TRISH: I HAVE NO DOUBT HE WILL WIN
As Sean Gallagher continues his presidential bid, his wife Trish reveals how, despite her initial misgivings, she has put the devastation of the 2011 campaign behind them...
WHEN Sean Gallagher asked his wife Trish what she thought about the idea of him running for president again, her initial reaction was to stick her head in her hands and groan at him: ‘You are kidding me.’ ‘It was in the summer, I can remember it well,’ she says with a wry grin and a small shake of her head. ‘I was in our kitchen, standing at the island, when Sean came into me. He’d been writing to the local authorities, encouraging them to exercise their right to nominate a candidate in the election, he felt there should be one.
‘There was a huge surge of support from them and from people on the ground, from strangers sending emails in, friends and family asking him: “Would you not consider doing it again?” But even when that was going on, I was thinking: “That’s not going to happen.”
‘One particular evening, he came into the kitchen and said: “Do you know, I’m after getting another message. What do you think? Do you think we should consider this?”
‘Well, my stomach just flipped and I put my head in my hands... It was two things; how gruesome and difficult it was the last time, and how it had such a personal impact on both of us, particularly on Sean. I thought: “Why would you want to put yourself through that again?”
‘And secondly; this time around we have two young children. Last time I had the freedom to go wherever and whenever I needed to be. I just wondered how we’d manage that this time around.’
So did she try to talk him out of it?
‘No, I didn’t, no. I just expressed what I was feeling,’ she says. ‘I was quite strong with my views, the thoughts of trying to do this with the kids and how would it impact their lives? I covered all the bad sides of it, all the what ifs? What if it’s as gruesome, what if I can’t be on the road?’
After some time spent discussing the positives and the pitfalls, the couple had still not come to a decision.
‘So we left it,’ says Trish. ‘Sean had to go abroad for a few days for work and I spent a lot of time thinking about it on my own, I didn’t allow other people’s opinions to come in on me because I didn’t want to be influenced. I went for a lot of walks in nature, which I love to do, I really took the time to step away from things and look at it.
‘I consider myself a very intuitive person and my gut feeling was, that this is the right thing to do.’
And so, Trish Gallagher, a 45year-old mum-of-two, now finds herself in the midst of another campaign, trying once again to persuade people to vote for her husband to be president of Ireland.
Just like Trish did, there are many who are wondering why Sean Gallagher felt the compulsion to run again. The last campaign in 2011 was particularly brutal, described shortly afterwards as ‘the most fractious presidential election campaign since the republic was founded.’
Gallagher himself has spoken several times about how it took him a long time to recover from his 2011 experience, when for a large chunk of the competition he was storming ahead in the polls but then, in the final week, had to watch as his campaign imploded around him. In the end he secured 35.5% of the final tally, not even close to Michael D Higgin’s phenomenal result of almost 57%.
Although Gallagher and his team have always laid the blame for his sudden demise firmly at the feet of ‘Tweetgate’, most political analysts point out that in fact the tide had already turned against him well before the now-infamous Frontline debate. He had been subject to a slew of revelations about his business dealings – including that he had charged a GAA club €5,000 to help submit a grant application. His business, Smarthomes, had once been profitable: however, in 2007, the firm only broke even, while in 2008 it lost €652,000 and further €540,000 in 2009. Despite the losses, filed accounts showed that Gallagher and his business partner Derek Roddy drew €542,500 from the company in 2008, and €316,000 in 2009. After a deal with investors, Gallagher left Smarthomes in 2010 and sold his shares in 2011. Furthermore, it emerged that Smarthomes had received €830,000 in State grants — substantially more than the total profits the company had made for him.
It was also revealed that Gallagher had registered an €83,000 directors loan from one of his companies which was far more than allowed by the law, before swiftly returning the money. (Indeed, it was his floundering attempts to defend this payment, which he insisted was simply the result of an accounting error, which saw the audience turn against him on the ill-fated Frontline broadcast). And although running as an Independent candidate, his connections to Fianna Fail were revealed to have been much deeper and closer than he had originally admitted.
It was these connections that were at the heart of ‘Tweetgate’, amid claims that Gallagher had been centrally involved in organising a 2008 fundraising dinner for Fianna Fail. An unverified tweet read out on the Frontline debate rattled Gallagher and effectively put paid to his presidential bid, according to him.
