Analysis: 70-year-old pushes envelope in Ireland’s beauty contest

IN YEARS to come, historians won’t struggle to pinpoint the moment Michael D Higgins won the race to become Ireland’s ninth president – or, probably more accurately, Sean Gallagher lost it.

The soi-disant entrepreneur was riding high in the polls when he arrived at RTE television studios for the last live presidential debate.

He left with his campaign in tatters, unable to convincingly deny Martin McGuinness’s allegations that he had received the most politically damaging object in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland: “an envelope”.

Redolent with images of political sleaze, the envelope, allegedly containing a cheque for €5,000 (£4,400) from a convicted fuel smuggler, was enough to scuttle Mr Gallagher’s carefully constructed image as an independent voice.

Instead the Dragons’ Den panellist spent the dying days of the campaign struggling to shake off questions about his business dealings and personal associations with Fianna Fail, the party which presided over the most catastrophic boom and bust in the Irish state’s history.

Michael D Higgins benefited significantly from a huge swing away from his rival in the final 72 hours of the campaign.

But the 70-year-old’s victory is also a reward for an impressively “presidential” performance throughout: time and again the Labour man rejected the opportunity to engage in the negative, personal attacks that typified much of the campaign.

It would, however, be churlish to accuse Higgins of winning by default.

An experienced parliamentarian, fluent Irish speaker, published poet and committed human rights defender, he is well suited for a role that, while largely ceremonial, has seen its symbolic stock rise since the election of Mary Robinson in 1990.

There is something of the beauty pageant to Irish presidential elections, with personality often the deciding the factor. The failure of Fine Gael’s candidate, Gay Mitchell, seems to reflect his own inability to connect with voters rather a wider dissatisfaction with the governing party, which is still polling around 36 per cent.

In the end, Martin McGuinness’s candidacy was crucial. The deputy first minister of Northern Ireland blew the race wide open with his on-air allegations about Mr Gallagher’s probity, but he failed to address the concerns of many Irish voters about his own IRA past.