INSIDE POLITICS:AFTER ALL the twists and turns of the presidential election campaign the voters opted in the end for Michael D Higgins, an experienced politician with an independent streak, rather than the Independent candidate, Seán Gallagher.
The Labour Party has now captured the presidency for the second time after a campaign that less than a week ago appeared to be in deep trouble. By last weekend Higgins appeared becalmed as Gallagher surged into an impressive lead in the opinion polls.
The events of last Monday night when Gallagher was ambushed by Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness in the last television debate of the campaign changed everything. Gallagher’s inability to deal adequately with the allegations about his role in a Fianna Fáil fundraising event caused a sudden implosion in his support
There is some irony in the fact that by taking Gallagher down, McGuinness contributed to Labour’s victory. It seems, though, that in the battle for top dog status on the Opposition side of the Dáil scuppering a Fianna Fáil-linked candidate was the primary objective for Sinn Féin.
Higgins deserves credit for keeping his campaign at a steady and serene pace from beginning to end as other candidates rose and fell. By keeping his cool, he put himself in the perfect position to coast home to a comfortable victory when Gallagher fell at the last fence.
That took some nerve on Higgins’s part because for much of the campaign it seemed as if the electorate was determined to choose someone from outside the established party system as the ninth president of Ireland.
The frontrunner in the early stages was Senator David Norris until the disclosure about his letters to the Israeli authorities on behalf of his former partner led to his temporary withdrawal from the race. A few weeks later Martin McGuinness made the headlines by entering the contest and it appeared he could replace Norris as a real contender. The Sinn Féin candidate’s rise was halted by a sustained focus on his role in the Provisional IRA. The televised challenge to him from David Kelly, whose father, an Army private, had been killed in the line of duty by the IRA in 1983, was a blow from which the McGuinness campaign never really recovered.
Then as the campaign entered its final stages, Seán Gallagher romped into a clear lead. Although his earlier involvement in Fianna Fáil was widely known, he was seen by the electorate as the leading Independent candidate and his positive message of hope struck a chord with the electorate.
The question last weekend was whether the Gallagher bubble, which had inflated so suddenly, could survive a puncture. We now know the answer. The unexpected happens regularly in Irish politics and particularly in presidential elections.
It happened in 1990 when Labour first won the presidency with Mary Robinson. Fianna Fáil candidate Brian Lenihan was the victim of a Fine Gael ambush about a tape-recorded interview he had given about events of eight years earlier and it destroyed his chances of winning.
In 1997 a mysterious leak of a conversation she had had with an official from the Department of Foreign Affairs threatened to damage Mary McAleese’s campaign but she came through unscathed if not enhanced by the way in which she dealt with the issue.
This time around Seán Gallagher’s lack of political experience contributed to his inept handling of the McGuinness claims. His failure to come up with convincing answers to serious questions on live television about Fianna Fáil fund-raising activities raised fundamental doubts about his ability to handle the office of president.
Gallagher’s business record also came under intense scrutiny in the final days of the campaign both in the print and broadcast media and ultimately it all proved too much. For all the public’s desire to elect a president from outside the ranks of established politicians, it was the most experienced politician of all who showed the skills necessary to win the race.
The Irish writer, politician and patriot Tom Kettle once wrote that politics was the only profession about which it was widely believed that an amateur could do a better job than a professional. When it came to the final moments of the 2011 presidential election the voters, having flirted with a gifted amateur, rushed into the arms of a tried and true professional.
It is to Higgins’s credit that he came through such a bruising campaign with his reputation untarnished. He generally stayed above the fray and behaved in a presidential fashion in the hope that would convince voters that he was the right person for the job. That ultimately paid off, but for a long time it seemed that it would not be enough.
The Labour Party ran a professional campaign and, even though its leading members were distracted by the responsibilities of Government, they paid close attention to the process of candidate selection and once Higgins was selected they engaged with the nuts and bolts of campaigning to ensure that he got the maximum vote available on the day.
The exact opposite was the case for the party’s Coalition partner, Fine Gael. For a start senior party figures were so bound up in governing the country that they failed to get a grip on the selection process. The key people who masterminded the most successful general election in the history of the party last February knew that Gay Mitchell was not the best candidate for the presidency but they did not do nearly enough to let their TDs and councillors know of their concerns.
Then when Mitchell was selected against their better judgment he was largely left to his own devices. The first Irish Timespoll in July gave him a reasonable chance of being elected but instead of ploughing resources into a coherent campaign from the start, the candidate went out on the campaign trail without any great fanfare. By the time the party leadership focused on the election, it was too late.
The party and the candidate share the responsibility for what happened. The TDs, councillors and party activists who selected the candidate blithely assumed the presidency was theirs for the taking. They have suffered a rude awakening.
For Mitchell, who has a fine record as a TD and MEP, the result is a political disaster that will take some time to get over. For Fine Gael it is a wake-up call to the fact that its new-found status as the biggest party in the country could depart as quickly as it arrived.
By contrast, Fianna Fáil can take a lot of heart from both the presidential election and the Dublin West byelection. In the presidential contest a former party activist showed that a Fianna Fáil label is not necessarily a disaster, and in the byelection David McGuinness showed that with good candidates the party can win back a lot of seats in the next election.
If the Gallagher bubble had not burst, Micheál Martin’s decision not to contest the presidential election would have been interpreted as a master stroke, and even his second place finish has given the party a shot of confidence.
Sinn Féin will take heart from the McGuinness performance, even if it was not quite as good as they had hoped in the early stages of the campaign. He got almost twice the vote the party achieved in the general election and in the process upped its profile.
In the longer term, though, the ghosts raised by the candidate’s own record could leave a mixed legacy. The renewed association of the party with the IRA campaign of violence could linger in the mind of the electorate long after the presidential election is forgotten.
As for the Independents, it was a really tough campaign for all of them. David Norris recovered his bonhomie in the final days of the campaign and may hold his deposit. Mary Davis handled her slide from possible contender to second-last place with dignity. Dana Rosemary Scallon had a very bruising experience but she battled gamely to the end.
One lesson is clear: presidential elections are not for the faint- hearted.