In May 1973, Jack Lynch, then Fianna Fáil leader, raised the prospect of a new departure when speaking about the office of Irish president.
The occasion was a press conference to launch the presidential campaign of his party colleague, Erskine Childers, during which Childers hazily outlined his idea of convening a “think tank” if elected.
What was that? Childers said it would be “some sort of group who would be preparing a concept of the policies we would have to undertake” to produce ideas for the Ireland “of the 1990s”; a chance to shape Irish society to retain the “best of its traditions” while avoiding “the evils of an industrial society”.
The journalists’ ears understandably pricked up at this notion.
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Childers reassured them such an initiative would be about seeking “popular consensus” rather than interfering directly in government affairs.
Asked about the potential for confrontation between a president and government if such a group were convened, Lynch suggested that in such an event “any taoiseach would resist”, but that “the functions of the president had never been clearly defined”.
He even suggested Childers “could court a confrontation to establish the extent of the president’s powers”, but that most people would be behind “a president who took the kind of initiative” Childers spoke of.
Lynch seemed to be almost taunting the Fine Gael/Labour coalition government that had replaced Fianna Fáil after 16 years in power in the general election three months earlier.
The sitting president at that point, Éamon de Valera, had been in situ for 14 years as a reward for patriotic services rendered and he certainly would not have approved of Lynch’s intervention, given De Valera’s idea of the presidency as a ceremonial role.
As he put it when he introduced the office in 1937, it was inconceivable that “a government should hand over to somebody else powers which they could exercise themselves”.
After Childers’ victory in 1973, that was precisely the stance adopted by the coalition government; the think tanks went nowhere and president Childers was systematically censored, as underlined in a file in the National Archives under the title “President of Ireland: Speeches, 1973-clearance”.
Referring to the “evils of the capitalist system” was regarded by the Department of Taoiseach censor as “skating on thin ice”, while the department ordered the deletion of a sentence in another proposed speech of Childers that read “in spite of all the known social and economic problems that still existed”.
We have come a long way since then; there is certainly more flexibility and guardedness about interference.
Yet the issues raised at that press conference in 1973 still echo.
After the publication of John Kelly’s 1980 textbook The Irish Constitution, law students could read Kelly’s dismissal of the idea the president is the “guardian of the Constitution ... this flattering title sometimes bestowed on the presidency ... is pure journalistic hyperbole. The Constitution nowhere describes the presidency in such terms and is extremely sparing in its attribution of any independent functions of the office at all”.
It is hardly unreasonable to expect aspirants to the office to read the Constitution, but millionaire millennial Gareth Sheridan’s assertion that local authorities have an “obligation under the Constitution” to nominate non-party candidates is incorrect; they may, but have no obligation to do so.
Nor is it the job of president to, as Sheridan suggests, hold the Dáil to account or use the Council of State to promote policy initiatives.
Meanwhile, Fine Gael councillor and former Lord Mayor of Dublin, Emma Blain, suggests Heather Humphreys would be “a shared-island candidate”. Presumably this is about Humphreys’ religious affiliation, but a Monaghan Protestant is still a candidate from the Republic in an election that excludes voters from Northern Ireland.
Despite the standard narrative, presidential election campaigns also raised questions of generational change long before 1990.
As a 21-year-old journalist in 1966, Vincent Browne wrote in support of Fine Gael’s Thomas F O’Higgins, aged 49, who ran unsuccessfully against 83-year-old De Valera.
Launching the O’Higgins campaign in May 1966, Fine Gael leader Liam Cosgrave suggested “youth and its aims should be given a chance”.
There is no reason why that should not remain relevant, notwithstanding the cynical assessment of a seasoned journalist in 1966 who wrote that the president merely “signs 40 or 50 Bills a year and shakes hands with a few passing VIPs”.
The point Browne raised in 1966 still resonates: there was potential, he suggested, to “mobilise the prestige of the office” around themes such as inequality and poverty; “This aspect of the presidency could well be more important than the constitutional one.”
That is broadly what happened in the long-term; one of the favoured phrases of Mary Robinson was “there are no inevitable victims”.
But there does seem to be an inevitability about over-promising and under-reading of the Constitution when it comes to these elections.
