AT BEST, the presidential election campaign should have given us some hope by becoming a real discussion about what kind of country we want. At worst, it should have been a harmless distraction. Who could have imagined that it would manage to be both extremely nasty and utterly vacuous?
That it would be full at the same time of secrets and lies on the one hand and banality and blandness on the other? The one thing we’ve really learned from the campaign is this: that we should never do this again.
If a presidential election can’t function as a conversation about values and priorities in our current state of crisis, it is clear that, without radical change, it is incapable of ever doing so.
Perhaps it is naive of me to have had such expectations. I’m 53. In my whole lifetime, there has been precisely one presidential election in which there seemed to be something real at stake. The 1990 contest between Mary Robinson and Brian Lenihan (which is what the election became) did have enormous symbolic weight.
Here were two very substantial figures in Irish public life who provided stark contrasts, not just in gender, but in manner, language and ideology. There was a real clash of cultures in which the choice to be made was of some consequence for the way Ireland saw itself and the way it was seen around the world. The election wasn’t just full of human drama. It felt epic.
This seemed at the time to be creating a new paradigm. But in fact it has turned out to be just a fluke. Was there ever such a presidential election before? No. The contest between Éamon de Valera and Tom O’Higgins in 1966 was dramatically close, but it was essentially an arm-wrestle between the two big tribes of Civil War politics. And has there been such an election since? No. The 1997 election was about nothing in particular and the 2011 event has turned out to be largely the same. One could go further and suggest that in fact the opening up of the presidential contest – welcome as it is on democratic grounds – has made a truly meaningful contest impossible.
Once Dana broke the monopoly of the main parties on the nominations process in 1997, it was always likely that any presidential election would become a beauty contest.
A seven-candidate race is bound to be fragmentary. A coherent clash of genuine alternative voices has become impossible. The good news is that just two tiny things have to change: the electorate and the office. One way of making a presidential election meaningful is to make its weakness a strength. The presidency has no day-to-day power. But precisely because it has no day-to-day power, it can offer at least a partial solution to a genuine Irish dilemma. The dilemma is this: the history of emigration and the consequences of partition mean that we have a mismatch between the population of the State on the one side and “the Irish people” on the other. There are millions of Irish citizens outside of the State who identify very closely with it: Northern nationalists, recent emigrants and the wider Irish diaspora.
Giving such people a vote in general elections runs up against the old “no representation without taxation” argument. That argument has never been fully teased out, but in any case it does not apply to an office that has no influence over decisions on tax and spending.
Allowing all Irish citizens, wherever they live, to vote in the presidential election would make that election much more interesting. It wouldn’t just be another ballot, it would be a different kind of democracy.
The other thing that needs to change is the office itself. It has become painfully clear that the current constitutional powers of the presidency are all but meaningless. The power to refer Bills to the Supreme Court is a redundancy – if anything it undercuts the rights of citizens to challenge legislation on constitutional grounds. And since the power to refuse a dissolution of the Dáil to a serving taoiseach has never been used, it seems safe to suggest that it, too, is effectively redundant.
These so-called powers are really the fig-leaf that hides the demeaning nakedness of the office. The presidency is disabled by the control freakery of central government, which insists on dominating the Oireachtas. The idea that every speech has to be vetted by the government constitutes a double humiliation: of the electorate and of the president.
It is wrong in a real democracy to ask the people to vote and then to treat their choice like a child. And it is wrong to expect someone distinguished enough to serve in the office to reduce themselves to seven years of consensual blather and blandness.
Why are we so nervous of the president saying anything the government doesn’t like? Would it have been so bad, after all, if Mary McAleese had been allowed to use her eloquence and stature to actually say something about the madness of the Celtic Tiger while it was unfolding?