You can probably name the big May 2015 referendum, the one about same-sex marriage. Now name the second proposal put to voters that day. It was the effort to reduce the presidential candidacy age from 35 to 21. Even two months out, seven in 10 were against it. More than half the youth group it was targeting were against it. In the end nearly three-quarters of the people voted No.
As crazily time-wasting notions go, it could have been worse. Nearly 20 years beforehand, an Oireachtas joint committee had recommended a reduction to age 18.
In 1937, Éamon de Valera referred to the president’s role and powers as requiring “the exercise of a wise discretion”. Surely only an insufferably self-important little twerp would deem themselves qualified at 21?
It’s also true, as Yes advocates were wont to argue, that the age barrier would have rendered Jesus Christ and Michael Collins (dead at 33 and 31) ineligible for the job, but why on earth would such busy, transformative young men have wanted it anyway?
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The same question could be asked of Gareth Sheridan. Why would the 35-year-old co-founder and chief executive of an $80 million Nasdaq-listed company about to hit serious paydirt – Nutriband – want to be entombed for seven years in the diplomatic fustiness of the Áras?
His first outing post-announcement on Sunday was to Tullamore Agricultural Show, where there were a team and badges in evidence but little gladhanding by all accounts. It might have been just a practice run.
Like every serious US presidential candidate, Sheridan has a book nicely timed for campaign season. From No to Nasdaq is the autobiography of a Terenure teenager who paints houses to buy a Nokia 3310, a TUD business and management student who spots a gap in the market (patch treatments for delivering medications and pain relief), emigrates to the US and drives an Uber to pay the bills while his wife works as a nanny to snitty rich kids, all while gaining US citizenship, dodging Wall Street sharks, being sued by the US Securities and Exchange Commission regulators, and getting listed.
He remains in the bottom five per cent of executives on the Nasdaq in terms of compensation – and that’s how it should be, he told Hot Press in a pre-announcement interview last week, “because we’re not quite ready. Next year when we get FDA approval, we can see what the company is in a position to spend and afford”. That’s when the company’s first big product, an abuse-deterrent technology with the FDA-approved fentanyl patch, will be rolled out.
The company he co-founded and leads is in big expansion mode and on track to become a billion-dollar business.
[ Gareth Sheridan’s presidential nomination is by no means certainOpens in new window ]
In the context of Sheridan’s presidential ambitions announced elsewhere just a few days later, that’s the puzzling part. All this excitement – including his goal “to put manners” on US Big Pharma – is due to unfold during his intended presidential term. Yet at 35, and after seven years in the US, he has chosen to step aside as chief executive to seek a seven-year sentence as Ireland’s ceremonial president.
There is a manifesto of sorts which so far resembles a Dáil hopeful’s manifesto, focused “on the pragmatic politics” of our old friend, “common sense”. He had become obsessed, he said, “with how we can fix this housing issue”, and had been meeting lots of people who happened to include lots of county councillors.
“The system is broken. It’s part and parcel of successive governments and their lack of foresight and preparation ... I’ve met with councillors and their frustration level is crazy,” Sheridan said.
A couple of them flatteringly asked if he would put housing at the top of the narrative and have a crack at the Áras, he told Hot Press. From which he inferred that it was time for a younger candidate “to keep these issues on top of the narrative”. And – as he says repeatedly – he’s young.
No-one could argue with the need to light a fire under housing policy, but this implies, a) that it hasn’t dominated every national and local narrative to death for years and, b) that President Michael D Higgins could have tried a bit harder. That forceful, emotional speech three years ago – when Higgins described housing as “a disaster” and “our great, great, great failure” – notwithstanding, probably.
Sheridan uses the word “figurehead” for the job so is clearly aware of the limitations. Yet he has been working at it “for well over a year”, finding the time for face-to-face schmoozing with councillors crucial to his nomination. Which means he was dabbling deep in Irish politics well before last November’s general election, with time enough to pack all that effort in to a run for the Dáil and possible ministerial office from which to wield the fix of real executive power. There is the puzzle.
The other question is why the Irish electorate would vote for a relatively unknown businessman to be its North Star. The 2011 candidacy of businessman Seán Gallagher – who almost made it to the Áras as an Independent until his campaign imploded on live TV – resonated because the economy was in ruins, leaving a gaping wound in the national psyche. Gallagher offered a fix, focusing on entrepreneurship and self-reliance. It wasn’t poetry but it was a sorely needed dose of positivity.
Since Gallagher served as Nutriband president for four years from 2018 to 2022, it’s hardly a stretch to think that Sheridan might have at least noted Gallagher’s nomination tactics, not to mention his business pitch, as a template when he says things like, “We need to start looking forward. That’s a mentality thing that needs to change.” But Sheridan has been remarkably adamant that he got no advice from Gallagher and told RTÉ that they “parted ways ... after a year or two”.
An advantage of being young is that there are fewer skeletons to fall out of the cupboard. Gareth Sheridan’s candidacy will reveal as much about this Ireland as about the man himself. It will get interesting.
