SIDELINE CUT:The presidential candidates failed to make much of their sporting backgrounds, but the tough-tackling Michael D Higgins will find it difficult to match Mary McAleese

THE PRESIDENTIAL vows of the last few weeks to return the Emerald Isle to full employment, to leave her latrines sparkling and to open up the Áras to the down-and-outs have been all very well, but it doesn’t take away from the fact that the chief requirements of the head of state involve a fondness for international travel, knowing your way around the silverware at a haute cuisine dinner and waving to the public at one hell of a lot of sports events.

Everyone knows that being President of Ireland is a 24/7 job but much of the work is hidden and obscure. It is only on big match days that the public really gets to see the President.

It may seem like a simple task but dispensing an equal number of waves to all sections of the crowd in Croke Park or Lansdowne Road is one of the trickiest aspects of the job. It is one of the reasons that Mary McAleese was such a roaring success. You could have the crumbiest seat in the house and still feel as though she was waving exclusively at you.

Will Michael D have the same magic touch? It remains to be seen but thankfully, we won’t have too long to wait. The new man in the Park is sworn in on Friday, November 11th and after the solemn duty of state is concluded, all attention will turn to Ireland’s crucial Euro 2012 championship match against Estonia. The return leg is on Tuesday night in Lansdowne Road and that will surely mark President Higgins’ first sporting outing.

One can only imagine what Giovanni Trapattoni will make of this tidy, white-haired charming man who has – overnight, the Italian will feel – replaced the glamorous lady that he has met over the past few years.

MDH is enthusiastic about many things and, as Ireland’s original renaissance man, he has a rich and varied history in the sporting arena. Casual race goers will know him as an habitué of many race meetings and he has always cut a dashing figure at the big Galway carnival, dispensing wickedly accurate and colourful tips on the star turns while cocking a disdainful eye at the big white tent which billowed through the boom years.

But his affection for the beautiful game is an area of his life that has not been greatly explored. He is a fervent Galway United man and the club’s president and has spent many a winter in Terryland, rallying the troops with inspirational bursts of poetry and occasionally materialising in the dressing room when things became particularly tricky.

They say the half-time dressing room talk he gave on Kierkegaard when the team was facing relegation turned that particular season around.

He was regarded as a tenacious midfield player in his day, modelling his game on the Leeds United of Bremner and Charlton and was rumoured to carry a Little Black Book into which he pencilled the names of prominent opponents during the notoriously tough inter-faculty lunchtime games played in the Quadrangle in UCG throughout the 1970s.

It is said that while togging out for the Philosophy Department in a bitterly contested league match circa ’76, Higgins met the star PHD member of the English faculty with such a truth-telling tackle that the poor chap abandoned Postmodernism entirely and spent the rest of his working life teaching Beowulf.

They say he has had many a deep and thoughtful conversation with Roy Keane on the lost art of “nailing” a fellow with a judiciously delivered tackle.

It was peculiar that the sporting backgrounds of the candidates rarely came into focus during the campaign. Each of the candidates had justifiable boasts to make in this department but didn’t make enough of them.

Martin McGuinness, for instance, was reputed to be a nippy wee street footballer around Derry. They say he was offered to trials with Tottenham but rejected the invitation, complaining that no Irishman ever got a fair trial in England.

Not only could Dana have waved to the crowds before big games, she could have sang the national anthem is well.

One of the great mysteries of the campaign was the public indifference to Mary Davis’s Special Olympics achievement. The vote was a kind of You-Organised-The-Biggest-Ever- Sporting-Event-Held-On-This-Island shrug. Perhaps in retrospect, she should have made more of her GAA roots – her brother was a star turn for Mayo in the 1960s. She might have declared her intention to be in the Ard Chomhairle as President when the Sam Maguire was handed to a Mayo man – although that feat would possibly involve retaining office for the next 50 years.

But no candidate had the sporting CV to match Seán Gallagher. Come Skip With Me In Ireland! It might have been the catchphrase of his first speech. The Louth man ranks second only to Bruce Lee on the world’s most famous black-belt list.

As he reviews the smoking ruins of a campaign that flew so brilliantly for so long, he might reflect that it required every ounce of Zen that he possesses not to deliver a quick, clean chop into the solar plexus of Martin McGuinness last Monday night.

The people have spoken and all that but there is something kind of reassuring about the thought of a President who could double as a kind of crack-commando security detail for visiting heads of state is reassuring.

In fact, it is debatable as to whether such a lethal practitioner of the martial arts would require any security at all. It could have saved the taxpayer a bundle. Pity the burglar quietly working his way through the family silver only to be confronted with President Seán in full karate regalia. A solemn bow of an honourable President and then: Ker-Pow.

Mr Gallagher’s exhibition on the skipping rope – when he went through a razzle-dazzle one foot and two foot routine that combined the speed of Mayweather with the power of Liston – was, in a weird way, the most moving moment of the entire presidential campaign. Did Dev, for all his talk, ever skip rope like that?

We will never know now but had the campaign gone differently, then dignitaries from all over the world might well have been wowed by President Seán’s after dinner skipping performances, floating like a butterfly. It would have been different.

But MDH will do us proud. It is hardly controversial that Mr Higgins is an exceedingly un-tall individual and that there is a distinct possibility that on those foggy Six Nations Saturdays that he may be mistaken for a mascot/veteran ball boy when he lines up beside the giants of modern rugby. Still, if this election has proven anything, it’s that it’s not the size of the man in the fight . . .

“He was regarded as a tenacious midfield player in his day, modelling his game on the Leeds United of Bremner and Charlton and was rumoured to carry a Little Black Book into which he pencilled the names of prominent opponents during the notoriously tough inter-faculty lunchtime games played in the Quadrangle in UCG throughout the 1970s