For a position with almost no actual power, the Irish presidency still manages to generate the occasional controversy. Some have been faintly comic, some more serious.
The office was designed to embody the nation’s dignity, which in practice for the first few decades meant sitting quietly in Áras an Uachtaráin doing as little as possible.
That has changed in recent years, as the last three incumbents tested the boundaries. But from the very start, our presidents and those who would be president have found ways to ruffle the drapes of the big house in Phoenix Park.
Douglas Hyde kicked out of the GAA
In 1938, a year into his term, the first president attended a soccer match between Ireland and Poland at Dalymount Park. The GAA, then under the terms of the infamous Rule 27, which banned members from attending “foreign games”, responded by expelling the Gaelic League founder and symbol of the Irish nation. Hyde took the insult with silence and dignity. Not the GAA’s finest moment.
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Seán T O’Kelly and the Yugoslavia question
One soccer controversy is unfortunate but two seems careless. Hyde’s successor almost succeeded in navigating two full terms without anyone really noticing. But in 1955, when Ireland was scheduled to play Yugoslavia – then a communist and officially atheist country – then archbishop of Dublin John Charles McQuaid declared that good Catholics should stay away. O’Kelly, ever obedient, announced he would boycott the match.
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The gesture produced a week of moral panic and much newspaper ink about the perils of godless socialism on the football pitch. More to the point, it showed where the real focus of power lay in 1950s Dublin. The game went ahead, with communist atheism winning 4–1.
Was Dev really Irish?
When Éamon de Valera stood for the presidency in 1959, Fianna Fáil found itself consumed by an awful thought: what if the great man wasn’t technically eligible? Born in New York to an Irish mother and a (supposedly) Spanish father, Dev’s citizenship papers were, like much else about him, a matter of interpretation.
Frantic civil servants scoured archives and registries to confirm that he was indeed an Irish citizen under the Constitution he had written himself. The conclusion – reached with relief and possibly a little creative reading – was yes.
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A very brief stay
Erskine Childers’s presidency was short and courteous. He brought a sense of refinement to the Áras, and perhaps a touch of melancholy. Seventeen months after taking office in 1973, he collapsed and died suddenly while delivering a speech.
His final words were reportedly an apology for causing inconvenience. Nobody wanted another election, so his successor was appointed without a contest.
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A thundering disgrace
Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh, who succeeded Childers, was a man of learning and, fatally, a sense of the dignity of the office. In 1976, he quite correctly exercised his constitutional prerogative to refer the government’s Emergency Powers Bill to the Supreme Court for review.
Defence minister Paddy Donegan, addressing a group of soldiers in Mullingar, was reported to have denounced the president as “a thundering disgrace”.
When taoiseach Liam Cosgrave refused to force an apology from his minister, Ó Dálaigh resigned. The sight of a president walking away on principle was shocking. Donegan apologised belatedly. The phrase entered Irish political folklore as an epitaph for a government that had forgotten its manners, although evidence strongly suggests it was a euphemism and that Donegan’s actual words were “thundering bollocks and f**king disgrace”.
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A phone call to the Áras
Patrick Hillery, a mild-mannered and experienced politician who never sought drama, inherited a presidency bruised by Ó Dálaigh’s resignation. But in 1982, he faced his own test when the government collapsed and Fianna Fáil figures telephoned him with a creative suggestion: refuse a dissolution of the Dáil and install Charles Haughey as taoiseach instead.
Hillery made clear that his former career as a Fianna Fáil minister would have no bearing on how he carried out his duties as president.
Mature recollection
In the 1990 presidential campaign, Fianna Fáil’s Brian Lenihan was asked about that same 1982 phone call. He initially denied it ever happened, but was forced to recant when a recording emerged of him admitting it. Lenihan ascribed his change of mind to “mature recollection”.
The words entered the political lexicon as the polite version of “I was caught out”. His campaign imploded, and Mary Robinson won the presidency.
Please don’t, Mrs Robinson
Mary Robinson brought energy, intellect and a whiff of cosmopolitanism to the Áras. She lit a candle in the window for emigrants, symbolically, for a modern republic that was still learning to see itself clearly. Within three years of taking office, she found herself shaking hands with Gerry Adams at a reception in west Belfast.
It was 1993; the peace process was delicate, the politics even more so. The image of the president greeting the Sinn Féin leader, still persona non grata in most places, flashed across the front pages. Unionists fumed, the government squirmed but Robinson refused to apologise.
“It was a handshake,” she said, “not a policy.” It turned out to be both.
An unfortunate comparison
Mary McAleese, Robinson’s successor, had a talent for cross-Border reconciliation and a gift for saying exactly what she thought. Sometimes the second quality complicated the first. Early in her presidency, she remarked that the kind of sectarian conditioning experienced by Northern Protestants was not unlike what had happened in Germany under the Nazis.
The reaction was immediate and fierce. Unionists were outraged; Dublin politicians winced. McAleese apologised, clarified, and went on to serve 14 successful years. The episode remains a reminder that bridge-building has its perils.
Michael D thinking aloud about housing
And finally to Michael D Higgins, poet, philosopher and serial government irritant. In 2022 he turned his attention to the housing crisis, calling it “a disaster” and “not a crisis any more, but a great, great failure”.
The remarks, delivered with the weary authority of a man who believes he owns the moral high ground, caused outrage in government, which issued a statement reminding everyone that the president was speaking “in a personal capacity”. The public, meanwhile, applauded him for telling the truth.
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With the exception of Ó Dálaigh’s resignation, these controversies have tended to be ephemeral, but they do tell a story of changing priorities.
From divisions over church-State relations to arguments about ethics in politics and on to the challenge of bringing an end to violence, the presidency has generally helped the nation feel a little better about itself while occasionally giving it a much-needed kick in the posterior.
