Popinjays, poets and plots... don’t deny us a vote for President!

FOR a while now, an Establishment plot has been underway to keep President Higgins on without an election. Shallow and cruel I may be, but as an Irish taxpayer I feel I should not be deprived of the compellingly gruesome spectacle of a presidential election.

You see I remember that, during the last campaign, by September 2011 David Norris had developed a thousand-yard stare and appeared to move sluggishly. At this stage in his disastrous campaign, the pressure was beginning to tell.

I met him in an ante room deep in the RTÉ complex after a sevenway debate on The Late Late Show. It was just a month out from election day, and everybody knew the game was up for Senator Norris, except himself. In the bright spring days of March 2011, when he launched his campaign to succeed President Mary McAleese, he shot to the top of most opinion polls. However, in May an interview from 2002 re-emerged.

While telling Magill magazine that he did not find children attractive, he said: ‘Classic paedophilia, as practised by the Greeks, for example, where it is an older man introducing a younger man to adult life, there can be something said for it.’

Senator Norris, a self-regarding popinjay, not understanding that defending paedophilia of any sort was not a smart political strategy, persisted in his campaign. Then, in July, there was more.

We learned that he had written a letter in 1997 to an Israeli court asking for clemency for his former partner, Ezra Nawi. Mr Nawi had been convicted of the statutory rape of a 15-year-old Palestinian boy. Senator Norris’s letter was written on parliamentary notepaper. Norris, with rare judgment, admitted his campaign was ‘in serious trouble’ and pulled out. Then, displaying a return to form, he reentered. Hence his appearance in RTÉ that late September evening.

And that’s without getting into Seán Gallagher’s meltdown on the RTÉ Frontline programme when the late Martin McGuinness accused him of receiving donations from Fianna Fáil.

There is, of course, precedent for the coronation of our president. Political parties can come to a consensus on a popular candidate, and he or she is appointed without an election.

A sitting president is entitled to re-nominate himself, as happened in 2004 with President McAleese. Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and Fine Gael favour this strategy. So do Labour, President Higgins’s party.

And there are arguments for no election. The first is that parties see them as expensive and, postcrash, extremely unpredictable.

In Leinster House, figures in all parties tell me they do not want an election. It has been a tumultuous post-crash decade, characterised by political unpredictably. Politicians want a breather after the extraordinary elections of 2011 and 2016. The traditional hegemony of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are most opposed to a general election that would give us a new, confidence-and-supply-free Dáil.

Incumbent government parties, first Fianna Fáil in 2011 and then Fine Gael in 2016, suffered from electoral batterings. However, polls show that the two centre parties are back to a joint 60%. That said, they will not allow an election until they can be sure the smaller, more ideologically extreme parties are not a threat. But can the Fine Gael Government be permitted to deprive us of a presidential election on this basis?

The second argument for no election is that President Higgins is very popular – a recent poll showed two thirds of voters want him to continue. And he is old: he’ll be 77 next year. So there’s little harm in him continuing on.

President Higgins himself wants to evade an election. He said he will not make his intentions on a second term clear until next September. An election must be held the following month, so this is a clear effort to wrong-foot his opponents, but he may have wrong-footed himself instead.

In response, the Fianna Fáil leadership is irritated by what a strategist described to me as ‘game playing’ by President Higgins. Sinn Féin’s Mary Lou McDonald also said, in a summer interview, that she wants a contest. This is a problem for our mystic-poet-inresidence in the Park. He remains a cunning politician whose character was forged in a gruelling career. But his electoral record will have left scars.

Mr Higgins unsuccessfully stood for election to the Dáil four times between 1969 and 1977. In 1973, he was appointed to the Seanad (without being elected) by Liam Cosgrave. He stood in the European elections in 1979 and failed again.

He was elected to the Dáil in 1981, but lost his seat again in 1982. He stood for Europe again in 1984 and lost again. He wasn’t elected to the Dáil again until 1987. So, during his first 18 years of elections, he spent just a year in the Dáil. While he was more successful later, it’s understandable that he wishes to avoid elections.

Yet there are significant arguments for a contest. Elections serve many purposes, both noble and pragmatic. Firstly, a president in a democracy should be elected by the people and, practically, campaigns allow voters to assess the suitability of candidates.

In the spring of 2011, Senator Norris was overwhelmingly popular. He was exposed as unsuitable in the campaign and came a distant fifth with 5% of the vote.

Seán Gallagher, with just days to go, was overwhelming favourite. But he slipped due to his reaction to a dodgy tweet, and the public decided Mr Higgins was a better candidate. While he has been vetted already by election, another issue is his mandate. He made a pledge in 2011 that he would serve only one term. He did this because of concerns about his age back then.

Ironically, the age issue seems less important. He appears healthy and energetic. Douglas Hyde was 78 when he became president without an election in 1938. Éamon de Valera was 83 when he won the 1966 election.

Mr Higgins also said late in the 2011 campaign: ‘One can never predict the love of the people.’ If he believes the people would accept U-turns from popular politicians and want him to stay, then he should stand for election. But ultimately arguments for and against the fit-up are moot. Because, and this is the real reason I believe there should be a contest, they are almost certain to be overcome by the nature of New Politics.

Fianna Fáil have survived because they are the supreme pragmatists. They will not push for a presidential election for idealistic reasons. That party believes it will have to put a candidate in the field because the days of the parties fitting up a cynical agreement to bypass the democratic process are well gone.

For the first time, in 1997, two presidential candidates succeeded in getting a nomination from city and county councils. Both Dana Rosemary Scallon and Derek Nally lost to President McAleese.

President McAleese succeeded in being reappointed without an election. It was the height of Bertie Ahern’s power and she was seen as unbeatable. But the move left a bad taste in a new era for the presidency, heralded by the election of outsider Mary Robinson in 1990.

In 2011 four candidates – Gallagher, Mary Davis, Norris and Ms Scallon – used the councils route. A prospective candidate needs the nomination of only four of the 31 councils. Senator Gerard Craughwell has already indicated he will pursue this route.

Ultimately, and with great irony, the diverse nature of the Oireachtas, which makes stable Government so unattainable, and makes the established parties so afraid of parliamentary elections, may rescue democracy. A prospective candidate needs the nomination of just 20 of the 218 serving members of the Houses of the Oireachtas.

So you see, considering that contest is next to certain, we may as well wrap the tricolour round us and demand a proper Presidential election, for a proper Republic.

Besides, they’re great fun.