We need a little more complication in our politicians

WHEN ERSKINE Childers died we got the day off school. We were given the day off school for the express purpose of going to look at Childers lying in state in Dublin Castle and, strange to say, that is exactly what we did. For southside suburban schoolgirls on public transport, Dublin Castle was quite hard to find, but we managed. When we got there we had to queue for what seemed like a long time.

Childers was laid out in, if memory serves, white tie and tails. He wore patent leather evening slippers, which I had to ask about when I got home, never having seen them in my life. It was the 1970s – it seemed right to be buried in your dancing shoes.

Childers died in office. “Fuair sé bás agus é fós in oifig an 17 Samhain, 1974,” the official Áras an Uachataráin website has it. He was only 68, although of course we young people thought him ancient at the time.

He was regarded, in our environs at any rate, as a Good Thing. The nuns liked him, even though he was a Protestant. Mind you, nuns are notoriously pragmatic and liked any man who was in power, as far as we could see. Nuns are very Irish in this regard.

It must have been a shock when Childers died, although I don’t remember the shock now. I remember, before he died, liking him and thinking that everybody else liked him as well. It seemed perfectly natural that adults would give up their free time to queue in November weather – apparently it was November, although I don’t remember that either – to pay their respects to him.

He had been in office for just a year, according to the Áras an Uachtaráin website. (Although the same website has given one of Childers’s predecessors, Seán T O’Kelly, a very long life indeed. “Fuair sé bás 23 Samhain, 1996,” it says, which would make Seán T 114, in Irish, when he died. It is more likely, and much less interesting, that he died in 1966.

It is strange now to think that Childers was only this State’s fourth president. And that its third president, Éamon de Valera, is still alive in our memories. The nuns loved Dev as well. In our time he was like a tall drawing, perhaps by James Thurber, perhaps of James Thurber, with the opaque glasses of a man who is going blind. An old guy in a black coat who was stooping to become a question mark, as very old men sometimes do. Old men in a young country.

In the potted biographies of our presidents given on the Áras an Uachtaráin website there is some detail of O’Kelly’s career and background. Early member of Sinn Féin, etc.

But in the current context of our presidential election it is interesting to see what is left out of the biography of Childers.

"I Londain a rugadh é, an 11 Nollaig, 1905. Tar éis a bheith ina chónaí i Sasana agus sa Fhrainc tháinig sé go Baile Átha Cliath i 1931 le bheith ina Bhainisteoir Fógraíochta ar nuachtán nuabhunaithe an Irish Press (Scéala Éireann)."

I never knew Childers had worked for the I rish Press. For those of you who do not enjoy my easy command of the first national language, I'm pretty sure that this paragraph says Childers was born in London on December 11th, 1905. That he lived in England and then in France and then came to Dublin in 1931 to work for the Irish Press (Stories of Ireland).

There is nothing here about the fact that Childers attended an English public school, or that he went on to university at Cambridge. Is that still too English and too posh for our peasants’ Republic? There is nothing here either about the fact that his father, also Erskine, died in front of a Free State firing squad in 1922, and died with extraordinary bravery. Erskine Childers snr’s last words to the firing squad reportedly were: “Take a step forward, lads. It will be easier that way.” Of course he had been a British soldier.

There’s nothing here either about how the 16-year-old Erskine jnr had to promise his father he would shake hands with the men who had had him shot. Is that too war-torn and bloody awful for us? I suppose it is.

The nuns were right to have Childers down as a gentleman, if a gentleman is defined as someone who can embody two contradictory historical movements in the one lifespan, and do it pretty gracefully.

Looking at the current presidential candidates – the Seven Dwarves, as they are being rather nastily characterised – the problem is not they are too complicated, but rather that they are too simple. Too simple to be convincing. The religious one, the republican one, the business one, etc. Who came up with this line-up – Simon Cowell?

We need a little more complication in our politicians; the Irish electorate can take it. Of course official Ireland doesn’t think we can bear too much reality, and is still trying to protect us from the truth. But official Ireland is wrong about that.