MARY LOU’S MASTERPLAN
Sinn Féin’s Áras candidate has almost no chance of winning: but winning isn’t the point. By running a candidate when FG and FF are absent, the party will get months of media coverage – during which it can sell its Trump-style populist general election message of ‘one for everyone in the audience’ without anyone questioning the maths. It’s all a part of...
IN TAKING the seemingly clever tactical option of backing Michael D Higgins for a second term as President, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil may have made a serious strategic mistake, one that will be to the benefit of Sinn Féin.
At first glance it’s quite easy to understand the reasons why the two major parties of Irish politics have decided not to run their own candidates in opposition to Higgins, a Labour Party mainstay who plans to campaign, as is required of a sitting President, as an independent. A challenger campaign requires a lot of money to sell his or her message and the two parties want to keep as much money as possible to spend on the general election, whenever that is.
As importantly, they have reckoned that they have no chance of winning, no matter what the spend, because of the popularity Higgins enjoys. Who wants to run and lose? Ideally, the Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil plan would clear the way for the automatic return of Higgins to Áras an Uachtaráin, without the public having to vote. It would be 2004 all over again, when nobody managed a challenge to incumbent Mary McAleese, who was duly reappointed.
Lots of people want to wreck the idea of that cosy little arrangement for 2018, it would seem. There is a plethora of independents who are interested in challenging Higgins: the names of independent senators Gerard Craughwell, Joan Freeman and Pádraig Ó Céidigh have been floating around over the past week. The 2011 runner-up, Seán Gallagher, has been throwing shapes, although it’s not clear if he intends having another go himself or is about to endorse Ó Céidigh. These candidates have varying qualities and attractiveness but few are likely to cause Higgins sleepless nights in the run-up to polling day.
THEY might not even get the chance to challenge Higgins. It seems that, for now at least, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil are hopeful of closing off the opportunity to many of those candidates by ensuring that their members on local authorities block any attempts by independents to use the local council route to securing a nomination. (If four councils nominate a qualifying individual then he or she can get on the ballot paper.) Alternatively, an independent might get the backing of 20 members of An Oireachtas – in which case there will be a contest – but this is easier said than done.
However, we are almost certainly going to get a contest in any case, courtesy of Sinn Féin. And while that should force the big two to reconsider their positions – why leave Sinn Féin as the only party contesting the election? – they seem to have boxed themselves in with their statements in recent weeks offering Higgins their support.
Now it may be true that the chances of a Sinn Féin candidate defeating Higgins later this year are relatively remote, but that’s not the point of the pending exercise by an evermore confident party buoyed by its growing popularity.
Today it will almost certainly confirm that it is fielding a woman in opposition to Higgins, despite some rumours that it might like to line out the GAA TV pundit Joe Brolly, a Derryman whose family has a long-running republican involvement.
Other names from outside the party to whom Sinn Féin might give backing have been suggested, too. However, even those of us who work in this political environment daily have struggled to identify them (Patricia McBride is hardly a household name) which suggests such a candidate’s chances of making major inroads into Higgins’s assumed lead would be remote. Some recognition is needed upon which to build, which is why MEPs Lynn Boylan and Liadh Ní Riada are being spoken of as potential candidates.
For Sinn Féin, the taking part is what will count and while winning would be a more than welcome bonus it is not what it would aim for or expect.
Here’s the rationale for entering the race, as explained to me by one of the party’s TDs last week. The highest share of the national poll that Sinn Féin has achieved in any election in the Republic to date is under 14%. In a two-horse race against Higgins almost any substantial candidate with a well organised ground campaign behind her (or him) is guaranteed to do way better than that.
Beating the 14% figure would allow Sinn Féin to then boast that it is more popular in the Republic than it has been at any time in the past. This is important when Sinn Féin has stated that it wants to be part of the new government and wants every opportunity to build its voter support.
Even if a bunch of independents manage to secure a nomination to enter the contest too – and in the absence of their own party nominations Fianna
Fáil and Fine Gael might just now have to facilitate that to prevent a two-horse race – Sinn Féin should still be able to command at least 20% of the vote, if current opinion poll figures carry into a Presidential election.
The working expectation is that Sinn Féin voters will vote for whoever the party offers and if that person is attractive enough to voters then lots of extra support will be picked up. For many, it may be the first time voting for a Sinn Féin candidate. Once that hurdle is jumped then, the theory goes, people won’t be as afraid to do so in a general election.
