The Race for the Áras

by Tom Reddy

  So let me break a story that is staring you in the face. Isn’t there something slightly sick about a society which approaches former terrorists with appeasing smiles, hand outstretched to shake hands which have spilled blood, but is ready to round on a good man like David Norris who has never spilled a drop of Irish blood or even hurt the proverbial fly?

  On the opinion pages of the Sunday Times the columnist Brenda Power revealed that Helen Lucy Burke was herself the subject of appalling abuse the previous week, when Twitter had come alive with comments directed at her age and sex, saying she was an ‘attention-seeking bag lady’ and a ‘vicious little old woman.’ According to Power,

  it would be a truly sorry day for this democracy, and a poor look out for the quality of presidential candidate we can expect, if Norris is hounded out of running for the Park over some designedly provocative comments he made ten years ago.

  Norris was putting his best side out for the Sunday World, saying that he remained confident and that he had received countless messages of good will and a warm reception in Limerick and Clonmel, where he had been canvassing.

  When things are taken out of context—I know myself it looked bloody awful. But it depends on how the Irish people perceive me, and I can’t second-guess them. Time will tell.

  In the Sunday Independent, Jody Corcoran wrote that it was a ‘sad truth’ that attacks on Norris were sparked by his homosexuality.

  It is only because Norris is a homosexual that the media feel free to ask him about matters related to sexuality; but because other prospective candidates are not homosexual, the media has not, and will not, ask them about such deeply personal matters … When the issue of sexuality is coupled with politics, as we know, it can be lethal, so lethal as to possibly now derail the Norris campaign for the presidency.

  And that would be a great shame because, of all of the candidates, Norris is so far the most interesting and, potentially, the best to do what can be a difficult job.

  The following Wednesday, 15 June, Norris convened a meeting of his election team for six o’clock. Thirteen people turned up at his campaign headquarters, beside Davy Byrne’s pub in Duke Street, including his campaign manager, Liam McCabe, and director of communications, Jane Cregan, who was on leave of absence from her post as events manager at Iarnród Éireann. The meeting was prompted by a phone call from the Daily Mail, who had contacted Norris to say they were going to rerun an interview he had given to them a year earlier. ‘David Norris with the team made a decision to deal with every issue as comprehensively as possible, to get out there and set the record straight,’ Cregan recalled.

  Norris launched a media blitz to counter the Mail’s interview. That morning, at 2 a.m., Norris’s web site was updated with a question-and-answer document addressing the contentious points raised in the interview and with a list of media interviews arranged.

  The first interview was on ‘Morning Ireland’ and sought to elicit Norris’s views on paedophilia and pederasty. He struggled to explain his case in simple, non-academic terms for a still-sleepy breakfast audience. He referred to the Symposium of Plato, a seven-part philosophical discussion on love, including homosexuality, until the presenter, Áine Lawlor, cut across him with a telling comment that would be repeated in later commentaries: ‘But you are not running for election in Ancient Greece: you are running for election in modern Ireland.’ The Irish Times would sum it up:

  On the face of it, Norris seemed to be saying he did not believe in an age of consent; that prostitution and drugs should be legalised, and that pederasty, as practised by the ancient Greeks, was acceptable. He also defended Cathal Ó Searcaigh against some of the allegations surrounding his contacts with young men in Nepal.

  Norris would admit later that ‘Thursday had been a difficult day for me and my supporters.’ He still claimed the support of three hundred campaign volunteers, but political observers would question the belief of his director of communications that time was on Norris’s side and that he would be able to turn the campaign around.

  Norris would tell the Irish Times that he had engaged in an academic discussion on sexual relations between older men and younger men and boys arising from classical Greek literature.

  I made a distinction between paedophilia and pederasty, which is a totally different thing. To the average person it would not make any difference, I suppose, but to me it did because I knew what I was talking about. That got mixed up and stayed mixed up.

  I abhor with every fibre of my being the idea of interference with children, sexual abuse, physical abuse and emotional abuse. My record on that speaks for itself.

  As the latest resurrected article was republished, Norris appealed directly to his electorate, scrambling to regain ground.

  So I stand on my deeds. I don’t think that responsible people like councillors, who have a lot of responsibilities in their local area, or my fellow TDs and Senators, would actually feel it appropriate to judge me on a couple of sensationalised headlines. I don’t think they would judge me on that …

  The great thing for me is my conscience is clear. I know I have done nothing wrong. I know I have not injured anybody. I know I have passionately stood up for the rights of the abused.

  He had been speaking to the recipients of the Fingal Centre awards at the Tailors’ Hall, near Christ Church, another diverse event on the campaign trail. He explained that, from 14 March, when he formally launched his campaign,

  I have behaved like a president and I am behaving more like a president all the time. And I feel I am being drawn towards and growing into the job. What I am asking now is that the councillors and my fellow members of the Oireachtas give me the opportunity to let the people decide.

