Michael D Higgins has been president for a very long time – so long, in fact, that the idea of the presidency as an institution independent of his peculiar astringent charisma, and of the Irish electorate’s general affection and regard for him, can seem somehow abstract. I am speaking personally here, but I presume I am not alone in feeling that the idea of electing a new president seems almost like a kind of category error, a syllogism whose logical propositions are fundamentally flawed. The president is Michael D Higgins. There cannot be a new Michael D Higgins. Therefore, there cannot be a new president.
Part of this has to do with Higgins’s outsize presence in Irish public life over the 14 years of his presidency. He was, famously, unafraid of pushing against the constitutional boundaries of his position, and of ignoring the legal and conventional definition of the role as an apolitical one. This was a source of frustration for the Government, but less so for the citizens he represented – or at least those of us who tended to agree with his frequent vehement pronouncements on questions of climate justice, the catastrophic failures of capitalism and, in recent years, the genocide in Gaza.
During his tenure in the Áras, I came to understand the presidency as playing a particular kind of role in the psycho-politics of Irish life. To put it in crudely Freudian terms, the president represented the electorate’s superego: a projection of the nation’s idealised view of its best self. Amid the dire degradations of global politics over the past decade and a half, there was something obviously flattering, and reassuring, in having such a person as head of state – a left-wing man of letters unafraid to take a stand on the big moral questions of our time.
The president, in other words, represented how we wanted the world to see us, and how we wanted to see ourselves. The Government, the people we elected to actual political power, was another matter entirely. In the practical business of actual politics – the business, in Freudian terms, of the ego – such ideals could only hold so much sway.
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During Higgins’s presidency, I sometimes found myself explaining to non-Irish friends that, yes, our head of state was indeed a poet and an honest-to-God public intellectual, but that the whole point of such a figure was that he had no actual political power; that in fact, to put it somewhat cynically and glibly – as I was not above doing – the whole point of such a figure was to encourage foreigners to gaze upon our country with open admiration and no small amount of jealousy, while allowing us to keep electing the same two centre-right parties to run the place.
Certainly, some of the people who now have their sights set firmly on the Áras seem somewhat unclear on what the role actually entails. Gareth Sheridan – a previously fairly obscure entrepreneur who is aiming to become the youngest person ever to run for president – has publicly talked about his campaign as motivated by a desire to address the housing crisis.
Maybe it’s purely a timing issue, in that the next general election isn’t for another four years, but if Sheridan really wanted to do something to address the housing crisis – other, that is, than securing himself, rent-free, a large 18th century Palladian mansion in the middle of the Phoenix Park, complete with mature formal gardens – it would make a lot more sense to run for the Dáil.
He certainly wouldn’t be the first person to believe he could parlay a background as an entrepreneur to get himself elected president. One argument for a public honours system is that it might be a way of throwing some prestige-chum to the type of person who would otherwise seek the presidency as the next step up from an Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year nomination. I could make my peace with a Sir Sean Gallagher, a Lord Peter Casey, even a Baron von Flatley, if it meant these guys staying well clear of presidential elections.
I could fairly be accused here of excessive negativity about the whole enterprise: of knowing what I don’t want in a president, but with no clear sense of what I do want. But I imagine I am not alone in this. There is, I suspect, a kind of general vagueness about what the president of Ireland actually does, what he or she actually is. First citizen, yes. head of state, yes, true enough. (I’m just glancing through the Constitution here, and it says here “supreme commander of the armed forces”? I’ll admit that this was news to me.) But it’s largely at the symbolic level that the role of president operates.
Our current President has been, for all his slightness as a physical presence, a great deal larger than the institution of the presidency. Over the years in which he has inhabited it, the role has been stretched well beyond its original constitutional measure, which is perhaps one reason why there is now a sense of a lack of plausible candidates to fill it.
Many of the names being floated for the job at present seem plausible enough. I’ve never been a particular follower of Gaelic football, and so I must admit that when the Taoiseach endorsed Jim Gavin as a presidential candidate last week, I was a little hazy on who he actually was. He seems like a standup guy – a well-regarded manager of the Dublin team, who seems to have had a distinguished career in the Defence Forces. Do these things suggest he would be a good president? I don’t know. Maybe?
[ Jim Gavin comes with his own presidential parachute and ticks all the boxesOpens in new window ]
And then there’s Bob Geldof, whom I definitely didn’t have to Google when I heard he was considering a run. What kind of president would he make? Would it even really matter all that much? Like a lot of people, I have complicated feelings about Live Aid. But he also wrote Rat Trap. That’s a pretty catchy song. Sure, what the hell, let’s give it a go. It seems unlikely that a President Geldof would remain obediently within the constitutional bounds of his role. But do we even necessarily want that any more? That’s not a rhetorical question: I’m genuinely asking.
Ultimately, the only people we can all agree should represent us internationally have either already been president – Mary Robinson, Michael D Higgins, maybe Mary McAleese – or are safely dead. And so perhaps we should just make a couple of adjustments to the Constitution, and convert the presidency into a posthumous position. It would be a nice way to collectively atone our national failure to venerate our greatest citizens during their natural lives. The ghost of Edna O’Brien would certainly bring some style and glamour to the Áras.
