One political surprise begets another. The earthquake of Mairead McGuinness dropping out of the presidential race was trailed by an aftershock: Michael Healy-Rae coming to the rescue of Fine Gael’s campaign.
Within hours of McGuinness’s announcement on Thursday, August 14th, when Fine Gael itself was still too stunned to strategise, Healy-Rae phoned Heather Humphreys. “This has changed everything,” he told her. “Now is your time.”
Healy-Rae, who says he had been actively “courting” the former minister to run for president for about a year, says that, after “a bit of debate”, Humphreys started to seriously consider the move.
“She talks the part, she looks the part, she’s very down to earth; she would be a fantastic president,” he says, admitting there’s been a “bit of a reaction in Kerry” to the dynastic Independent Minister opting not to back the Kingdom’s Seán Kelly.
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By that Thursday night Humphreys was confiding in those closest to her that she was really thinking about running for president.
The view locally and nationally in Fine Gael is that Humphreys never seriously considered running against McGuinness, who she described as her “friend”. Everyone knew that McGuinness, who had been polling well and had strong name recognition, had wanted to be president for a long time. Humphreys had signed her nomination papers in 2011, when she lost out on the nomination to Gay Mitchell’s doomed campaign.
Over the weekend an organic momentum swelled into an unassailable lead. TD Grace Boland and former minister Frances Fitzgerald declared their support for Humphreys on social media without it needing to be sought.
Humphreys came into the Dáil with Simon Harris, who she thought was there on a school tour
It was early last Tuesday morning when Humphreys confirmed to her closest political allies that she was going for it. All she asked was for time to “tell the people of Cavan/Monaghan first”. Humphreys has always chosen Joe Finnegan’s show on her local radio station Northern Sound to make big announcements. Senior Fine Gael figures listening to the radio interview heard a Humphreys who was “in a presidential space”, talking about themes of reconciliation and community. But local allies still heard a familiar “Heather” who had “no airs and graces”.
Afterwards, people who are described as “diehard, poster-hanging, grassroots Cavan-Monaghan Fianna Fáil” started calling into the radio station to declare their support for Humphreys.
This will be the first Irish presidential election to be contested by Fine Gael – and most likely Fianna Fáil – since the perceived end of Civil War politics. Since 2016 both have had to depend on each other to govern. Big parties are not as large as they used to be, with these two coalition partners each now hovering at 20 per cent of first-preference votes on their best days. To win, a Fine Gael candidate needs to be more popular with a Fianna Fáil base than Micheál Martin’s candidate would be with Simon Harris’s grassroots.
[ Strong argument for Micheál Martin to back Heather Humphreys for presidencyOpens in new window ]
That is why Fine Gael is so optimistic about Humphreys’s campaign for the Áras. There is not a single other Fine Gael politician who would earn the public endorsement of a Healy-Rae in a presidential race. There is confidence among senior Fine Gael politicians that if the public can get to know the same Humphreys they know, she will not be beaten.
A depleted Fianna Fáil was in a state of post-crash convulsion in 2011 when a new intake of Fine Gael TDs, including Humphreys, was elected. Humphreys came into the Dáil with Simon Harris, who she thought was there on a school tour. She was also elected alongside fellow first-timers Paschal Donohoe, Patrick O’Donovan, Regina Doherty and Martin Heydon, all of whom now hold senior roles in the party. They are also all fans of Humphreys.
Nobody is more adoring than O’Donovan, now Minister for Tourism and Culture, who is understood to have vowed to Humphreys this week: “I’ll talk to every Tom, Dick and Harry and turn over every stone in Ireland till we get you elected.”
O’Donovan and Humphreys are close, and talk multiple times a week, if not multiple times a day. Humphreys was a good friend to O’Donovan when he suffered the loss of both his parents within a year. Not even half an hour after Humphreys put her name into the race on Tuesday morning, O’Donovan was lobbying for her on national radio, social media, in a widely-circulated voice note, on the phone to TDs and Senators and to Fine Gael councillors in Limerick.
MEP Seán Kelly also started his ring-around in earnest last Tuesday to rally support for his bid, which now seems far too late. Some in Fine Gael were astounded Kelly had not used the weekend to try to catch up to what most understood was a Humphreys lead.