The following day he floundered again, attacking businesswoman Glenna Lynch for questioning his business past — and wrongly suggesting she had been put up to it by a political party.
The former Dragon’s Den panellist all but disappeared from public view after losing the election, popping up again briefly in March 2012 when it was announced that the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland had upheld his complaint about how RTE had handled the unverified tweet.
In December 2017 it emerged that the State broadcaster had agreed to pay Gallagher a ‘substantial sum’ (believed to be €130,000) as part of a confidential legal agreement — though there was no admission that this error had cost Gallagher the presidency. Moreover, the sum paid out was hardly suggestive of an acceptance that the national broadcaster had cost Gallagher a seven-year stint in a €350,000 a-year-role.
Despite all this, it’s clear chatting to Trish that she firmly believes it was the final television debate that did him in.
‘We always say, it wasn’t the fact he didn’t win, but it was what happened and how it happened,’ she says. ‘So the aftermath was difficult, there’s no doubt about it, for both of us. It was very difficult for me to see him hurting and suffering the way he did.’
It certainly must have been a very difficult time for the couple, especially given they had only been married the previous year and by rights, should have been still in the depths of newly-wedded bliss rather than dealing with such a public humiliation.
Indeed Trish admits the 2011 election threw at her some of the toughest times she has ever had to cope with.
‘Oh without a doubt, yeah,’ she says. ‘But we’re still together and we’re doing it again.’
We meet at Gallagher’s campaign headquarters, elegant offices on St Stephen’s Green in Dublin City centre. Huge chandeliers hang overhead, while behind a large polished mahogany desk, there is a tricolour flag sitting jauntily in a floor stand.
There is already a distinctly presidential feel to the room. But then Sean Gallagher deals in confidence.
As does Trish, it would seem. Also on the walls are several of the prints she sells through her new online company, Bobolu. Each features a written affirmation, for example; ‘You can never cross the ocean without having the courage to lose sight of the shore.’ Mounted on a hard acrylic, they cost in the region of €130 each.
‘I’ve always loved affirmations and quotations,’ she tells me later. ‘I find them really powerful, if I’m going through a really difficult time, to have them dotted about the house really helps.’
Gallagher is at the office when I arrive to interview his wife, with a very firm handshake and booming voice. He asks if I am fluent in Irish and if I believe the President of Ireland should be able to speak Irish fluently. There’s another very firm handshake and he’s still talking as he leaves the room.
A few minutes later Trish comes in. She may have done this all before but she seems a little nervous. She doesn’t have to be, she’s bright and engaging there’s a genuineness to her that draws you in.
Yet it’s not until I ask how herself and Sean met that she truly relaxes. This is a story that she loves to tell.
Her face lights up and she settles back in a leather chair as she recounts how good friends of hers from Cork were holding their annual business conference in 2009 and the guest speaker that year was Sean Gallagher.
‘The next day my friend Niamh rang me and said: “I’ve met the man you’re going to marry.” It was as profound as that,’ she says.
After a bit of gentle persuasion, Trish allowed her friend pass on her number to Gallagher.
‘He called me the following week,’ she says, smiling at the memory. ‘A few days later, we both happened to be in Limerick for work. He rang and asked if I wanted to meet up that night, seeing as we were both in town. So we met in the foyer of the Radisson Hotel, where he’d been speaking, and we chatted for hours.’
What was her first impression of him?
‘I remember seeing him and just getting the sense of charisma from him,’ she says. ‘And the energy, he had an amazing presence.
There was a physical attraction
‘My gut feeling was this is the right thing to do’
‘It was very difficult for me to see him hurting’
He has what he calls ‘Big Hairy Audacious Goals’
‘It was like he was in no man’s land for a while’
but, she says, it was deeper than that.
‘I called my mother the following morning and I told her: “I’ve just met my soul mate, this is it.” And it turned out it was the same for him. We met a week later for our proper date and we talked about the soulmate thing. And he asked me: “Do you think you’ve found your soulmate?” And I said: “I do.”’
The couple were married less than a year later in a parish close to home in Kanturk, north Cork, where she was raised on a dairy farm, the third youngest of seven kids. The reception was held in Dromoland Castle. (Although Gallagher had been previously married in 1997 and had split from his first wife after two years, that marriage had been annulled — meaning they could marry in church). Trish had worked as a sales and training rep for a cosmetic company for almost ten years. Although she tried to get relocated, it didn’t happen so instead she began to do administration work for her new husband from their home in Blackrock, Co Louth. Not too long after their wedding, Gallagher told her of his plan to run for president.
