given day, you have to do homework as well. You’d have to be mad to even contemplate it.
Being not mentioned as even worthy of consideration, though — that’s another issue entirely. In that context, I can confirm that I will get over the Clifford insult. Not quickly, though.
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