SCRAP THE PRESIDENCY
GER COLLERAN’S BRILLIANT NEW COLUMN
THERE should be no election for president. It’s not just because Michael D Higgins is engaged in a dreary pretend game of hard to get. We all know what he’s at. He wants to drag it out long enough to smother any real appetite for a contest, and allow no-hopers and half-baked wishful thinkers to present themselves as candidates only to crash and burn shortly thereafter.
Then he’ll step forward, take the nation’s hand and walk us through another seven years of soporific ceremony, with a price tag of at least €30m.
It’s important to remember that when the politician and poet campaigned in the presidential election in 2011, he said he would serve only one term in Áras an Uachtaráin. Now, if he accepts a coronation, he will break his solemn promise without a hint of regret or apology.
In fairness, it’s hard – I imagine – to turn your back on €250,000 a year, lavish accommodation, highpriced, chauffeured German cars, Government jet excursions here and there and all that adulation.
But, the real reason there shouldn’t be an election for president is we don’t need a president.
It’s because the Presidency is a futile institution – almost entirely powerless. The only real authority the president has is to refer Bills to the Supreme Court to ensure they comply with the Constitution. And even that authority is restricted.
The president can’t touch financial Bills (the budget), or even Bills that propose to change the Constitution itself. All the president’s minimal authority can easily be performed under provisions that already exist in the Constitution.
CURRENTLY, should the president lose his mind or, for one reason or another, is unwilling or unable to do the job, the role is simply taken over by a three-member presidential commission. It consists of the chief justice and the chairs of both the Dáil and the Senate. They simply do the job as a nixer, grafted on to their normal functions.
The Presidency is a bauble and a plaything, a lavish decoration deliberately inserted into the 1937 Constitution by Eamon de Valera to extend his own political life span.
It’s a shameless retirement-home package for politicians who simply couldn’t accept that the country no longer needs them.
Douglas Hyde became our first president. Seán T O’Kelly kept the seat warm for Dev from 1945 to 1959. Dev himself had a 14-year stint above in the Áras. Erskine Childers could have had 14 years were it not for his sudden death just over a year into his first term. The pattern continued unchanged with Patrick Hillery.
Of our nine presidents so far, only two – Mary Robinson and Mary McAleese – buck the trend. Together they are the exception that proves the rule. Mary Robinson quit the presidency for a better offer at the UN at the end of her first term in 1997.
McAleese completed her twoterms of drudgery on our behalf but as we have seen during her powerful contribution to the gay marriage referendum and her recent verbal assaults on the Catholic Church’s stance on women, it is clear we missed a persuasive powerful advocate for change who could have had a lasting impact if she had ever served in the Dáil.
Instead she exchanged the authenticity of direct debate for the language of symbols imposed by the diplomatic muzzling she agreed to within the cushioned confines of the Phoenix Park.
The Presidency is expensive. The Irish Independent reported in April: ‘Department of Public Expenditure and Reform figures show the office will receive €23.7m in budget funding by the end of Mr Higgins’s seven years in office.
‘The cost of running the office has increased from €2.9m in the President’s first full year in office to €3.6m last year. The estimated cost for this year was budgeted at €4.3m.
‘This includes paying for his 25 staff, travel and administrative costs. Mr Higgins’s travel bill has increased more than threefold since taking office – from €85,000 in his first year to an estimated €310,000 last year.’
THE office itself is problematic too. In 1976, president Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh used his presidential discretion to refer anti-terrorism legislation to the Supreme Court to test its constitutionality. Defence minister Paddy Donegan called him a ‘thundering disgrace’. Donegan clearly did not appreciate that the president is laughingly referred to in the Constitution as being in ‘supreme command of the Defence Forces’. A standoff ensued, a constitutional crisis erupted and, eventually, Ó Dalaigh resigned.
The title sounds vaguely dictatorial – until you read the rest of Article 13. It reduces the president’s control of the army to nothing at all. For all legal and practical purposes the president is at the beck and call of the government.
He appoints judges when he’s told to and would sack them too on command if the Oireachtas ever fired one of them. He must accept the Dáil’s choice for Taoiseach, and the Taoiseach’s appointments to and sackings from government. Handshake is discretionary.
It gets worse. The president isn’t even entitled to leave the country without a taoiseach’s permission.
He can address or message the Oireachtas and the nation – in the middle of the night if he likes – on any matter. The trouble is, whatever he says has to be signed off by the taoiseach and his cabinet.
Michael D fits neatly into the mould of ‘retirement home’ presidents. His approval ratings are high. He is an eloquent speaker and tolerably benign. But he’s playing silly games with the country over his intentions for another term.
It’s time to call a halt. There should be no election for the presidency. Because there should be no Presidency in its current form.
We need a referendum to rid ourselves of this extravagance.