We do not want another pain in the Áras

Fianna Fáil know that even if they could persuade St Patrick to come back and stand for the presidency on behalf of the party, he would fail to get elected.
That’s how poor an image Fianna Fáil has now and that’s why party leader Micheál Martin announced during the week that Fianna Fáil councillors may nominate an Independent candidate to stand for the presidency.
Fianna Fáil dreads this coming presidential election. The party knows that they have little or no chance of winning. They also cannot afford a costly presidential election coming in the wake of a costly general election.
The ideal solution for Fianna Fáil is an agreed candidate, which would avoid the need to hold an election, which happened on many occasions in the past. But that is not going to happen this time. Fine Gael and Labour are already committed to contesting and Senator David Norris is already in the field. So an agreed candidate is out.
The next best thing for Fianna Fáil would be a win for an Independent candidate. The only good thing about that, of course, would be that an Independent president would be better than a Fine Gael or a Labour one – from the Fianna Fáil point of view.
Micheál Martin’s announcement that he was, more or less, given his councillors a free hand to nominate whoever they liked, sounded great coming from a party which always ran a tight rein on how its representatives voted. But this is the new Fianna Fáil that has been humiliated at every election since the bubble burst. It is a Fianna Fáil that is getting used to eating humble pie – a dish that was never previously on the party menu.
There are a sizeable number in Fianna Fáil who do not want to contest the election at all for the reasons already mentioned – the cost and the prospect of another heavy defeat.
But there are also those in Fianna Fáil who believe that a refusal to contest would be a mark of cowardice – something Fianna Fáil could rarely be accused of. “Fianna Fáil needs to get up off its knees and come out fighting,” one Fianna Fáil TD told me during the week.
“We need to show that there is life still in this party. How can we attract new young people into Fianna Fáil if we run away from election fights?” he asked.
He also claimed that Fianna Fáil could win this election. “We still have units of the organisation in every parish in this country and with a good candidate we can pull this off,” he added.
That, of course, is the question. Does Fianna Fáil have a candidate popular enough to win the presidency? The answer to that question is a resounding NO. Cork MEP Brian Crowley seems to be their best bet but the party brand is so toxic that any Fianna Fáil candidate for any position would only have an outside chance.
However, it is still far too early at this stage to write off any candidate’s chances. The campaign has not got off the ground yet. We do not know who Fine Gael or Labour are going to nominate. The whole picture may change in five months’ time. The honeymoon may be over for Fine Gael and Labour by next October or November. I remember the early stages of Mary Robinson’s campaign for the presidency in 1990. Nobody gave her a chance; she had already been trounced as a Labour candidate at a number of general elections in the 1980s. Everybody thought that the late Brian Lenihan was home and dry. How wrong we were. The same happened in 1973 when everybody thought that the Fine Gael candidate Tom O’Higgins, the bookies’ favourite, had it in the bag, only to see Fianna Fáil’s Erskine Childers romp home.
The bookies’ favourite this time is Senator David Norris, who this week received the nomination of one local authority. He needs the support of four local authorities or 20 members of the Dáil or Seanad.
I do not think he will gain the support of 20 Oireachtas members but I do believe he will have the backing of at least four local authorities.
He will certainly be a popular candidate but whether he will have sufficient support to take on the party machines is something we cannot know until the campaign gets underway in the autumn. An Independent has never previously beaten a party machine on a national basis but it might happen this time.
Second favourite with the bookies at present is Clare man Michael D Higgins. I imagine that my readers do not give a tinker’s curse who my favourite is but I want to nail my colours to the mast at this early stage and tell you that I would like to see Michael D in the Park. We were in St Flannan’s College together and I got to know him fairly well in the Seanad and in the Dáil throughout the 1970s, the 1980s, the 1990s and into the 21st century.
I don’t want to take anything from David Norris, who would be my second-favourite but I think the Newmarket-on-Fergus man would do us all proud as president of Ireland.
The former PD leader, Des O’Malley once infamously said Michael D would go mad if he were ever in government. Well, when Michael D did get into government, he stopped the madness that Fianna Fáil and the PDs planned for Mullaghmore.
We need somebody in the Park who will brighten up our lives in the long dark days ahead. I believe that Michael D Higgins – or David Norris – would fit the bill nicely. Some of the other candidates mentioned might be another pain in the Áras.
We are not going to get St Patrick. Maybe we have had too many saints as presidents.