70-year-old poet is new president of Ireland

The Irish Labour Party veteran, poet and civil rights campaigner, won an unprecedented swing in support following the spectacular implosion of his main rival on live television.

Higgins claimed that his triumph had been built on a left-leaning campaign and promised that his seven-year term would be marked by inclusion and transformation.

The 70-year-old’s resounding victory was obvious within an hour of ballot boxes being opened just days after favourite Sean Gallagher publicly came off the rails during a televised debate.

Martin McGuinness, the Sinn Fein candidate and Northern Ireland’s deputy first minister, came third in the vote. He decided to run despite a conviction for terrorism as an IRA commander.

“I feel a little overwhelmed,” Higgins said. “I’m very, very happy. It is something I prepared for, something I thought about for a long while. I am very glad as well that it is a presidency built on a campaign that emphasised ideas. I hope it will be a presidency that will enable everybody to be part of and proud of.”

Higgins secured the victory for Labour – the second in a day as the party edged towards a by-election win – after the other six candidates conceded defeat.

Gallagher, the poll topper with a 15-point margin as recent as last Sunday, saw his support vanish to 28 per cent in a defeat blamed on his ties to Fianna Fail, the party most associated with the Irish Tiger’s economic demise.

Higgins will be inaugurated on Armistice Day, 11 November, the day after the current president, Mary McAleese, leaves office.

It was McGuinness, running third in the poll, who secured a tactical victory by dropping the bombshell that Gallagher had requested and personally received a ¤5,000 (£4,390) cheque from a businessman with a conviction for tax fraud and fuel smuggling.

With wife Trish by his side, Gallagher yesterday admitted it had been a bruising campaign before he paid tribute to Higgins.

McGuinness, who is to return to his role in Northern Ireland’s Legislative Assembly, later dismissed suggestions that he was in the race for tactical, party political reasons.

“I was in the contest to win,” he said.

Two independents at the bottom of the polls, Mary Davis, who headed the Irish division of the Special Olympics, and Dana Rosemary Scallon, former Eurovision winner and Eurosceptic MEP, were excluded on the first count.

Labour, the junior party in coalition with Fine Gael in government, was last night celebrating a double victory with the prospect that councillor Patrick Nulty will win the seat in Dublin West left vacant following the death of former Fianna Fail finance minister Brian Lenihan last year.

It will be the first time since 1982 that a governing party has won a by-election.

But Gay Mitchell was on course for the worst performance in history by a presidential candidate from Fine Gael.

His failure to register left him vying with Senator David Norris, a former Trinity College Dublin professor and James Joyce scholar, for the fourth and fifth spots. Norris was the first candidate to acknowledge that Higgins had won yesterday.

Justice minister Alan Shatter was yesterday forced to deny allegations that Fine Gael failed to fully support presidential flop Mitchell. He said he did not think his defeat had anything to do with the party, saying the vote was more about personality than politics.

His presidential campaign in particular failed to set the country alight amid an uninspiring list of candidates and was peppered by a number of gaffes, including leading a group of almost 40 politicians, along with Enda Kenny, the current taoiseach, into the lingerie department of Debenhams in Cork, in a scene reminiscent of the hit Irish television comedy Father Ted.

Mary McAleese was first elected president of Ireland in 1997, when she became the country’s second female head of state after a career as a barrister and a journalist. She was re-elected to the post in 2004. She used her time in office to address issues such as equality social inclusion, anti-sectarianism and reconciliation.

Her predecessor was Ireland’s first woman president Mary Robinson.