It was starting to look like we might have no candidates for the presidency at all. The list of the eminences who have ruled themselves out is now considerably longer than those who haven’t; hats are disappearing from the ring at an alarming rate. Presumably somebody will eventually agree to do the job.
Latest to skedaddle this week was Seán Kelly, the Fine Gael MEP for Ireland South, only days after Joe Duffy announced he wouldn’t be walking the walk. Kelly had toyed with the idea for months and had been expected to contest the Fine Gael nomination with Mairead McGuinness. Announcing on Morning Ireland that he would not seek the nomination, Kelly quoted John B Keane that a day spent out of Kerry is a day wasted – which may well be true but hardly holds water if you already spend half the week in Brussels or Strasbourg.
Kelly would have been a formidable candidate. A fortnight ago in Dungarvan a man in a restaurant told me Kelly was “loved from Mizen Head to Malin Head”; whatever about that, he is a former president of the GAA and a prolific and repeated vote getter. Party chiefs might well have preferred a competition for the nomination, not just to introduce the eventual candidate to the public, but to test them a little too.
McGuinness – now likely to be the only Fine Gael candidate when nominations close next week – will have her own issues in the campaign. The story that she – quite legally – claimed some €800,000 in office expenses while an MEP for a premises she and her husband own might take some explaining. And she might find her closeness to Ursula von der Leyen is not an unqualified political advantage. She can expect a tough campaign.
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But at least Fine Gael has a name for the ballot paper. None of the other big parties does at this stage. This week Sinn Féin floated the intriguing possibility that Mary Lou McDonald would be its candidate – a prospect that, unlike previously, she declined to dismiss out of hand. Pearse Doherty noted that some people would find the prospect “exciting”; David Cullinane thought she would have an “opportunity to win”.
Running McDonald would give Sinn Féin a shot at winning – a long shot, to be sure (surveys show there are a lot of voters that say they will never vote for Sinn Féin), but a shot all the same. She is almost certainly the party’s strongest possible candidate.
But it would also signal a huge move from Sinn Féin: that her term as party leader is over; that Sinn Féin’s “collective leadership” – as the party describes it – has decided that she will not win the next general election and that it stands a better chance at leading a government with someone else at the helm.
Who is that? Doherty is the most obvious successor. Does he stand a better chance of winning over middle ground southern votes than McDonald? I don’t know about that. But if the party is going to replace McDonald with Pearse, I think it would mean that the party wants to fight the next election from the left, with a harder populist edge.
There is still talk of a left unity candidate. But while it looks like Catherine Connolly will be in the running, a consensus candidate with the backing of Labour and Sinn Féin seems a dim prospect. I suppose you never know.
A meeting of the leaders of the left-wing parties at Leinster House on the subject on Wednesday was – would you believe? – inconclusive. Sinn Féin wouldn’t say what it was going to do. Labour and the Greens are unenthusiastic about the prospect of Galway independent Catherine Connolly – who will launch her campaign next week – as a candidate, though she is favoured by the Social Democrats and People Before Profit. If not her the former TD and MEP Mick Wallace indicated this week he may be willing to serve. I fear this may be a case of don’t call us, Mick, we’ll call you.
No sign of any action in Fianna Fáil. For the second time in recent weeks, twice former candidate Seán Gallagher was knocking around Leinster House, discussing legislative matters, he says. Pressed on presidential ambitions, he concedes there is lots of talk around, but reckons that “the landscape will remain unclear for another six or seven weeks”. Gnomic.
Gallagher was a sort of proxy Fianna Fáil candidate in 2011. Could he fill that role again? A senior party figure responds emphatically: he could not.
It’s the prospect of the campaign, and the rigorous interrogation by the media that accompanies it, that seems to be scaring most of them off.
David Norris in 2011 is the example most often cited of someone who was almost destroyed by the campaign – but there are many others who have had cause to wonder about the wisdom of entering the contest. Norris is a man who has done his country great service. But if the campaign showed us anything it was that he had flaws that would have surfaced as president. Nobody is perfect for the job. The function of the campaign is to find out more about the imperfections of the candidates so voters can make up their minds.
The Constitution provides that if the president dies, loses grip on reality, spends too long at the sherry or is otherwise incapacitated, his or her functions can be discharged by a presidential commission consisting of the chief justice, the ceann comhairle of the Dáil and the cathaoirleach of the Seanad. The way things are going, it might be time to start thinking along those lines on a permanent basis.
