In March 1997, the Progressive Democrats (PD) proposed an amendment to the Constitution to allow a written petition of 20,000 Irish citizens to ratify a candidate for the presidency of Ireland.
The proposal, according to PD leader Mary Harney, could be put to the people in a referendum before that year’s presidential election in October.
Harney expressed concern that the presidency, after Mary Robinson’s term, was in danger of relapse into a party political retirement post: “We do not need what has been lightheartedly referred to as a Val Doonican presidency – in which rockers, carpet slippers, cardigans, log fires and golfing games are the public image of the job.
“We need a hands-on presidency which is engaged with the people.”
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This was a bizarre characterisation of the office holders to that point.
In 1947, when Doonican was playing the drums with a touring band, or singing the praises of Donnelly Meats’ sausages on a sponsored Radio Éireann programme, Ireland’s second president Seán T O’Kelly had a penchant for dress suits and top hats rather than cardigans; indeed his dapperness was often noted.
True, Doonican was wearing cardigans, rocking in chairs and singing Paddy McGinty’s Goat on British television when Éamon de Valera was president, but Val subsequently swapped the cardigans for suits and was also well able to write orchestral scores.
Fittingly, the president that followed Dev, Erskine Childers, said he wanted to be “composer and conductor of the national orchestra”. Childers was denied his baton by the government of the day and his presidency from 1973-1974 had to conform more to the title of one of Doonican’s best selling albums, Val Doonican Rocks, but gently.
Harney’s proposal lapsed with the dissolution of the Dáil in May 1997; as per the title of another Doonican song, it was a case of Walk Right Back.
But within a few months, there was a flurry of activity to use the county council nomination route to a presidential nomination. The singer Dana said her prayers had been answered when five county councils nominated her.
It now seemed possible that all kinds of every candidate could be nominated, and she was joined by Derek Nally, a retired Garda and victims’ rights campaigner, also nominated by five councils. It was the first time candidates nominated by local authorities contested a presidential election.
In 1997, Fine Gael told its councillors not to break the party whip, given the party had its own candidate, Mary Banotti, but some abstained rather than voting against Dana, and some Fianna Fáil councillors also voted for her.
In Donegal, for example, some councillors insisted they should not be in the business of denying other candidates despite having their own. Nally said he wanted to demonstrate that “a man of ordinary means and ordinary sound values can become president of Ireland,” and he pointed out that the first president, Douglas Hyde, was a non-party candidate.
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Last week’s election, especially the scale of spoiled votes and the various complaints about the lack of more candidates, has generated renewed focus on the nomination process.
Clearly, the system was designed to secure party political control and limit the field. But a suggestion that nomination could be secured on the back of 20,000 signatories would create alarm that this would take us to another, unmanageable extreme.
In 1996, the constitutional review group chaired by T.K. Whitaker suggested the president inhabits the office to “strengthen the cultural and social ties binding the people of Ireland to one another and the people of Ireland to other peoples throughout the world” and “serves as a personification of the State ... from the president the people seek a reflection of their highest values and aspirations”.
It considered that “the constitutional requirements for nominating a presidential candidate are too restrictive and in need of democratisation”.
“In some countries a popular element is secured by providing that a certain number of registered voters may conjoin to nominate a candidate. The Review Group feels that validation of such nominators would be difficult.
“However, some alternative mechanism, based on a specified number of voters, ought to be explored. Another method that might loosen the nomination procedure would be to reduce the number of members of either House required for nomination.”
The Independent Ireland party, denouncing the current system an “affront” to democracy, has suggested reforming the process so that aspiring candidates would require the support of 20 members of the “combined pool” of TDs, and MEPs, or, alternatively, could be backed by 80 individual councillors from across the country.
But talk of reform is likely to fizzle out, as before, partly because of the long gap between presidential elections, possibly up to 14 years; partly because governments are wary of being burnt by referendums, and because of the difficulty of finding consensus on how the nominations process should be changed.
