IT SURELY tells us something about the bizarre nature of the campaign that, in the end, Michael D Higgins – colourful, passionate, challenging, idiosyncratic and hitherto nobody’s idea of a dull, reliable politician – won because he was “a safe pair of hands”. When Michael D is the safest harbour, there must be some pretty turbulent waters out there.
On the surface, Higgins’s victory in the campaign could be seen as evidence of a public at ease with its political system. It is a reversion to an older, pre-Mary Robinson, idea of the presidency as a home for a distinguished older politician, an ex-minister at the end of a long career in the Dáil. After all the drama, the prize went to the most serene and gentlemanly of the candidates, one who very deliberately set out to float above the fray. Michael D constructed quite a conservative notion of what it meant to be “presidential” – experienced, constitutionally informed, dignified – and it worked for him. While he may be following Mary Robinson as only the second Labour-nominated president, his campaign was a million miles away from Robinson’s barnstorming, insurgent campaign in 1990.
But these surface appearances are deceptive. The paradox of the election is that the outcome belies the process. A veteran politician has emerged from a deeply anti-political mood. Far from suggesting that all is well with the traditional Irish polity, this election has shown that political power in Ireland is up for grabs. Anything can happen – and it almost did.
Because it was signalled so early in the polls, it is easy to miss the significance of the most extraordinary aspect of the election: Gay Mitchell’s nightmarish performance. The simple explanation – that voters just don’t like him – doesn’t stand up. He pulled in nearly 100,000 votes in Dublin just two years ago in the European Parliament elections. He ran a reasonably brave campaign, challenging Martin McGuinness and Seán Gallagher with some force.
SO WHY DID he do so badly? Because he presented himself as what he is: a politician. On RTÉ radio yesterday morning, Fine Gael strategist Frank Flannery put it well when he said that Gay Mitchell had defined himself as a “businessman whose business is politics”.
It was the truth, but it was also the craziest possible self-definition to put before the Irish electorate right now. Mitchell was quite right when he insisted that the presidency is not “above politics”, but there were no rewards for telling the public what it didn’t want to hear. He stamped himself on the forehead with a sign saying “politician”: it might as well have read “loser”.
Let’s not forget, either, that, in spite of the eventual outcome, roughly half the voters plumped for Independent candidates. Or that an anti-political mood was also evident in the large degree of opposition to the idea of giving strong powers of investigation to Oireachtas committees. The message from the vox pops on the issue was clear: “I don’t trust them.”
SEÁN GALLAGHER’S rise and fall illustrated the point. He rose in accordance with his ability to project himself as a non-politician and fell in accordance with the public’s suspicion that he might be a politician after all. In this sense, “politician” wasn’t just a synonym for Fianna Fáil, though there was a considerable overlap between the two terms. His underlying difficulty was that he couldn’t quite construct the narrative that would have got him elected: I was in Fianna Fáil but I became disillusioned and left. Why would this have got him elected? Because it’s the story of almost 40 per cent of voters, who supported the party in 2007 and then ditched it. (From the RTÉ/Red C poll, it seems that 45 per cent of those who voted for Fianna Fáil in 2007 voted for Gallagher.) And because everybody loves a redeemed sinner.
Gallagher’s problem was that he couldn’t own up to being a sinner. He couldn’t find a way to square a particular circle: tip the wink to the remaining FF voters and activists that he was one of them while giving the rest of the electorate the impression that he regretted staying in the party so long.
And in the way he twisted and turned on the question, as well as on the odder aspects of his personal and company finances, he started to look awfully like the politician everyone loves to hate, Bertie Ahern – shifting, prevaricating, juggling memory and amnesia.
Ironically, Gallagher just wasn’t enough of a politician to convince people that he wasn’t a politician. Had he been cooler, more experienced, with a better
instinct for the right moment to keep his mouth shut, he would have won. But Gallagher’s fall shouldn’t obscure his remarkable rise. Those polls that put him on 40 per cent of the vote were not wrong and if he had been better prepared for the ambush he should have known was coming, he would have achieved the most unlikely victory in modern Irish politics.
This tells us something too: not just that the public’s mood is anti-political but that almost anyone can come from nowhere to exploit that mood.
Gallagher’s techniques were drawn from motivational speaking, from TV celebrity and from advertising.Those techniques can be learned and deployed by someone else. Neither Gallagher nor his most obvious predecessor, Declan Ganley, managed fully to sustain and consolidate a winning position, but they’ve shown that, in a period of social turmoil, the chance is there.
But this anti-political mood isn’t merely negative. For the other thing that marked the campaign was people power. It is striking that, apart from Martin McGuinness’s controlled explosion on The Frontline debate, the two most decisive interventions in the election came from so-called ordinary citizens: David Kelly and Glenna Lynch.
Kelly’s confrontation with Martin McGuinness in Athlone, when he approached him with a photograph of his father, Pte Patrick Kelly, murdered by the IRA in 1983, shaped the campaign by making it impossible for McGuinness to win. Lynch’s detailed questioning of Gallagher’s business dealings on The Frontline – and even more so her return to haunt him on radio next morning – killed off his one opportunity to get out of the hole he was in.
LYNCH AND KELLY were motivated by very different issues, but they were united in two things. Both acted out a sense of moral purpose and both had a simple demand: “Tell me the truth.” It is a long time since an Irish election has been shaped by individual citizens standing up to be counted in this way. The people power at work was still personal rather than collective, but there were glimpses in these moments of what an active, really democratic citizenship might look like.
Mary McAleese remarked, in relation to her predecessor, Mary Robinson, that: “We have come to realise that the emotional reach of the presidency is much, much greater than its constitutional reach.”
It was Kelly and Lynch who gave the campaign its emotional reach: a deep anger about the way things have been done on this island transmuted into the courage to be an effective, morally engaged citizen.
That might not be a bad theme for the man who emerges from a strange election into a turbulent and troubled Ireland as President Michael D Higgins.