The Virginia Show in Cavan was uncharacteristically Humphreys-free on Wednesday morning, her absence perceived partly as a strategic courtesy to Kelly, who was expected to concede. Yet by the end of the week, the former GAA president’s supporters were still clinging to an almost irrational faith that things could yet turn around for him.
Fine Gael is reasonably confident Humphreys’s 13 years in national politics means her skeletons are well out of the closet
Over on the other side of the country on Wednesday, Tánaiste Simon Harris was doing a whistle-stop tour of west Cork. To his face, Harris was getting plenty of good wishes for Humphreys. But behind his back, there was a distinct perception in Munster that it had been snubbed.
Shane O’Callaghan, a Fine Gael councillor in Cork, was with Harris in Clonakilty this week. O’Callaghan admires Humphreys and is confident “she will be the president”. But he also feels the parliamentary party in Leinster House in effect decided Fine Gael’s presidential candidate themselves.
“We got no say,” he says. O’Callaghan thinks a contest like the 2017 leadership battle between Leo Varadkar and Simon Coveney would have been welcome “free publicity” for the party. This view is shared by Cork and Kerry councillors who favour Kelly.
As TDs and senators made their support for Humphreys clear this week, many were able to post tributes on social media to her for acts when she was minister for rural and community development, such as opening new floodlights on a Donegal pitch or a food hub in Roscommon. This, along with her shepherding of the State through the 1916 commemorations, will be the linchpins of Fine Gael’s campaign during the presidential election.
The latter is particularly meaningful to a party that still smarts at the memory of its incomprehensible attempt to commemorate the Royal Irish Constabulary in 2020. Humphreys’s childhood memories of smuggling butter and Maltesers over the Border and seeing burned-out checkpoints during the Troubles made her a compelling voice as minister for business during Brexit.
At the time of writing, Fine Gael is reasonably confident Humphreys’s 13 years in national politics means her skeletons are well out of the closet. “Though I’m sure you guys will do your best,” says one Minister.
They include the appointment of Donegal businessman and 2014 Seanad byelection candidate John McNulty to a State board to boost his credentials for the Seanad’s cultural panel.
There is also her alleged handling of a complaint from a prison services whistleblower while minister for justice, her intervention in an alleged animal cruelty case that was subsequently dropped, her role as director of elections for the failed family and care referendums, a highly controversial and subsequently mothballed planned reform of disability payments, hiring her second cousin as an adviser and her clash with Save Moore Street protesters during the 1916 commemorations.
Many left-wing politicians have been zeroing in this week on an incident when she reportedly told two reporters from The Ditch to “f**k off”. The lore in Fine Gael is that Humphreys always maintained she told them to “hop off”.
Humphreys is embraced as a matriarchal figure in Fine Gael, with some female colleagues claiming this week that her feminist record has been understated. Emer Higgins was one of the first Ministers to come out and support Humphreys this week.
She said the former minister went out of her way to be “very kind” to her when she was first elected and that supporting new female TDs was a pet project of Humphreys’s. Alongside former Labour junior minister Aodhán Ó Ríordáin, Humphreys helped push women to the front of the 1916 commemorations.
In the heat of the Protection of Life During Pregnancy debate that consumed Fine Gael in the summer of 2013, the devoutly anti-abortion Peter Matthews tried to demur against changing the law at a parliamentary meeting. Humphreys reportedly went through him for a shortcut, and was cheered by colleagues in the members’ bar afterwards.
It may not seem that significant in 2025, but 2013 was long enough ago in Fine Gael’s history that future repealer Simon Harris was still anti-abortion.
By 2018 Humphreys backed repeal, but took her time consulting with her rural base on the new 12-week limit. She was also one of the few ministers with the then-taoiseach Enda Kenny when he had his surreal, pre-marriage-equality Christmas pint in Dublin gay pub Pantibar in 2014.
Humphreys has always been offered a lot of grace by her colleagues – even when she floundered during the McNulty controversy. The question for Fine Gael is if its rush behind Humphreys has been rash, and if the Monaghan woman’s affable personableness will translate to the national stage of a presidential election.
