The State We're In

It took a long time for the political system to realise that, when she left the presidency, Mary Robinson created not just a vacancy but a vacuum. A vacancy is a quiet, harmless absence and the main political parties tried to go about the apparently mundane business of finding someone to put into it. They found, instead, that they are being asked, not just to fill an office but to fill the vacuum that has been left by Mrs Robinson's departure.

And vacuums are dangerous and unstable. They exert an unpredictable force, sucking in strange pieces of the surrounding landscape. They attract an uncontrollable array of objects. They generate a wind of change that can knock people off their feet.

So, instead of a traditional, familiar party-dominated election, this one has drawn to itself by far the oddest political contest in the history of the State.

It's a strange contest because it presents a perplexing contradiction. On the one hand, the Irish people have never before been presented with such a wide and refreshingly unpredictable choice of candidates. On the other hand, though, the very diversity of choice masks a huge uncertainty about what precisely the choices are about. When Mary Robinson squared off against Brian Lenihan, it was easy enough to imagine that the electorate was being asked to choose between clearly alternative identities. This time, though, the question being posed is not "Do you choose this or that political option?" It is "What kind of political options do you want?" We are being asked not so much to make a statement about ourselves as to decide what language we should speak in, what issues should be under discussion, who are we talking to, and who, in the first place, is "us".

Each of the candidates, by her very presence, offers a particular definition of what the context for our national identity should be in the early years of the new millennium. Each locates Ireland on a different map. Dana's candidacy places Ireland in the context of the American religious right, as a Christian nation battling the forces of godless modernistic decadence.

Mary Banotti's Ireland is a European society, intimately and irreversibly a part of the EU. Adi Roche's Ireland belongs in the small world of global environmental consciousness, the world in which a Ukrainian nuclear explosion is also a deeply Irish disaster. Perhaps most awkwardly of all, Mary McAleese's Ireland is what it officially pretends to be but does not always feel like, a borderless island in which at least the Catholics of Northern Ireland are also "us".

The very fact that half of the candidates are Northerners and that the election's most conspicuous absence, John Hume, is also from the North, is itself remarkable. It suggests two things. One is that the big internal conflict in the Republic has run out of ideological fuel, forcing the system to look across the Border for other passions. And the other is that Republic's once tight sense of its own political identity is badly frayed.

For if it does nothing else, the election will help to answer some critical questions about how the Republic's citizens define themselves. Will Dana and Mary McAleese suffer the Austin Currie effect and find that Southerners prefer to admire them from afar? The antipathy to Northern voices, Northern attitudes, Northern dangers, surfaces from time to time on radio phone-ins but is not generally admitted to in public debate. The election will tell us how deep it runs and whether the remit of "us" runs beyond Dundalk.

Nobody ever expected that the task of replacing the holder of a largely ceremonial office could set off such a deep and potentially uncomfortable exercise in enforced self-definition.

It has happened in part because Mary Robinson didn't just answer a public need, she also created it. Some people, the minority of the electorate that gave her a first preference vote in 1990, knew what kind of person they wanted as an embodiment of their aspirations.

But for most - those who voted for Brian Lenihan or Austin Currie or who didn't bother to vote at all - her presidency was an answer to the question "How do I know what I think until I see what I say?" They knew that they thought well of her only when they saw what, through her, they were saying about themselves and their country.

They didn't know they wanted a president like her until they got one. And what they got was therefore an office that was indistinguishable from its holder. The president was not Mary Robinson; Mary Robinson was this new kind of political institution that we still called the presidency.

In that sense, her presidency was a happy accident. But accidental good fortune has a way of being taken for granted. A lottery winner quickly comes to believe that is quite natural to have a Porsche. A nation that finds itself with an outstanding president quickly comes to believe that it is natural for Irish politics to produce such people. What was previously an unimaginable luxury has become a basic need. But in fact our political system is not geared to fulfill that need. Neither the constitutional shape of the office itself nor the restrictive system for nominating candidates even begins to address its urgency.

It is not, in that context, at all surprising that the choice of presidential candidates left all the major political parties floundering. They sensed that established and experienced politicians like Albert Reynolds and Avril Doyle simply wouldn't wash as candidates. They knew that the public wanted something else, something that, almost by definition, they themselves could not supply: an articulation of the sense of social belonging that underlies but often eludes the parliamentary system itself. They were like vegetarians dreaming up dishes for carnivores, forced to offer choices that they could not themselves consume.

The strain has pushed the system into uncharted territory. For the first time ever, Fianna Fail chose to be represented by a candidate from outside the party. For the first time ever, the system of nomination by county councils has been used. For the first time ever, a major election will be contested by female candidates alone. And, for the first time in a very long time, the difficult, edgy issue of how Irish the citizens of the Republic consider their Northern neighbours to be has become unavoidable.

But it's not just that the political parties are losing control.

It's also that the underlying political landscape has become unstable. All of these unique occurrences are indications of a larger uncertainty. They point to the fact that the big public debates are losing their familiar shape. There are still deep conflicts but the battlelines are suddenly fuzzy. What was a fairly orderly engagement has become a confused free-for-all.

