With the presidential campaign finally under way and the first television debate having taken place on Monday night, the impact of the very small field of candidates is becoming apparent. The fact that only three – Catherine Connolly, Heather Humphreys and Jim Gavin – made it on to the ticket has led to claims and counterclaims. On one side are accusations that democracy is being violated; on the other, that everything is grand and there’s nothing to see here.
While some of the reactions are clearly hyperbolic, there are reasons to feel uncomfortable with the rules as they stand.
First, it’s obviously not true that the failure of more than three candidates to secure a nomination somehow constitutes evidence that Ireland is not a democracy, or that democratic principles have been violated. Many democracies don’t allow any popular participation at all in the election of their head of state. Some, such as the Netherlands, Spain and the United Kingdom, apply the hereditary principle. In the world’s largest democracy, India, and in Europe’s largest, Germany, the president is elected by parliament, not by the people.
The world’s most high-profile head of state, the US president, is elected by popular vote, but under rules so idiosyncratic that receiving the largest number of votes might not guarantee victory, as Al Gore in 2000 and Hillary Clinton in 2016 discovered to their cost. Since there’s not much dispute that all those countries qualify as democracies, Ireland’s presidential election rules certainly pass muster.
The bar to secure a nomination is high, but as Prof Theresa Reidy pointed out in this paper recently, so it should be, given that the contest is to elect the first citizen of the land. Members of the Houses of the Oireachtas (TDs and senators) are empowered to nominate candidates, but they are not obliged to do so. Similarly, the power given to city and county councils is an option, not an obligation. The decision by a council not to nominate a candidate is just as valid an exercise of that power as would be a decision to nominate one.
The conditions for securing a nomination are set out in the Constitution approved by the Irish people on July 1st, 1937, not an arbitrary set of obstacles devised by a self-serving political establishment, as implied by some of the criticisms.
That said, there is something anomalous about the rules as they stand. The Oireachtas route, whereby an aspirant needs to secure the signatures of 20 TDs or senators in order to get on to the ballot paper, seems reasonable, and indeed this has become less onerous over time as the size of the Dáil increases in line with rising population.
The requirements for the council route, though, are less satisfactory, because they undoubtedly empower some political actors to prevent others from becoming candidates. Because the Constitution specifies that a candidate requires nomination by four city or county councils, a candidate with significant support among councillors could be thwarted if his or her supporters do not amount to a majority in at least four councils. In the extreme case, a candidate backed by 49 per cent of the members of every council in the country might not secure any nominations if on each council the other 51 per cent of councillors voted not to nominate anyone in order to enhance the prospects of the candidate they support.
That’s not a principle that would be seen as acceptable for standing as a candidate at Dáil elections. At present, anyone who can muster the signatures of 30 electors in a constituency earns a place on a Dáil ballot paper; there is no possibility of any other actor being able to stymie their path to a candidacy. The idea that a local majority, such as a group of one’s neighbours, could deprive a minority of the right to run a candidate would be regarded as an outlandish suggestion and decidedly anti-democratic. By the same standards, the current provisions requiring nomination by councils rather than by councillors are dubious from a democratic standpoint.
A fairer approach would be to require a candidate to get the backing of a certain number of councillors rather than of councils. Given the changing number of councillors over time, this would be better expressed as a percentage rather than a number – one that would give any candidate with a reasonably broad base of support a chance of getting on to the ballot paper. The bar might be set at, say, 5 per cent of city and county councillors – which under the present local government configuration of 949 councillors would mean that the backing of 48 councillors would be needed. It could be further refined so that these councillors would need to come from at least, say, eight different councils, to avoid the risk of local champions with little support outside their home turf getting on to the ticket.
Is any change likely? Perhaps. On the one hand, questions around the presidential nomination process tend to be discussed quite intensely once every seven years, in the lead-up to a presidential election, but are then forgotten about until the next presidential election comes round.
Changing the rules would mean amending the Constitution and holding a referendum, and it’s clear that the Government is wary of putting any issue at all to the people in the wake of the debacle of the failed Family and Care referendums in March of last year. As a result, it has so far shied away from holding a referendum even on as anodyne a topic as ratifying the Unified Patent Court agreement.
On the other hand, changing the presidential election nomination rules in the manner suggested above would unambiguously take power away from the larger parties and as such would be unlikely to engender suspicions that the motivation is self-interest on the part of the larger parties. Since there’s a reasonable chance that such a proposal would be approved by the people, it’s not unrealistic politically to envisage all-party agreement on proposing a change to the Constitution along those lines.
Michael Gallagher is co-editor of the forthcoming How Ireland Voted 2024 (Springer/Palgrave)
