FROM THE ARCHIVES:
With a little over a week to go in the 1990 presidential election, favourite Brian Lenihan's campaign was imploding, Mary Robinson was catching up fast, and Fine Gael's Austin Currie was being eclipsed as Nuala Ó Faolain tried to meet him for breakfast.
The incredible shrinking breakfast, I began to call it to myself. You would think it would be easy enough to arrange – Austin Currie has to go to bed sometime, and therefore he has to get up, and all I wanted was for the photographer and myself to join him for a cup of something whenever he did get up. But where? Where was the problem.
This campaign’s being fought in the style of the fifties: mano a mano, real flesh and blood, out there in the real nooks and crannies of Ireland. Candidates aren’t sleeping in their own beds and relying on national broadcasting. They’re zooming around the countryside, and you can’t find them to have breakfast with them.
Nevertheless, last Thursday night I went to bed after a hard night watching Brian Lenihan on television with a firm date. Mr Currie would have breakfast with me in the morning. Finnstown House Hotel. But Mr Lenihan’s recollections affected even me. “Ring, ring,” went the telephone in the middle of the night. Forget Finnstown House. Mr Currie still in Thurles. Mr Currie due on Morning Ireland first thing. Proceeding immediately there from to Navan. Breakfast bye-bye.
So I kidnapped Mr Currie. I got up in the dark and went to RTÉ and waited . . . the cleaning women were hoovering away, the place was peaceful and empty and smelt of Jeyes Fluid.
Then, whoosh, a Mercedes. Must be Liam Lawlor. A Saab with a man on a car-phone: Peter White, Fine Gael handler supreme. Dick Spring came in with the kind of shoeshine you get in the Army. And at last – my man. Austin Currie dapper and pink, only a little peached-looking around the eyes from having only three hours’ sleep.
I went and waited in his car with Sean, the driver, who doesn’t get very much sleep either. The car is their home these days. They live in there in a welter of newspapers and smoke and people ringing up
Another handler arrived and sat in. Another journalist. The car was getting crowded. But we did go off to the Montrose [Hotel] and we were, fleetingly, in the presence of coffee and toast.
It hadn’t struck me before that running for President is actually a great way of seeing Ireland and that really they’re privileged, the three of them, to be allowed to do it. They have helpers and enthusiasts in every town and the populace is going along goodnaturedly with the whole thing.
Mr Currie talked about the torchlight procession in Cavan and the pipe-band in Tipperary and the interviews in hotel bedrooms and the repartee in Listowel. Win or lose, you have to say this about the candidates – they’ll never be the same again.
http://url.ie/dc4l