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THE INTENSE focus on controversies or supposed controversies surrounding individual candidates means the big issues that dominated the two previous presidential election campaigns have been strikingly absent.
In 1997, and more particularly in 1990, the question of whether a government party should also hold the presidency was significant. A candidate’s capacity to be independent of government and stretch the constitutional bounds of the office was a central concern.
Mary Robinson’s candidature offered a new type of presidency in 1990. She was presented as a younger, more energetic and more independent president than the Fianna Fáil candidate, Brian Lenihan.
The Labour Party and others supporting Robinson argued that the presidency should not simply be a retirement home for elderly government politicians. They warned that someone as steeped in party politics as Lenihan could not perform this new, more assertive presidential role or carry out the functions of the office independent of his party.
Dick Spring and his advisers recruited Robinson precisely because she was not a Labour Party member – although she had been previously. Before and after her time in the Labour Party she was an Independent.
While Robinson had championed many Labour-friendly policies and causes, she had differed from the party on many controversial matters – in a way that often made her unpopular with Labour politicians and supporters. Having agreed to accept Labour support for her nomination, Robinson insisted on running as an Independent and was listed as such on the ballot paper. She repeatedly emphasised how she had had nothing to do with the Labour Party for five years.
As a strategy, it worked. Robinson won in large part because she and the Labour Party persuaded the electorate that a more assertive and active presidency was needed. Robinson’s independence was as important a factor in her victory over Lenihan as her energy and ability.
As president Robinson had several stand-offs with Charlie Haughey as she carved out a more assertive role within the constitutional space. However, her most difficult confrontations were with Spring after Labour entered government in 1995.
For the 1997 election Labour was an even stronger believer in the need for independence in the presidency – so much so that it nominated a non-politician, Adi Roche. Labour again encouraged her to run an independent campaign. The strategy failed this time. Notwithstanding her many fine qualities, the public did not see Roche as having the skills necessary for the presidency.
Spooked by Labour’s nomination of Roche, Fianna Fáil also decided against a party elder and chose Mary McAleese rather than Albert Reynolds as its candidate. She had been a Dáil candidate for the party more than a decade earlier but was then Belfast based.
Bruised in 1997, Labour did not nominate a candidate in 2004 and McAleese began a second term unopposed. Now, in 2011, rather than nominate a candidate from outside the fold, Labour has adopted a Lenihan-like strategy and selected a party elder. In Michael D Higgins the party is offering a quintessential Labour Party man. A darling of the Labour grassroots, he has been party president for eight years.
This time around Labour has forgone all pretence of detachment from its candidate. Higgins’s campaign appears to be dominated by serving or retired Labour politicians or apparatchiks with a sprinkling of family members and friends.
A few Higgins pals who are Independent Senators were used this week for photocalls but they have no significant role in the campaign. The only exception is Shane Ross, who made a significant contribution to the Higgins effort by penning a vicious attack on Mary Davis in which he was the first to brand her as a “quango queen”.
To all intents and purposes the Higgins campaign is a Labour machine running a solid Labour stalwart, seeking an unequivocal Labour victory. Like Éamon de Valera, Seán T O’Kelly or Paddy Hillery before him, Higgins would be distinguished, competent and appropriate in the role. But his election would represent a return to the presidencies of old.
On Wednesday’s Vincent Browne show on TV3, one Labour activist pitched for Higgins as “a safe pair of hands” – precisely what Labour argued against in 1990 and 1997. Opting for Higgins on that basis would set the presidency back 21 years.
Because he cannot claim to be an Independent, Michael D speaks instead of having “independence of mind”. He has certainly been brave in the causes he has championed. For much of his political life he swam against, or ahead of, mainstream opinion. However, his “causes for concern” have also been popular among Labour Party members and supporters.
It is difficult to think of any significant occasion over 40 years when Higgins broke with Labour. He may have exasperated his party colleagues at times but he has always been a loyal Labour man.
There is nothing in Higgins’s record akin to Robinson’s principled and unpopular decision in 1985 to resign in protest at the failure to reflect unionist concerns in the Anglo-Irish Agreement. He will struggle to be able suddenly to break the Labour habits of a lifetime.
Higgins is now the ultimate Government insider and his party will be in office for most if not all of the next president’s term. Labour and Fine Gael have a particularly tight hold on power with the largest yet majority in the Dáil and a massive majority in the Seanad (which they now propose to abolish). The Coalition has also shown a populist inclination to tinker with the constitutional separation of powers. The need for an assertive and active presidency is now more important than ever.