It is hard to see how this could go wrong for Sinn Féin. So it’s no wonder it’s almost certain that Sinn Féin, having flagged that it is meeting today to consider its position, will announce subsequently that it is picking a candidate to run under its banner in October.
It won’t be its former leader Gerry Adams, however, which is significant for a number of reasons. Many pundits had speculated earlier this year that Adams, upon retiring from the presidency of his party after 35 years in charge, might fancy the trappings of office at the Áras, as a lap of honour to mark the end of his career. It would certainly suit his ego.
But Adams has a degree of canniness and caution to match his towering regard for himself and he would not enter a race that he did not feel confident of winning.
While Sinn Féin strategists would tell you that they were delighted with the amount of votes Martin McGuinness harvested in the 2011 Presidential campaign some had hoped he would have done far better. Some – albeit not the more hard-nosed realists – even harboured hopes that he could win. But McGuinness’s IRA past made that an impossibility. And the same would apply to Adams.
His profile would attract many votes, but it would repel others. Much of the electorate may forgive or forget – or not know – but while new non-IRA Sinn Féin candidates get a pass for their party’s past, people like Adams don’t.
HIS laughable denials of prior IRA membership (and leadership) would become a major Presidential campaign issue (and the planned late August release of the documentary I Dolours, about the late IRA bomber Dolours Price, makes pointed reference to Adams and his alleged role in the terrorist campaigns of the 20th century). When it comes to the position of President of our Republic, Adams is almost certainly unelectable. The determination to defeat him would unify too many people.
But there’s another good reason why – despite the awe in which Adams is held within Sinn Féin, even by people like its leader Mary Lou McDonald, and the delight they would take in his holding the office – the party would regard Adams as a candidate in a Presidential campaign as an impediment to the party’s greater ambitions.
Sinn Féin will use the Presidential campaign to project to the future, not focus on the past that Adams represents.
It will not disown Adams or its own republican roots but those things are being consigned to the margins where possible; they are still just about present to keep the core Sinn Féin base happy, but out of sight as much as possible to those who have to be persuaded to subscribe to the Sinn Féin project. There will be no blood on the hands of whoever it is Sinn Féin picks to run. The candidate will instead tick as many ‘politically correct’ boxes as is possible.
It is set up perfectly for Sinn Féin. It is canny enough to offer praise to Higgins for what he has done and symbolised in office but that will be eroded as the campaign gets dirty.
Despite his own long standing and still occasionally declared socialist credentials, Higgins runs the danger of being painted by his opponents as the man who, in the comfort of office, became part of the establishment. That he has been endorsed by both Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil will not impress some of his potential voters.
SEASONED veterans within Sinn Féin – and there are still some despite the relative youth of most of the party’s public representatives – most likely remember well how the Labour Party used the 1990 Presidential campaign to its own advantage. It was a bizarre campaign, often remembered for the implosion of the seeming shooin for the position, Fianna Fáil’s Brian Lenihan senior. Labour pushed Mary Robinson, a seemingly stuffy law professor who had toiled in the Seanad but had never made it to Dáil Éireann. It was an inspired choice as she came from behind to win the Presidency, to the horror of Charles Haughey’s Fianna Fáil.
Two years later, in the general election, we had the so-called ‘Spring Tide’. Labour reaped the benefit of its association with the Robinson victory, as well as then leader Dick Spring’s strong performance as the most effective government critic from the Opposition benches, tormenting in much the way McDonald does now. It won more seats than it had ever done previously, just as Sinn Féin intends for the next general election when it comes.
Consider the publicity that Sinn Féin will be able to garner in the coming months if it runs a candidate in a limited field. Even if there are three, four or five candidates for the radio and television debates that will be held, the Sinn Féin candidate will likely be the only one who can say he or she is directly representing a party.
These will be like free party political broadcasts from which Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil have chosen to exclude themselves.
The other candidates are unlikely to attack Sinn Féin with the rigour that experienced candidates from the established parties would surely muster. Sinn Féin would have near free rein to push a happy-clappy mantra of postconflict fairness and equality without ever having to deliver upon it, because that’s not what Presidential elections are about.
Sinn Féin is poised to win, even if its nominee gets nowhere near taking the Áras.