Áras battles are carnage, that’s why we need one
FINALLY: he has decided. After refusing for months, even years, to say whether he wants another stint in the Áras – a process technically known, I understand, as “dragging the ass out of it altogether” – President Michael D Higgins has announced he’ll stand as an Independent in October.
But will there even be an election? All the main parties support the incumbent. One website giddily produced a listicle of “nine reasons why we should re-elect Michael D immediately” (he’s small, cute, nice wife, nice dogs, seems clever, etc).
Not everyone is quite so hagiographic, however – or so accommodating. Sinn Féin wants to run someone. Several independents have expressed an interest, including Pádraig Ó Céidigh, Joan Freeman and Kevin Sharkey. In a vaguely disquieting echo of elections past, ex-candidate Seán Gallagher has asked local authorities to facilitate entry for aspiring Presidents. (The process of securing a nomination is so needlessly labyrinthine it’d give Einstein a migraine.)
Meanwhile, another potential runner, Gerard Craughwell, reiterated his long-expressed view that we need a Presidential election, for democracy’s sake if nothing else. Criticising Michael D’s tardiness, he says the situation is “the subversion of the democratic election process in favour of a coronation”.
I’m not sure I’d go that far, but do agree an election makes for healthy democracy. We don’t live in a monarchy; no “leaders for life” are present or desired here.
There are other sound reasons: it could be tied into various (fairly pointless) referendums, seven years is long enough for anyone to sit in the Big House, and personally speaking, Michael D has become rather annoying.
But there’s a more compelling reason than my entirely subjective dislike of the incumbent: Presidential elections are brilliant. I’m nowhere near a politics wonk, yet I find them wildly entertaining and enthralling. We’re treated to weeks and months of excitement, drama, melodrama, psychodrama – and great, great fun.
They hit that psychological sweet spot, impossible to pinpoint but instantly recognised. Like major sports events, they feel important, seismic, at the time – but in the back of your mind is a safety-valve of knowing none of this matters in the grand scheme of things.
Nobody’s life is changed, one way or another, by who is President. But during the campaign, when the fur is flying, gloves are off and you’re gleefully roaring abuse at your chosen “villain of the piece” during TV debates – what a rush. It’s what I imagine a trip to the Colosseum felt like for Roman patricians, albeit with less actual bloodshed though a lot more metaphorical bloodshed.
You buy into this real-time, real-life, impossible-to-predict narrative. You pick sides, get swept forward by different stories, cheer along, boo and hiss.
And Irish Presidential elections, by very dint of their ultimate irrelevance, tend to be incredibly (and hilariously) vicious. It’s mad.
If a Craughwell/Higgins mano-amano comes to pass, and following Sayre’s Law, the less is at stake, the more rancorous it will get. And I love it.
THESE elections give us endless enjoyable controversies. The last one, in 2011, was shock after shock from start to end: Paul Kehoe’s tweet about Martin McGuinness and Northern Bank, the Sinn Féin man’s IRA past challenged by Vincent Browne and his eight books of evidence, Mary Davis labelled the “Quango Queen”, Michael D and Tara Mines workers, Miriam O’Callaghan’s apology to McGuinness’s family, Seán Gallagher and David Norris’s travails, David Norris’s travails, the alleged “attempt on Dana’s life” after a tyre blow-out.
Not forgetting the One Tweet to Rule Them All: sent by a fake Sinn Féin account, read on-air by Pat Kenny and applying the coup de grace to Gallagher’s ambitions. Even Gay Mitchell, surely the most beige-grey man ever to run for office, courted controversy with suggestions we rejoin the Commonwealth.
Go to the previous election in 1997 and we find more larks. Albert was allegedly “betrayed” by Bertie, having allegedly been promised the FF nomination; Adi Roche claimed a smear campaign was behind accusations of bullying from a former employee.
In 1990 we had Pee Flynn’s snide jibe at Mary Robinson’s “new-found interest in her family” and the notorious omnishambles of Brian Lenihan’s campaign, involving that interview with Jim Duffy, alleged letters pressurising then-President Patrick Hillery not to dissolve the Dáil, and possibly the greatest catchphrase in Irish political history: “On mature recollection.”
How could you pass up entertainment like that? Returning to the Romans, this is our version of “bread and circuses”: combat, mayhem and bloody carnage, with none of it really affecting us.
It may be a meaningless distraction at the end of the day. But as meaningless distractions go, a Presidential election is a damn good one.