Peter Geoghegan: Irish eyes on the prize of president

AS ANYONE who has ever been in a bar room argument knows, the intensity of feeling in a dispute is often inversely proportional to the value of what’s at stake. This isn’t just a truism, it’s a law: Sayre’s law, to be precise. Formulated by Princeton economist and historian Charles Issawi to account for the bitter squabbles witnessed during academic disputes, Sayre’s law certainly holds true for the current campaign to succeed Mary McAleese as president of Ireland.

With few powers beyond the ceremonial, the position of the Republic’s head of state was – at least until the election of the enigmatic Mary Robinson as the first female president in 1990 – essentially a retirement home for political big beasts.

Sean T O’Kelly, Patrick Hillery and, most notably, Eamon De Valera all made the transition from cabinet table to Aras an Uachtarain, the president’s official residence in Dublin, with little – or in some cases, no – opposition.

The president’s power might be far more symbolic than real but the ferocity of the battle to win next Thursday’s vote is anything but a phoney war. This year’s field – seven candidates in all – is by far the largest and features a much wider range of characters and political persuasions than previous contests: for the first time Sinn Féin has a candidate, Martin McGuinness, Fianna Fail does not, and four of the nominees are running as independents.

One of those non-party candidates, Sean Gallagher, has somewhat surprisingly emerged as the front-runner. An opinion poll published last weekend in the respected Sunday Business Post newspaper put the panellist on the Irish version of Dragons’ Den on 39 per cent. His nearest rival, Labour’s Michael D Higgins, commanded the support of just 27 per cent of those polled.

But the abiding story of the campaign so far has been the scandals involving various independent candidates, the spectre of McGuiness’s IRA past and the failure of Fine Gael to translate their Dail dominance into an effective presidential challenge.

The first candidate to fall was Senator David Norris. During the summer, Norris, who announced his intention to run back in March, seemed a shoe-in. An openly homosexual university lecturer, a Joyce expert and a civil rights activist, the senator was seen by many in metropolitan Ireland as the perfect antidote to the traditional politics of Fianna Fail and Fine Gael. After more than two decades of female presidents, Norris’s gender was also in his favour.

But in July, Norris was forced to resign following the revelation that he had written to an Israeli court asking clemency for his former partner Ezra Nawi, who had been convicted of the statutory rape of a 15-year-old Palestinian boy in 1992.

He has since re-entered the race but, on the back of a series of weak performances during televised debates, his support has all but dried up. From a high of 38 per cent in June, Norris registered just 7 per cent last weekend.

A sex abuse scandal also derailed the campaign by Dana Rosemary Scanlon, best known for her 1970 Eurovision-winning hit All Kinds of Everything, to take the Aras on an independent, strongly Catholic platform. Scanlon, an unsuccessful candidate in 1997, was always unlikely to poll more than 10 per cent but allegations concerning her brother will not play well to her religious base.

Meanwhile, Derry native Martin McGuinness’s inability to appear detached and statesmanlike amid continued questioning of his IRA past has hampered his appeal before Sinn Féin’s core vote. Nominating the deputy first minister of Northern Ireland was a bold move but as doubts about his suitability for office have lingered, support for McGuinness has ebbed away.

Sinn Féin’s intransigence, so effective in Northern Ireland, has not crossed the border well. Last week, when RTE television presenter Miriam O’Callaghan asked the Sinn Féin candidate about his IRA membership during a live debate, McGuinness reacted angrily. Afterwards he demanded a one-to-one meeting with O’Callaghan, a firm favourite among Irish viewers, and dismissed the debate as “trial by television”.

The Republic’s electorate is unlikely to reward such an intemperate response to what many see as legitimate questions for a would-be head of state.

On the opposite side of the spectrum – both in terms of politics and personality – is Fine Gael’s Gay Mitchell. Having won 76 seats in February’s general election, in the process emerging as the largest contingent in the Dail for the first time in their history, Enda Kenny’s party would have hoped to secure the presidency too. In the end, a series of internal disagreements over candidate selection was a harbinger of a hapless campaign: Mitchell, an MEP with a propensity towards the technocratic, has failed to connect with voters and could struggle to reach even the 12.5 per cent threshold needed to recoup election expenses under Irish law.

Fine Gael’s coalition partner, Labour, has fared a little better. Party president Michael D Higgins is well-liked with a pleasing, avuncular demeanour and over 25 years Dail experience. So far Higgins has performed capably in live debates and profited from the demise of his rival for the urban middle class vote, Norris. He continues to struggle in rural and working class areas, where support for entrepreneur, businessman and putative political neophyte Sean Gallagher has surged over the past two weeks.

Previous Irish presidential elections have been bellwethers of wider change: Mary Robinson’s victory at the start of the 1990s portended a decade of social and economic liberalisation. Gay Mitchell’s inability to make an impact coupled with the emergence of Sean Gallagher could be interpreted as a shift in the Fine Gael/Fianna Fail civil war tectonics of Irish politics – to do so would, however, be a mistake.

Gallagher is standing as an independent – and has castigated previous Fianna Fail administrations’ handling of the Irish economy – but is himself a former member of that party’s national executive who, as a builder, was close to many of the key players in Ireland’s disastrous construction boom.

That a candidate who describes himself as coming from the Fianna Fail “gene pool” is on the verge of winning the presidency less than nine months after his spawning party were decimated at a general election, suggested that reports of Fianna Fail’s demise have been greatly over-stated.

While Fianna Fail wisely eschewed putting forward a presidential candidate in the wake of February’s drubbing, a Gallagher victory would be a boon for the most successful political party in Irish history.

Whether it comes to this depends on a number of factors, not least the Irish electoral system. Ireland uses the single-transferable vote for both general and presidential elections, and the winner on Thursday will almost certainly be decided on transfers.

Adrian Kavanagh, an election expert at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, believes the destination of Martin McGuinness’s transfers will be crucial. “If McGuinness finishes third his transfers could settle it. Gallagher’s outscoring Higgins on McGuinness transfers by 36 per cent to 9 per cent. If the polls stay constant between now and then, that could decide the race for Gallagher.”

Back in 1990, Mary Robinson declared: “I was elected by the women of Ireland, who, instead of rocking the cradle, rocked the system.”

Regardless of who emerges victorious from Thursday’s vote, anyone expecting Ireland’s next president to shake-up the political system so radically is likely to be disappointed.