Fortune favours the bold – and delivers a large serving of cold comeuppance to the complacent. Catherine Connolly got very, very fortunate in her opponents but she was also bold enough to make her own luck.
At a personal level, Connolly thoroughly deserves her landslide victory. She started out as a political sole trader with a somewhat quixotic ambition to be president. She had no national base and, outside of Galway, only a vague public profile. Yet she kept her eyes unblinkingly on the prize, brought the five parties of the notoriously fractious left behind her and stayed serene under the relentless pressure of being the front-runner in a race whose recent history has made the Grand National look like a donkey derby.
In the end, she even made it look easy. Once Jim Gavin withdrew from the campaign on October 5th, it was pretty much all over bar not very much shouting and a lot of tedious circling around the same questions. Some of those questions (about who she had represented as a barrister) were so obviously desperate that they did more harm to Heather Humphreys than to Connolly.
For the rest, the line-dancing skills Connolly showed off at a hen party in Ennis last Monday seemed like a good metaphor for her nifty political footwork. She managed to maintain a remarkable balance between her righteous self-presentation as the epitome of upfront authenticity and her highly practised proficiency in circumlocution. Where others would have tripped over these contradictions, she managed to step lightly around them.
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However frustrating her evasiveness may have been for all journalists and many voters, the fact is that she came (to adapt Shakespeare) “smiling from the world’s great snare, uncaught”. That takes a steely nerve, a keen intelligence and an innate self-assurance – all useful qualities for a woman who now has to represent an uneasy and uncertain nation to itself and the world.
Indeed, the great irony of Connolly’s triumph is that the same talent for ambiguity that made her seem so slippery in the campaign may also be the one that could make her presidency a success. Since Mary Robinson transformed the office in 1990, line dancing has been its forte: presidents test the constitutional limits, put one foot over the line, then take a step back.
Connolly projected herself in the campaign as an uncompromising owner-occupier of the high moral ground, but she also showed herself to be dexterous enough to manage the subtle shape-shifting the office will now demand of her. She emerged as a very artful dodger – artful enough to swerve away as president from some of her own more ridiculous rhetoric.
Yet even as she savours her deserved victory, Connolly cannot be unaware that she was also soundly trounced by the real winner: indifference. Hers is a hollow crown. For after this unprecedented election, a very large body of the Irish citizenry is left feeling un-presidented.
Most of the electorate was insufficiently enthused by any of the three candidates to bother voting. Add in the huge number who spoiled their votes, plus those who gave their number one to Gavin as a protest against the poor range of options on offer, and the mandate for the new first citizen looks bleakly meagre.
The primary blame for this lies with Micheál Martin, who, in a fit of the head-staggers, looked into his heart like a mini-me Dev and decided that a notoriously taciturn football manager was the man to inspire the nation. This was the place where complacency shaded into contempt for the presidency itself.
Fine Gael at least has the alibi that it had chosen a highly credible, astute and experienced candidate: Mairead McGuinness. She was easily the centre-right’s best chance of winning the presidency. As things played out, she would at the very least have run Connolly close – and with a fair wind could have beaten her.
It was nobody’s fault that McGuinness had to withdraw because of illness. What was hard to fathom, however, was Fine Gael’s audible relief that, instead of the formidable and seemingly, for them, somewhat forbidding McGuinness, they could have their own lovely Heather instead.
That’s “Heather”, as in Daniel or Marty or Enya. In all her election material from posters to social media posts, she was assumed to be so famous and universally treasured that she doesn’t need a second name. We all love her, so of course you people out there must do so too.
And since she doesn’t need a second name, why burden her with a narrative, a theme, a proposition? For the last 35 years, the presidency has been occupied, to the evident satisfaction of most Irish people, by individuals who did the vision thing. It beggars belief that the party that has been in power since 2011 genuinely believed that promising to make a harmless niceness general all over Ireland would be the winning bid for the role for which their Heather was auditioning.
If the aim was to dramatise the yawning gap between the governors and the governed, the result is a brilliant success. The centre-right parties both managed to look delusional.
What we’re left with is a middle ground that seemingly lacks belief in anything beyond its own God-given right to power; a broad left that has momentum and symbolic authority, but as yet no clear alternative programme for government; and a very wide and disparate constituency of the disillusioned, the disgruntled and the disengaged.
Connolly’s pledge is that she can give voice at once to each of these blocs – speak for the established State, represent a radical opposition to it and give hope to those who are increasingly disenchanted with Irish democracy. That’s a tough task. But so was getting to the point where she has a chance to make good on her promise. She has defied scepticism and made the improbable seem inevitable. If she can repeat that feat in office, she will do much to shore up a democracy endangered by complacency.