We have lived, from the mid-1970s onwards, through a radical shift in the nature of the Irish consensus. Rapid urbanisation, membership of the European Union, and reaction against the sectarian atavism in the North all helped to destroy an old orthodoxy and forge a new one. The forces of change were deeply divided on economic issues.

But they were agreed on three things: opposition to militant nationalism, support for the separation of church and State and enthusiasm for the extension of personal freedoms. In many cases, as when the Progressive Democrats effectively supported a socialist, Mary Robinson, for the presidency, agreement on these issues was sufficiently strong to allow fundamental conflicts of economic philosophy to be sidelined.

That alliance has now run its course. In the first place, the so-called liberal agenda has gone as far as it can go. Many of its goals have been attained. The political power of the Catholic church has been greatly diminished. Censorship rarely impinges on the consumers of books and films. Contraception is no longer even a matter for debate. Divorce laws are on the statute books.

The remaining Church-State questions - abortion and the control of education - are too messy and ill-defined to form the basis for a clear liberal consensus. And even though real gender equality is still a distant goal, feminist language has been so thoroughly absorbed into the mainstream of politics that the only possible male candidate for the presidency at this stage - David Norris - is gay.

At the same time, the second thrust of the liberal alliance - its challenge to the old nationalist orthodoxy on Northern Ireland - is also stalled. The peace process has made opinion on the issue fluid and tentative. The predominant impulse is to wait and see, to give people a chance, to blur hard-and-fast distinctions between democracy and terrorism in the hope that the paramilitaries may be encouraged to cross the line. For the moment at least, attitudes to the North don't serve to define a clear political divide in the Republic.

In effect, the liberal advance that has shaped contemporary Irish politics has run out of steam.

In its absence, what we are seeing is not a return to the old conservatism, but a radical uncertainty about politics themselves. It's not that there are no issues - on the contrary, in the context of unparalleled prosperity, the hard questions of poverty and social exclusion stand out ever more clearly. But the system cannot at the moment muster sufficient energy to grapple with them.

What we're seeing in the presidential contest, then, is an array of choices that neither fits the familiar divide between liberals and conservatives nor presents a clear new line of argument. Dana, perhaps, represents most clearly one side in the old conflict. She speaks for, and seeks to represent, the Catholic conservatism that has been fighting change for the last 20 years.

But she does so in a way that implicitly acknowledges how changed Ireland itself really is. She is part of the very wave of globalised media influence that conservatives have traditionally decried. Her style, her fusion of the medium with the message, the very notion indeed that right-wing fundamentalism is best represented by a candidate from the world of showbusiness, are all imported from American religious conservatism. Even while harking back to the past of a fixed, protected Ireland, she is also marking its demise.

The other candidates fall more emphatically outside the familiar divisions. Mary Banotti's family and party connections may seem to place her in a recognisable mould. But she, no less than Dana, enters from beyond the fray. If Dana's angle of approach is American, Mary Banotti's is essentially European. Strasbourg and Brussels, where debates about, for example, whether or not to permit divorce are simply incomprehensible, have been her main arenas. She could as easily be a Danish social democrat or a German Green. A weathered idealist, rational, sane and without prejudice, she seems to have already arrived in the cosmopolitan, enlightened, progressive Europe toward which the rest of the country is still feeling its way.

Mary McAleese may have taken a stand firmly on the conservative side in the socio-sexual debates about divorce and abortion, but she cannot be reduced to such an easy definition. She has been at times a close ally of the Catholic hierarchy, at others one of its sternest critics. She is a complex compound - a Catholic feminist, an Irish nationalist who has found a comfortable place within the UK establishment. And by virtue of being a Northerner, she sets off echoes that have a resonance quite separate to the sounds generated by the conflict between tradition and modernity in the Republic.

And Adi Roche, above all, has emerged not so much from outside politics, but from inside the kind of counter-politics that has itself sprung up in the last decade. Largely in the post-hippy generation and largely around environmental issues, an alternative form of politics has taken hold in recent years. It is issue-based, activist, inclined to exert pressure on the system rather than seek power within the system. It combines the radicalism of the old left with the personal responsibility and risk-taking spirit often advocated by the old right. It combines things - in Adi Roche's case, politics and "good works" - that used to belong to separate categories. As perhaps the most remarkable embodiment of its power in Ireland, Adi Roche's candidacy is itself a profound statement about the changing nature of politics.

Irish identity has, it seems, become such an open question that the only impossibility is what was just seven years, largely taken for granted - that the best embodiment of the nation would be a comfortable, unthreatening tried-and-tested, middle-aged man from the senior ranks of Fianna Fail politicians or jurists. Even the election of the most theoretically conservative candidate - Dana - would actually be the biggest bombshell, the most exotic outcome to the race and the most potentially disruptive presidency.

The most extraordinary fact from an extraordinary week in Irish politics is that there is, in effect, no establishment candidate, no one who is offering what used to be the automatic appeal of the presidency - safe, dull, careful conformity to the familiar institutions and self-images of the State. There are no such familiarities left. We can choose between different kinds of change, but we can't choose no change at all. If that makes for a confusing and perhaps disappointing contest, it has at least the virtue of being a pretty accurate definition of the state we're in.