IGNORANT OF our past, despairs of our future. Shame at home, contempt abroad. The president who will disgrace us. The animals’ president. Changing Ireland for the worse. Let’s wallow in our weaknesses.
It’s a good test of a slogan to turn it on its head and see if its opposite is a claim that anyone at all would want to make. If it’s not, the slogan is entirely vacuous. On this test, the essential messages that the candidates for the presidency wish to convey have no meaning whatever.
Mocking a slogan is, of course, too easy. So let’s try some real statements. Can you match these statements with the presidential candidate who has made them?
1"I want to put my fighting spirit and the compassion I learned growing up in difficult circumstances behind these difficult circumstances."
2"My family didn't have much, but we had values of respect for people and pride in our community and our country."
3"Ireland is not just an economy, we are a collection of communities and we will rebuild our country, one community at a time."
4"We all have rights and responsibilities as members of different communities, be it as part of a family, a neighbourhood, or even a country."
5"We need to move beyond cynicism and draw on our strengths and on the very best aspects of ourselves."
6"I will be the people's president . . . I will be a president of all the people."
7"I will be a people's president and will put the people's interest first."
8"After the boom and the gloom it is time to bloom."
Observant readers will notice that there is in fact an extra statement here – one from each candidate and one from a speech by Bertie Ahern. Anyone who can match the speaker to the statement without Googling is, I would guess, either an obsessive political anorak or a kinky connoisseur of vapidity.
There is, though, a simpler question: would anyone who knew nothing about Ireland guess from the campaign that this is a society in the midst of a very deep crisis? Ireland has lost the sovereignty for which it fought so hard, its democratic systems have failed abysmally, its domestic economy is in the mire, its society is deeply divided and the moral standing of most of its secular and spiritual leaders has collapsed.
If ever there was a society that needed a sustained conversation about its values and aspirations, it is ours. Values and aspirations are precisely the territory in which the presidency ought to operate. Yet to a depressing degree, the election has been about truisms and cliches.
It surely says something that the candidate with the most momentum is the most vapid of all, Seán Gallagher. This is a man who was in Fianna Fáil for 30 years but didn’t inhale. This is the candidate whose favourite piece of rhetoric (he’s used it repeatedly) is to relay a phrase from Enda Kenny about sending up a flare to signal that Ireland is open for business and to announce with a straight face that “I want to be that flare” – the cheesiest line this side of Camembert.
A flare, as Gallagher seems to forget, is a signal of distress, and his own ascent is surely sending out such a signal about the campaign so far. But using this kind of rhetoric is easier than coming up with any kind of coherent statement.
Gallagher’s main theme is job creation, so does he actually believe that the presidency can help to create jobs? Yes and no. On the one hand, he claimed in an Irish Times article on Tuesday that “I want to use my life experience to put enterprise and job creation at the heart of the next presidency”. But in his vision statement on his website he says that his “plan for the future” is “not a plan about creating jobs or building infrastructure, that is the job of Government”.
It is perhaps unfair to single out Seán Gallagher, though. For if he’s guilty of overselling himself, many of the other candidates are actually underselling themselves. Most of them actually have an interesting story to tell, but none of them is managing to tell it.
Michael D Higgins is a leading Irish public intellectual who has been a critical voice for many decades. But he can’t really talk about the most blatant injustice in contemporary Ireland, the bank bailout and its consequences for public values, because his party has accepted those consequences in government.
And as the race narrows and Fine Gael votes become ever more crucial to his chances, it will be even harder for him to say what he really thinks.
David Norris has an extraordinary story to tell – that of one of the first gay men to come out in public in Ireland, face down hostility and contempt and lead the campaign that changed not just the law but the lives of very large numbers of citizens.
But you’ll search in vain for any of this in his campaign materials and speeches. His website will tell you that he is a member of the Royal Zoological Society of Ireland, but not of his role in the Campaign for Homosexual Law Reform or the Hirschfeld Centre.
Gay Mitchell is, believe it or not, a scholarly man with two postgraduate degrees. He has real expertise in a number of areas, including one that matters a lot to Irish people – development aid.
As a member of the European Parliament’s development committee, he was instrumental in changing the rules for EU aid to ensure that at least 40 per cent had to go to health and education projects – an achievement of genuine significance. But this hasn’t been a theme of his campaign.
Dana’s official website describes her as having a Catholic “ministry”, which can be supported by buying her CDs and DVDs. Why has she been so coy about this ministry?
Martin McGuinness has an amazing human story to tell – about the horror or revulsion that must have led him to decide that the IRA’s campaign could not be justified. But he’s not telling that story, because he doesn’t want to talk about the IRA at all.
An overcrowded field and media interest in the Norris letters and McGuinness’s IRA past have undoubtedly made it hard for candidates to get their messages across. But it’s not at all clear that they know what those messages are. In one way or another, almost all of the candidates are running away from the things that are most interesting about themselves and taking refuge in airy banalities.
It must be nice to live, as they seem to do, in a country so calm that it can afford to devote its first presidential election in 14 years to such sweet nothings.
(1) Gay Mitchell; (2) Mary Davis; (3) Seán Gallagher; (4) Bertie Ahern; (5) Michael D Higgins; (6) Dana; (7) Martin McGuinness; (8) David Norris