The Irish presidency began in 1938 and became a comfortable sinecure for party warhorses who were kicked upstairs until the spectacular success of the outsider Mary Robinson in 1990. She was catapulted into the largely ceremonial position by the Irish left – the Labour party and the then Workers’ party. Here’s to Mrs Robinson, who became a powerful symbol of a new, caring, more confident and inclusive Ireland.
As the first woman to hold the post she was ‘the hand that rocked the cradle.’ She also kept a candle permanently lit in the window of her official residence in Phoenix Park in recognition of the role of the Irish diaspora whose size dwarfs that of the Irish Republic.
Her seven-year term coincided with much of the last phase of ending the Troubles. She took it upon herself to lend the weight of her office to campaigns seeking to isolate violence.
At that time the Provisional IRA were regularly bombing the railway line between Belfast and Dublin, which was an odd thing to do for a movement supposedly dedicated to a united Ireland.
Cultural, union and political figures formed the Peace Train Committee to protest, and several trains with hundreds of people from across the political spectrum ran the gauntlet. Most got through though some were halted by hoax bombs. They then ran a Peace Train from Belfast-Dublin-London (I was the London organiser). Mary Robinson was our patron and invited us to tea at the presidential palace.
Such activity underlined that those who used physical force, claiming to be the legitimate government of Ireland, were totally unrepresentative and their actions were not in the name of the Irish people.
The next Irish president, Mary McAleese was a Catholic from the North where she had been a colleague of David Trimble’s at the Law Department at Queen’s University. She and her Protestant husband played a very useful role in consolidating the peace and in reaching out to unionist and loyalist figures, including former paramilitaries. I understand that one of her last acts was to secure visas to America for a delegation from the Ulster Defence Association.
The winner this year, Michael D Higgins, is a man of letters and leftwing causes, some traditional and some hopeless. He was neck-and-neck until the last few days with Sean Gallagher, a judge in their equivalent of the Dragon’s Den who was described by the Irish writer Kevin Myers as a ‘stealth missile’ by Fianna Fail, the long-standing and deeply unpopular natural party of government which didn’t formally field a candidate
However, his nominal independence from Fianna Fail was kyboshed by a Sinn Fein leak of news – a ‘political assassination’ as Gallagher called it – that he had passed 5,000 Euros to Fianna Fail from a businessman. Gallagher’s defeat helps confirm the sharp decline of Fianna Fail which had provided, at least in part, five of the country’s eight presidents.
Time will tell if the ninth president can make the most of the post and raise the spirits of the once successful Celtic Tiger which has been tamed by the economic crisis blowing through Europe.
Time will also tell if the party of Martin McGuinness, who came third, will come to be seen as a big winner. It’s only 25 years since Sinn Fein abandoned abstentionism in the South – their boycott of parliamentary elections in what they insisted on calling the Free State – the 26 counties as opposed to what they called the ‘occupied six counties’ – neither of which they wished to recognise because of what they see as the illegitimate division of Ireland in the 1920s.
Sinn Fein’s were keen to hold the presidency during the centenary in 2016 of the Easter Rising. That was a step too far for most Irish people who were far less deferential to McGuinness than in Northern Ireland where he remains deputy first minister, although on temporary leave of absence.
McGuinness was often confronted on the campaign trail by relatives of soldiers and police officers killed by the IRA. His claim that he had left the IRA in 1974 was widely mocked. He is closely associated with the war crimes of the organisation throughout the Troubles although, to be fair, he did overturn some old republican no-go areas by admitting that the IRA committed murder and recognising that the Irish army is the only legitimate army in the country.
Many jokes were made at his expense and had a deep resonance. In my recent article, I quoted the widely circulated joke by one Facebooker – ‘Just found an election leaflet from Martin McGuinness under my car. Old habits die hard.’ The immediate response to the result were tweets that he had conceded using a recognised code word.
Yet his campaign may have drawn much of the poison felt towards his party. It may be that his historic role is to have soaked up the punishment and to have been the lightning conductor for Provo atrocities. This may have drawn the line under the past.
Sinn Fein’s share of the vote in the South is rising, it has fresh blood in the Dail, the two historic governing parties in the South are down on their uppers, it is in poll position to be a major alternative in times of austerity and its stature in the north bolsters its claim to be a major pan-Ireland force. Others are sceptical of this and fear that Sinn Fein’s machine politics, to put it politely, could poison Irish politics.
McGuinness is 61 and could easily stand in seven years’ time with the necessary name recognition to be a president or hand the baton to a new, younger and cleaner generation which can fight free of their movement’s record. Sinn Fein is used to playing a very long game – ‘our day will come’ being the movement’s slogan.
In the meantime, Labour can celebrate another historic success and seek to make the most of being in government, albeit in tough times, to build for the future. Irish politics is changing – the old civil war parties are not what they used to be – and the voice of Labour needs to be strengthened.
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Gary Kent is director of Labour Friends of Iraq
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