What the presidency is now reduced to is a question of damage limitation. We have one candidate who is harmless. And one who has the potential to do some harm, but also the capacity to do considerable good. One option is no risk and precious little reward; the other is high risk but possibly real reward.
I keep thinking of a famous moment in American political history involving two otherwise forgettable politicians. The 1988 vice-presidential debate was between the young and bumptious Republican Dan Quayle and the grizzled old Democrat Lloyd Bentsen. Asked about his political callowness, Quayle said: “I have as much experience in the Congress as Jack Kennedy did when he sought the presidency.” Bentsen sprung the devastating reply: “Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.”
It’s no insult to any of the three candidates (Jim Gavin is still on the ballot paper) to look at them and say: “You’re no Mary Robinson; you’re no Mary McAleese; you’re no Michael D Higgins.” This is one bar in Irish politics that has been set pretty high. Given a choice, Irish voters have opted for 35 years now for public intellectuals who could hold any audience, at home or abroad, in thrall for an hour with their eloquence and passion.
What Robinson, McAleese and Higgins have in common is that they all draw on an extensive intellectual hinterland. In his inaugural speech after his election in 2011, Higgins said boldly that “I will seek to make this a presidency of ideas”. That ambition would have been dismissed as risible before Robinson’s victory in 1990. But she and McAleese, in different ways and from different perspectives, established the remarkable notion that, as Michael D put it, the office could and indeed should “claim or defend a space of discourse” in which civil society can “create the capacity to understand, critique and offer ... alternatives” to the pure pragmatism of day-to-day politics.
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This ambition is easily mocked – but as Jonathan Swift put it when he left money in his will to build a mental hospital, “no nation needed it so much.” Irish public culture has been largely anti-intellectual. And its dominant articulator of values – the Catholic church – was beginning to implode just as this new presidency was taking shape. In its own odd and organic way, Ireland repurposed a largely ceremonial office in order to fill a vacuum.
[ All the presidents of Ireland so far, ranked from nine to oneOpens in new window ]
In their statements of why they are running for the Áras, neither Catherine Connolly nor Heather Humphreys even uses the word “idea”. They seem implicitly to share the belief that Michael D’s “presidency of ideas” is dead. What they offer instead is “hope”, “shared dreams”, “unity”, “community”, “peace”. Gavin, for his part, never got beyond promising to “work tirelessly to bring people together at home and promote Ireland abroad”. These are all lovely notions but hardly concepts that invite much critical thinking.
We’re left, then, with something rather narrower and less ambitious than we have become used to. In a sense, the contest is now a meta-election – it is about the nature of the presidency itself. Do we or do we not want the office to go back to what it was before 1990? We get to tick a box to show whether we vote to put the presidency back in its box.
For Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, this is a consummation much to be desired. We have to remember that the office has been a disaster zone for the old Civil War parties. It is where their joint authority as the near-identical twins of the Irish power system started to unravel. They don’t like it.
Since 1990, Fianna Fáil has had precisely one successful presidential election, when it got McAleese into the Áras in 1997. Fine Gael has had a series of also-rans: third of three candidates in 1990, a distant second of five in 1997, fourth of seven in 2011, nowhere at all in 2018, when the party didn’t even try to contest the election. This is the part of the Irish political system that has escaped the grasp of the eternal Establishment.
The point of picking anodyne candidates in Gavin and Humphreys was to both grasp the office and squeeze it more tightly into benign blandness. Hence what Humphreys as the sole survivor is really offering: harmlessness. If you want a defanged presidency in which no boats are rocked, no consciences are pricked and no thoughts are stirred, she’s your woman. As she herself has emphasised, the height of her ambition is to “work to open doors for Irish businesses overseas”.
This is the implicit proposition: vote for Humphreys and you won’t have to think about the presidency again until 2032, a time so distant that it is vaguely possible Dublin will have a Metro by then.
Or: you can have a presidency that is alive and kicking – with the kick being that you don’t know what it’s going to mean. You can’t know because often Connolly herself doesn’t seem sure about she means.
When she said there was a parallel between today’s German government and the Nazi rearmament in the 1930s, she didn’t mean to suggest that there was any parallel between today’s German government and the Nazis. When she said of her trip to Syria while the vile Assad regime was in power that “I funded that trip” she assumed we all heard that as “you, the taxpayer, funded that trip.” When she said she would have to think about whether to employ a convicted rapist she meant that of course she wouldn’t employ anyone on the sex offenders register.
[ Catherine Connolly should keep her inner Basil Fawlty under wrapsOpens in new window ]
But what Connolly would do is keep the presidency going as some kind of alternative space in the State’s official life. The Áras would continue to function as a counterweight to Government Buildings, a space in which a wider set of Irish realities can be recognised. Can we really afford to have no such space?
