On Sunday evening, rumours started circulating among Fianna Fáil TDs that Jim Gavin, the former Dublin GAA football manager, was being tapped to become its candidate in the presidential election.
“First I heard of it and I couldn’t see it myself. Not yet anyway. He’s not overtly political,” a person who has known Gavin for a long time texted this reporter.
That person was not alone. Others expressed similar sentiments.
Jim Gavin was a stellar performer in the various roles he has held over the years. But he was a below-the-radar operator, more of a technocrat.
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He does not come from the old school of shouty GAA managers. All found it hard to see him in the political space, as that type of public figure.
Indeed, his public persona is polite, serious, unruffled, and undramatic to the point of blandness.
“God, he can come across as dull as ditchwater,” said another person who had dealt with him over the years.
Yet his friends say that in private he is more animated.
“He’s great company. That said, the guard does not come down very often. He is serious. There is no bullshit artist about him,” said one friend.
One GAA person suggested that he had deliberately cultivated the vanilla reputation in public to reveal as little as possible about his squad.
Gavin has had an exemplary record in his career: as an athlete and footballer, as a military officer, as one of the most successful managers in the history of the GAA, as the senior executive in the Irish Aviation Authority, as the person who revolutionised Gaelic football, as chair of the civic partnership charged with regenerating the northeast inner city, one of the most disadvantaged communities in the State.
Yet, for all that, there is much that remains unknown about him, to a larger public.
There is certainly a strong core of support for Gavin within the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party, especially among Dublin TDs and Senators.
But the one question that some ask is: can he successfully pivot to the very different – and very public – world of politics and its constant scrutiny?
Gavin (54) was raised in Clondalkin but his parents were from west Clare, a part of the country in which he retains a strong emotional connection. As manager of the team, he took the Dublin squad down to Doonbeg in Co Clare for training camps each year. He still holidays there.
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Periodically his interviews hint at an undoubted strong allegiance to the State and its values, some of which can be traced back to those west Clare roots. His grandfathers, Michael Gavin and Sean Vaughan, both fought in the War of Independence.
“I never met them, but I have Michael Gavin’s War of Independence medal. That’s a treasured possession,” he said in a 2018 interview.
In the same interview, he touched on another strong precept on merit that has guided his approach.
“You don’t deserve anything in life. You have to earn it,” he said.
He first marked himself out as a footballer with Round Towers GAA club, playing with underage teams, and then playing at wing forward for the Dublin team that won the senior All-Ireland in 1995.
A left-footed player, he wasn’t a star but he was incredibly brave and hard-working. The team manager, Pat O’Neill, said of Gavin that he always put the team first, even as a player. That loyalty extended to the club.
“He was an ever-present person in Round Towers,” says a former club team-mate. “Even now, he is still brilliant with his time. While living elsewhere, he never forgets his roots.”
Gavin joined the Air Corps as a cadet officer and trained as a pilot, rising quickly through the ranks. He became chief flying instructor and chief of military aviation in the Air Corps. He also served in overseas military operations, most notably in Chad.
A trained commercial jet pilot, he has spent his post-Defence Forces career on the public service side, as a senior aviation regulator. He is currently chief operations officer of the Irish Aviation Authority where he has overall operational responsibility for air safety in Ireland.
Those who know him are convinced he could expand into the role of president, if he runs and was elected.
Does Jim Gavin have what it takes for a presidential campaign?
“He’s a very bright, articulate guy who’s extremely good on the competence side. And he’s shown that in all sorts of ways,” says former deputy chief of staff of Óglaigh na nÉireann, Maj Gen Adrian Ó Murchú, now retired.
“He’s not a one-trick pony,” said Ó Murchú.
“He brings a fastidious approach to planning and meticulous attention to detail. For me, here is a guy who is in the top 5 per cent in the competence space.
“If leadership is a combination of character and competence, it’s in the character space that Jim Gavin comes into his own.”
[ Presidential nominees: why Fianna Fáil wants GAA legend Jim GavinOpens in new window ]
Gavin was always a person who was humble enough to take advice from others, to recognise his own weaknesses, and to learn, he says.
“He makes decisions based on values, his own personal values, the values of the Defence Forces when he was there, of the GAA, of the State,” he said.
Ó Murchú said Gavin would apply the same forensic approach to considering a run for the presidency.
“He will do an assessment of what is required of him as president – no better man to figure out the constraints imposed by the Constitution, the realpolitik, the relationship with [the Executive],” he said.
Others say that people should not be too swayed by a narrow reading of his public image. A GAA source, who has been close to Gavin throughout his career, has said he could not have done what he did without a formidable personality and powers of persuasion.
“When he takes on a project, it’s not going to be a losing project. They’ve all been successes, from Dublin teams he managed, to his own career, to the civic projects, like the Citizens’ Assembly of an elected mayor and the Dublin northeast inner city partnership,” he said.
The source said the project that stood out was the work he did on the Football Review Committee and his engagement with the various vested interests in devising the new Gaelic football rules.
“The amount of hours he put into it was mind-boggling. It was the most methodical piece of work I have ever come across,” says the source.
“And then he had to sell it to Congress, and had to navigate the greasy pole of GAA politics. It’s a very different ecosystem and audience but it was a tour de force.”
Harking back to Ó Murchú’s warning not to regard Gavin as a one-trick pony, the source argued that Gavin could articulate a vision and a plan for the presidency that would be communicated with conviction.
But can his undoubted skills and ability translate into mainstream politics?
“He would be an unusual choice for a main political party,” says political scientist Dr Theresa Reidy of UCC.
“They tend to recruit very much from the world of politics, or its intersection with the law”, as was the case with Mary Robinson and Mary McAleese.
“If he was to come into the race for Fianna Fáil, it would be a step change for the party,” said Dr Reidy.
She says people from politics find it a little easier to endure the Spanish Inquisition-type scrutiny from rivals and the media in the presidential election, where candidates find themselves under enormous scrutiny.
“We have seen many instances of really impressive and eminent people coming from civil society who have had the minutiae of their careers scrutinised in unbearable ways,” she says.
“The thing is: don’t come into the fray with a party manifesto or policies. You’re offering yourself. It’s all about you as a person and what you stand for. It’s not what you’re really going to do as a president, it’s really what you’re going to be as a president.”
All presidential elections since 1990 have been impossible to call before the campaign starts, she says. The public have not voted along party lines in the same way they did before.
“When push comes to shove, voters have tended to opt for people with fairly well-developed political careers,” says Dr Reidy, putting Robinson and McAleese in that category.
“That’s the big question Fianna Fáil has to mull right now. Would Jim Gavin be willing to endure the scrutiny of the campaign?
“Secondly, are the voters at a point where they are willing to go with somebody – albeit one as impressive as Jim Gavin – who is on the edge of that world, who is more embedded in civil society than in the political thing?” she says.
Some of those questions will be settled soon.
