It’s time to bury Seamus Brennan’s famous analogy for the high-stakes political face-off. It took Jim Gavin’s hapless foray into the arena to nail the idea that senior hurling – or football in Gavin’s case – is any preparation for the modern political trenches.
The only surprise is that some bought into the idea in the first place.
It’s over three-quarters of a century since senior hurler Jack Lynch became the poster child for the GAA celebrity-to-candidate route, a time when “a complete lack of a political pedigree was compensated for by having won six All-Ireland hurling and football medals,” as professor of politics at Dublin City University Donnacha Ó Beacháin put it.
But the short version of the story rarely includes the boring detail where Lynch, a practising barrister, had the humility to decline the initial invitation to stand, insisting he needed some experience first.
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There is a skill to politics that is rarely acknowledged, partly because it threatens the popular view that anyone can do it.
Aspiring Fianna Fáil leader Jim O’Callaghan alluded to it during the party’s emotional reckoning last week. Everyone thinks they can be a politician, but it’s a hard job, he said, one where you have to see around corners – and not everyone can do it. Whatever one’s views of politicians in general, it takes a particular kind of individual to remain courteous while being called “corrupt” or “a c**t” while picking up the milk on one side, and being accosted by a distressed constituent on the other.
It’s difficult to fathom how a taciturn political naïf like Gavin would have coped with the demands of a full presidential campaign.
The blurry narrative about “a co-ordinated smear campaign” against Catherine Connolly – signalled as such all of six weeks ago by People Before Profit’s Paul Murphy – slots into sharper focus when compared with the genuine, almost-forgotten smear campaign against Gavin in mid-September.
[ Catherine Connolly accuses FG of politics of ‘fear’ and ‘smear’ in latest debateOpens in new window ]
Posts garnering over a million views and focused solely on his private life were designed to destroy him and his young family.
By contrast, the purported “smear campaign” against Connolly is limited to her political activities. They include her policy statements and stances; the wisdom of her political travels and who paid for them; legitimate questions and necessary follow-ups about her employee choices; her work choices (also legitimate, even for barristers who claim they are obligated to work for whichever solicitor dials their number); her ongoing political associates; her initially hazy recollection of which EU referendums she may or may not have supported.
[ Connolly v Humphreys: five takeaways from the latest debateOpens in new window ]
Heather Humphreys has been faced with repeated questions related to her husband’s politics – social media wits like to call her “Orange Heather” – down to where he will live if she is elected. She is asked repeatedly to explain how she handled controversial policies, slippery appointments and some deeply sensitive issues as a local TD and a minister, while also required to defend the Government’s record. And that’s fair enough.
Part of the problem for Humphreys is that her answers sound rather workaday compared to the fires lighting around Connolly, which is probably because Humphreys had served in Cabinet for 11 years and her skeletons were already well-aired.
Connolly’s record has been less scrutinised, despite stints as Leas-Cheann Comhairle and on the Dáil Public Accounts Committee. She has no Government service to defend and no one demands that she defend the record of the parties funding or appearing alongside her on the canvass. Naturally, she is going to be questioned closely and repeatedly on her political activities and all that pertain to them.
Either way, candidates of Connolly’s and Humphreys’s experience are well aware that it is the media’s job to demand clear and full answers of people aspiring to the highest office in the State.
They therefore hardly need to be told that tough media questioning is not remotely the same as a “smear campaign” even when questions are repeated ad nauseam or demand supplementaries or are posed as hypotheticals. To suggest otherwise is to wilfully misunderstand how the media works or even its purpose.
Anyone intent on confusing a media grilling with a real smear campaign has only to check out 1997 presidential candidate Adi Roche, an internationally respected environmentalist who was almost annihilated by a vicious smear campaign focused on her brother – an innocent man dismissed from the army decades before and eventually exonerated – in anonymous letters asking, “do we want someone so close to the Provos in the Áras?”
Overt smears on 1997 candidate Mary McAleese included accusations of being a “tribal time bomb” and “being colonised by Sinn Féin” at a profoundly sensitive time before the Belfast Agreement. And in 1990, when abortion was an explosively divisive issue, a Fianna Fáil TD suggested that Mary Robinson would be setting up an abortion referral clinic in the Áras.
It’s worth noting that the same campaign saw Fianna Fáil’s candidate, Brian Lenihan Snr, fired from the government a week out from the election by CJ Haughey, his party leader, though Lenihan’s name remained on the ballot paper. His ratings initially collapsed but climbed back again in a massive sympathy vote that saw him nearly catch up with Robinson – which might have happened but for a risen Mná na hÉireann’s revulsion at Pádraig Flynn’s suggestion that Robinson’s branding included “a newfound interest in her family”.
In a different time, Flynn’s brazen smear could have changed the course of history.
Smear campaigns are an old and deadly social poison, a bleak, soulless, ethics-free “strategy” championed by the wannabe sub-Steve Bannons of the era. But that’s entirely different from a media grilling. It’s also important to hold on to the difference.
