God send me a presidential candidate who says: I wish to do nothing in the park other than be invisible and obey the Government; who makes no ringing speeches and shares no visions; who nods off at State banquets without drowning in the soup; who greets visiting ambassadors who have trouble remembering his name; who nods agreeably at lines of soldiers and totters back to his big home in the Park; who does not rush off to other continents to make mission statements; and MOST OF ALL, does the job for which he was elected for its full duration, and doesn't hare off to some better-paid, more glamorous appointment which involves first-class air travel and first-class hotels around the world before his term is due.
I said "he". That is merely a conventional usage. I do not give a damn whether he is a he or a she; I care less whether he or she is a homosexual or a serial adulterer with a past. On balance I would prefer that the sexual activities of the President - if he or she engages in any, which I understand has not always been the case in the history of the presidency - are of the discreet variety and with a limited number of participants.
Silent and biddable
Otherwise, what the President does in the sexual line is his business. Or, as I say, hers. In public, all I ask of him is that he appears in public fully dressed, does not get drunk at Lansdowne Road and fall to his death, killing a brace of Somali infants beneath, does not pick his teeth with his fork at State banquets in Dublin Castle and otherwise is a silent and biddable instrument of constitutional government. It would be very nice if he could in 20 languages say all that an Irish President is expected to say when he goes abroad, and that is, "What a very nice country you have here, and what a pleasure it is to meet you". If not, we'll get interpreters to say it for him.
That is the Irish President - amiable, cautious, undemonstrative. I don't expect him to disarm the US or reform the African continent. I don't expect him to bring peace to the North. I don't expect him to think deeply about this or that. I just want that person to be an ambitionless and largely silent representative of the monarchical duties of the Irish Presidency who will read set speeches and smile at children and watch the rain and the deer through the windows of Aras an Uachtarain, and think back upon A Life.
Hustle bustle, hubble bubble: what will our fine four candidates do if they get to the Aras? In terms of the Presidency, I do not care a fig for Mary McAleese's successful career in toppling the unionist monolith in Queen's. Nor for Adi Roche's work for children in Chernobyl. Nor for Dana's work promoting Jesus in Alabama. Nor for Mary Banotti's work as an MEP.
Strong-willed, etc.
If this is what they are good at, then that is what they should stay being good at. Because you are good in your field does not mean you should be elected in another field completely. Mary McAleese is a strong-willed, independent woman, who perhaps today is not so vocal in her admiration of Charles Haughey or her dislike of the British as she once was. Adi Roche seems to have comparable personality traits without the same tastes. Mary Banotti is a strong-willed, independent, etc. And Rosemary Scallon is another strongwilled, indepe. . . And so on and so forth.
Irrelevant. Their very ambition to do things with the Presidency should be a double disqualification for the post; firstly because it would take their talents, their energies, their application and their vision from the tasks where they are already successful and where those qualities are still needed; and secondly, because people who want to do things with the Presidency have no business putting their names forward for it.
In other words, hands off the presidency. It should go to ladies and gentlemen of a certain age with a certain cautious wisdom. Jim Dooge, say, or Margaret McCurtain, or some such soldierly figure as Tadgh O'Neill or Vincent Savino, or, were they alive, artists such as Cyril Cusack or Hubert Butler; or equally, some poet or writer who is looking for a quiet corner to write in exchange for a few menial civic duties and the occasional signature on the occasional Act of Dail Eireann and who can be relied on to keep his trousers or her skirts on in public.
And the first requirement of any candidate, he or she, is the quality conspicuously lacking in the four who have presented themselves. It is modesty. The President of Ireland - if we are going to have one: I see no compelling reason, other than our consitutional imperative, to have one - ideally should be a reticent person who is not trying to establish an alternative government in the Park.
Let the four who have their names down for the Presidency follow their careers where they lead them; but may those careers not lead them to the Park. Is it too late for some gentle, sweet old soldier, some still-vigorous Mother Superior, some ageing but energetic former chairman of the Bank of Ireland, to step forward and declare: I will be President, and will discharge my modest and largely ceremonial duties within the law?
Guard of honour
The way to buttress the marginal and utterly subordinate role of the Presidency, and for the Government to remind the incumbent of the extreme narrowness of his powers, is to give the President a long overdue honour-guard of green-andgold-uniformed dragoons to accompany him everywhere, with the strictest instructions to cut him down with their sabres if he even begins to make the slightest suggestions about world disarmament or African debt-management or peace in the North. These dragoons would also patrol the Aras at night. And so, in addition to being pretty, they would be the permanent assurance that the President doesn't do a midnight flit to the UN. And that's all I ask.