Not that anyone is asking, but I wouldn’t want to be president. The job does have its attractions: the money is good, you get to live in a nice house and you can work from home a lot of the time. I once heard that the president has their own private entrance into Dublin Zoo. I hope that’s true.
But once you get the job, you’re stuck there. Most of our presidents have seen out the full seven or 14 years: during which, I imagine, a lot of their time was spent having polite conversations with dignitaries, listening to boring speeches and sometimes delivering boring speeches. A president doesn’t seem to get any time off. There’s no sneaking out for a pint or idly perusing the middle aisle in Aldi.
To a degree, it robs them of their personhood, but also magnifies it. As soon as they assume office, they don’t seem to have a past. Obviously, they do. But it’s like we collectively agree to forget about the person they were before they went to live in the park. The edges are smoothed out and they are required to transform into the personification of the State.
Michael D Higgins, for instance, was (and still is) an old-fashioned leftie, and back when he was a humble TD, most voters in solidly centrist Ireland would have rejected his politics. Yet when it comes to the presidency, the considerations are different. As much as possible, the entire person has to be taken into account. In his case, the academic, the poet, the decent human being: the last quality being the most important.
The Irish are a nation of storytellers, and our president is the storyteller-in-chief
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It’s often been pointed out that while the Oireachtas, with all its squabbling and cold pragmatism, might be a reflection of who we really are, the presidency is a reflection of who we would like to be.
And we would like to see ourselves as decent people, living in a decent and compassionate society: an aspiration that seemed to emerge in the Mary Robinson era and carried on with presidents Mary McAleese and Higgins. All had their own variations, all occasionally pushed against the non-political edges of the office, but all three seemed to have an innate understanding of the power of symbolism, of presenting a collective aspiration for the kind of place we want Ireland to be.
They didn’t create that aspiration: it’s more the case that our last three presidents were a living expression of how Ireland had evolved into a European liberal democracy. It also explains why so many candidates – especially those pushing an issue – rarely made headway with the electorate. They presented themselves in two-dimensional terms. And often failed the decent human being test.
But those three presidencies also took place during decades when Ireland (for the most part) was in good shape economically: it’s human nature that people are more inclined to think about the needs of others when their own bellies are full.
But all that is threatened now. Economically, geopolitically and even militarily, our world seems to be changing at a dizzying and terrifying rate. Each 24-hour news cycle is packed with developments. There’s so much going on, it’s difficult to get a fix on what we should be worrying about, which is perhaps how certain people want us to feel.
Our president, of course, can’t protect us from any of that. But if the Irish are a nation of storytellers, then our president is the storyteller-in-chief: and as we move towards the election of Michael D’s replacement, it will be interesting to see if the story we wish to hear about ourselves will remain the same or if it has changed.
It’s possible that, in the face of so many exterior threats, the old ideas of building an inclusive Republic might seem unfeasible. Or we may recognise the essential value of those ideas – both for ourselves and for a world that may be plunging into a new Dark Age.
