Happy are the mud slingers

PEOPLE should be very careful when they fling mud as a lot of it is liable to stick to themselves.
We had a lot of mud slinging over the past week, mainly by Fine Gael people who fear their candidate, Gay Mitchell may come in at the bottom of the presidential poll.

It will really annoy them if the Sinn Féin candidate, Martin McGuinness gets more votes than their man gets.
So instead of positive campaigning in favour of Gay Mitchell, they have engaged in a negative campaign of mud slinging aimed at McGuinness.
They are afraid their own candidate is so dull that even Fine Gael voters themselves will not come out to support him. They feel the only way to galvanise them into action is by raising the spectre of Martin McGuinness, the terrorist and former gunman taking up residence in Áras an Uachtaráin as President of Ireland for the next 14 years. Perish the thought!
Now I have known Gay Mitchell since he was first elected to Dublin City Council in 1979. I have interviewed him on several occasions and have always had a good and even friendly relationship with him.
I would not go along with Michael McDowell’s insulting description of him (in relation to his late older brother Jim Mitchell) as “the evil of two lessers”. Neither do I think Gay Mitchell is a dull candidate.
I believe he would be a good President of Ireland and – insofar as it is possible in such a restricted and powerless office – also an innovative one.
He is a man who thinks big – he once wanted to bring the Olympic Games to Ireland – but his big ideas are usually scoffed at by his more “clever” colleagues in politics.
They went out of their way to stop him from running for the Prewsidence because they didn’t think he was good enough for them, preferring instead Pat Cox whose background was far more Fianna Fáil than it was Blueshirt.
Now that they are stuck with the lad from Inchicore, they are unwilling to go out and canvas positively on his behalf. That’s a pity because Mitchell can give a good account of himself. For example, there was very little notice taken here of his suggestion that Northern Ireland could have joint heads of state, Queen Elizabeth of England and the President of Ireland.
This was a proposal he made in an interview on BBC radio earlier this year, part of which was rebroadcast last Sunday.
It got little or no notice here because, generally speaking, our political parties have no interest in Northern Ireland and are not really serious about ending partition. Neither have they any interest in what Gay Mitchelll says unless they can get him to fling more muck at Martin McGuinness and the more muck he flings at McGuinness, the more publicity he will get.
I believe his suggestion about joint heads of state for Northern Ireland is quite an interesting one and should be examined further. There is nothing the future President will be able to do about that and it would be bitterly opposed by the Unionists. But they no longer have a veto over everything we propose and I think it is a suggestion that should be pursued by our Government here – and by Martin McGuinness when he gets back to Stormont next month.
But Gay Mitchell’s is a voice crying in the wilderness.  Fine Gael has no interest in Northern Ireland, which it regards as a foreign country. Not that Fianna Fáil nor the Labour Party ever had much of an interest in it either until they were forced to. 
But Fine Gael’s lack of interest in the North was on a different level. Surely you remember John Bruton’s vulgar dismissal of the peace process when he was Taoiseach for a brief spell back in the mid-1990s.
Fine Gael has no interest in Gay Mitchell either, nor in any of his ideas no matter how good they might be. I have a feeling they don’t want him to win this election. I think they believe they wouldn’t be able to cope with him or with his big ideas if he was President of Ireland. They think he would be an embarrassment to them.
I think they would prefer to see Michael D Higgins up in the Park rather than their own man. Michael D after all is of the Labour Party and the Labour Party is in Government with them.
That’s why you have all this negative campaigning.  But it may yet blow up in their faces. I know a number of people who had intended voting for other candidates and have now switched their allegiance to Martin McGuinness.
As I pointed out last week, I am one of those myself.  The Fine Gael attacks on McGuinness have been so disgraceful and so outrageous that many people will have sympathy for the Sinn Féin man and may vote for him now despite, or more likely, because of Fine Gael’s dirty tricks’ department.
Meanwhile, Michael D Higgins is already looking and sounding Presidential. He will not engage in any mud slinging. He doesn’t need to as he looks like heading the poll and also looks like getting more second and other preference votes than any other candidate.
During the week, he pointed out that “there isn’t much to gain if candidates start slagging each other off”.
As a newspaperman, I acknowledge there’s nothing like a bit of mud-slinging and a few dirty tricks here and there to liven up a dull campaign and to sell a few more papers. But an election is not called to provide entertainment nor to boost circulation figures. The purpose of an election is to elect the best person for the job. It’s as simple as that.