Even before Jim Gavin’s presidential campaign imploded on Sunday, it was shadowed by one very big unanswered question. It was not the ultimately fatal one about his behaviour as a former landlord. It was more basic than that: what on earth was Micheál Martin thinking?
Gavin was patently not ready for his close-up. Not in the sense of being prepared to project a comfortable and confident version of himself. And not in the darker sense of being ready for the horribly relentless scrutiny of everything you have ever said or done that starts the moment you step onto this field.
Gavin was a brilliant GAA football manager but also an infamously taciturn one. From his debut as a presidential candidate it was painfully obvious to everyone that this taciturnity was not tactical. It isn’t a ruse to out-psych opponents.
It is, rather, a result of what a good football manager tells a decent but limited player: play to your strengths. If you’re a big bruiser of a centre back, don’t start trying to solo your way up the field. Know your limitations. As a GAA man, Gavin clearly knew his.
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He is obviously an inspiring figure in the small world of a locker room. If he could gather three million voters in a huddle, he’d probably walk a national election. But it doesn’t work like that. What happens in a locker room stays in the locker room. What happens in the TV studio escapes instantly into the wild. And what radiated out from his appearances was the only message his nervous body language and scattergun sentences seemed able to communicate: I’m an ill-considered celebrity candidate, get me out of here!
But the thing about a TV appearance is that it’s very easy to simulate. There are dozens of studios available. A party with Fianna Fáil’s resources could have booked a slot and brought in a few professionals to look at Gavin under the lights. A thorough screen test could have saved a decent man from a horrendous experience and saved Martin from the politically disastrous consequences of his own arrogant incompetence.
Martin was certainly right to dodge the Bertie Ahern bullet and not wrong to think that a Mary McAleese-style non-party candidate would have an excellent chance of winning. We know that he made approaches to at least one such potential candidate – Deirdre Heenan. She was very open to the idea.
Heenan is a woman of great substance, a former leader of the University of Ulster and one of the island’s most distinguished experts on social policy. She knows the presidential ropes, having served as a member of the Council of State during President Michael D Higgins’s first term. She’s also a fluent, confident and charismatic media performer. It’s breathtaking that Martin thought seriously about her and then looked into his heart and decided that Gavin would be more convincingly presidential.
Or, if Martin really wanted to give the campaign a jolt of high-voltage celebrity, he could have gone for Bob Geldof. Geldof has real international standing, a sharp intelligence, a gift for language and a passion for justice. He was also very interested in the job. Picking him would have been a very bold move, but oddly much less risky than going with Gavin. With Geldof, you know exactly what you’re going to get. With Gavin, Martin clearly hadn’t a clue.
He hadn’t a clue about Gavin but he also hadn’t a clue about what he wants Fianna Fáil to stand for. Gavin’s inarticulacy is a token of a party (and to a large extent a government) that has nothing to articulate. It seemed that all Martin really wanted to say was: I’m in charge here.
The perverse logic of his presidential choice was that the odder it was, the more humbly obedient his party would have to be in endorsing it. Getting your followers to agree to a proposition that makes no sense is the ultimate ego trip. They are going with it simply and solely because you’ve told them to. Don’t trust a process – there isn’t one. Trust my gut.
What came out here is, however, something that lies deep in Fianna Fáil’s DNA: stroke politics. Pulling Gavin out of a hat was Martin’s ham-fisted version of pulling a stroke. Except that Martin is more Tommy Cooper than Penn and Teller. It turned out to be a stroke in the other sense of the word: a seizure of the brain that has left Fianna Fáil half paralysed.
Gavin will, of course remain on the ballot paper – a starkly conspicuous absence, a visible vacancy. And there’s something weirdly appropriate about this. Vacuity is where traditional centre-right Irish politics now lives. Under the glittering shell of corporation tax riches, the Government seems hollow.
It has no narrative, no vision, no passion, no sense of purpose. It has drifted into the disaster of a housing crisis it has no idea how to resolve. It watches child poverty rise in a rich society as though it is a helpless spectator.
It feels as though, consciously or otherwise, the governing parties resented the presidency because, for 35 years now, it has been occupied by brilliantly articulate and passionate people who have shown us what real political leadership looks like – and thus shown up its absence in government.
They wanted to cut the presidency down to size. The vacancy when Michael D leaves office was to remain permanent, embodied either in Gavin’s barely existent public persona or in Heather Humphreys’s cheerful banalities. They have managed to be even more reductive than they hoped, cutting what is supposed to be our one chance to debate values down to a two-horse race in which much of the electorate has no one to back.
Catherine Connolly is now odds-on favourite simply because she has coherence and conviction. The rest of the campaign will be a grim attempt by the Government parties to knock her off her horse. In trying to shrink the presidency, that’s what they’ve reduced themselves to.