‘I don’t recall that particular conversation,’ she says. ‘But I think it was something that he had always aspired to. He has these things he calls BHAGS — Big Hairy Audacious Goals. He does a lot of work with an American mentor called Jack Canfield, who wrote the Chicken Soup for the Soul Books, and this (the Irish presidency) was one of his BHAGS.
‘I believe he always had it in him, he always had this desire to do something for Ireland, he is and was then so very passionate about Ireland, the people and the country.’
If he was always so keen to serve, why does she think he didn’t he try to fully commit to having a political career? After all, he was once a member of Ogra Fianna Fail and in the early 90s worked full time as a political adviser to Fianna Fail TD and Minister for Health Rory O’Hanlon.
‘We’ve never really had that conversation,’ says Trish. ‘I think he feels he can do more in the presidential role. I don’t think it’s ever come into his consciousness (a career in politics), it’s not really something he wants to do. Mentoring small businesses, that’s been his focus over the last 30 years, with an interest in politics.’
At first the experience of canvassing in the 2011 presidential election with her new husband must have been exciting. He went from being ranked second last with 11% in the very first poll, to being ranked first, with a seemingly unbeatable 40%, in the last poll before the election.
Although she had never done anything like it before, Trish gave canvassing her all.
‘I had never been in the public eye before,’ she says. ‘I’d never experienced anything like that. But I just thought why not? What an amazing opportunity. So I grasped it and really went for it.’
Always beautifully turned out, she was never far from her husband’s side. But then it all went so dramatically wrong.
‘It’s bruising,’ she says. ‘But I don’t really look at that side of it, what I focused on then and still do, is that we’re out and about every day and we’re meeting an amazing groups of people.’
There was also, she says, a element of having to start from scratch in the immediate aftermath of Gallagher’s failed election bid.
‘He’d stepped away from all his business interests,’ she explains.
‘And so at the end, it was the case of a clean slate, starting afresh. For a time he was lost, trying to figure out what to do. He fell in-between the world of politics and the world of business, so it was like he was in no man’s land for a while.
‘Initially, we moved to Cork, our dream was to start a family so we thought it would be good to be close to family... He tried different businesses, some of them didn’t work, some did. At that point, thankfully I was pregnant, so the focus was to provide for the family and have a happy and healthy pregnancy and move on from there.’
Their son Bobby was born five years ago, while daughter Lucy, is now two. The family relocated to Delgany, Co Wicklow in 2015 and although he’s stepped away from his business interests for the moment to run his campaign, Gallagher has been working in real estate for the last few years.
Trish says the first she heard of his idea to run for the presidency again was just this summer.
‘It’s not something we were hatching for seven years,’ she says. ‘It wasn’t the focus at all, particularly because it had such a gruesome ending (last time).’
The children, she says, are too young to be aware of any flak given to their father on social media.
‘Bobby is in senior infants,’ she says. ‘He knows something is going on, he knows Daddy is trying to be the President of Ireland, but he probably doesn’t know what that means. There is also the side of it that we are trying to create memories, so no matter what the outcome, they will look back and say: “Look what Daddy did.”
For her part, Trish is also staying clear of Twitter and Facebook,
‘I don’t go near them,’ she says. ‘I saw how difficult that was last time round. So I’ve no idea what’s happening (online). Besides, we’re going at such a fast pace there’s event after event, you’re on the campaign bus, you’re discussing where are we going what are we doing, I’m checking in to make sure the kids are OK, you don’t really have time to go on social media and read stuff.’
Given that it’s roundly believed Michael D Higgins will win by a landslide, was she never tempted to tell her husband just to leave it, not to bother taking him on?
‘No, she says firmly. ‘Because I go back to the reason why we’re doing it. And that is, Sean’s belief in Ireland, his passion for Ireland, passion for the people and his belief and my belief in him that there is an awful lot he can do with the role, When you’re coming from that place, everything else doesn’t matter.’
Does she really believe he has a chance of being the next president of Ireland?
She looks me straight in the eye and declares: ‘I have no doubt that he will win.’