  On Sunday 19 June, as the Labour Party met to elect its nominee, the Sunday Independent published its opinion poll commissioned from Quantum Research. Support for Norris had not diminished with the Magill controversy. He topped the poll, with 30 per cent support, more than twice that of Pat Cox, his nearest rival. Cox—a former TD, MEP and president of the European Parliament—and Finlay were at 13 per cent each. Michael D. Higgins and Gay Mitchell scored 11 per cent, while Mairead McGuinness won 9 per cent, Mary Davis 7, Seán Gallagher 4 and Kathleen O’Meara 2.

  While Norris still had not secured the necessary twenty Oireachtas nominations, the independent Dublin TD Finian McGrath urged support for Norris.

  The absence from the field of the most popular candidate amongst the public would seriously tarnish the credibility of the highest constitutional office in the land. My position at the moment is that the winner of a campaign that does not include Mr Norris would have a flawed mandate.

  The following Thursday an Irish Independent/Millard Brown Lansdowne opinion poll showed that Norris was still the public’s favourite, with a 21 per cent rating—a drop in approval but a heartening result after all the controversy he had endured. But he still had not secured a nomination.

  Higgins scored 19 per cent (the same percentage that the Labour Party achieved in a national approval ratings), while Mairead McGuinness was ahead of her party colleagues as Avril Doyle joined the race and was assessed by voters. McGuinness achieved 10 per cent and Cox 7 per cent, with Doyle picking up 3 per cent and Mitchell 2 per cent. Among the independents, Gallagher was leading, with 6 per cent, while Davis was on 4 per cent and O’Dowd on 3 per cent.

  On a separate question—which of the Fine Gael candidates would be best positioned to win the Presidency—McGuinness came out on top, with 26 per cent, while Cox won 19, Mitchell 14 and Doyle 9.

  A few days later, on the 24th, the Sunday Independent published the result of another opinion poll, showing Norris at 42 per cent, Mitchell trailing him at 21, Higgins at 16, Davis at 11 and Gallagher at 10.

  In the same paper Miriam O’Callaghan, presenter of RTE’s ‘Frontline’ programme, again dismissed rumours that she had been approached and was considering running for the Park. ‘It’s a story that just won’t go away,’ she complained.

&nbs
p; This started last year. It’s quite extraordinary, but if people think I’m going to jump out of the bushes at the last minute and make a dash for the Park they are wrong. I will not be running for the Presidency this year. If I do you can come back and haunt me.

  On Wednesday 20 July, despite still not having a nomination from four local authorities or the support of twenty Oireachtas members, Norris remained the voters’ favourite to win the race for the Áras. That morning’s Irish Times/Ipsos MRBI opinion poll showed him scoring 25 per cent. Mitchell came a close second, at 21 per cent, Higgins at 18, Gallagher 13, Davis 12 and the undeclared candidate Éamon Ó Cuív 11.

  The pollsters also asked voters to rate the qualities they considered most important in the next President. A total of 38 per cent said that a candidate who could represent the country well was the most important. Honesty and reputation came second, with 17 per cent, while 9 per cent opted for personality. Ominously for a candidate who was a TD, senator or MEP, the poll had only 3 per cent believing that a candidate’s political experience was the most important factor.

  The opinion poll also showed that Norris was attracting cross-party support, with his strongest support coming from people in the 35–49 age group.

  Mitchell’s support was strongest in Dublin and weakest in Connacht-Ulster, which was the opposite of Ó Cuív, who could only muster 4 per cent support in the capital. However, Mitchell was winning the support of only half of Fine Gael voters—a cause for real concern for head office. Higgins was strongest in Munster and Connacht-Ulster but, like Mitchell, was getting the support of less than half the declared voters. Davis and Gallagher had an even spread of support among all classes and age groups, but Davis was sweeping up more Fianna Fáil votes than Gallagher.

  Within hours Norris was going to find his political support and his hopes for the Áras rapidly slipping away. On Friday 29 July the Norris campaign came crashing to the ground as his director of communications, Jane Cregan, and director of elections, Derek Murphy, resigned, feeling let down by Norris after he had failed to disclose a plea for clemency that he had written for his former lover.

  In the blogosphere and on the net, the conviction in Israel of Norris’s former lover, Ezra Yizhak Nawi, in 1997 for having sex with a fifteen-year-old Palestinian boy—statutory rape—in 1992 was resurrected. Norris had provided Nawi with a character reference and had written a substantial letter pleading for clemency on Seanad Éireann notepaper.

  There was a storm of comment in the social media, and its significance was not lost on the savvy ‘Team Norris’. They had put a lot of effort into building an online campaign for Norris, with a regularly updated and lively web site and with constant conversations on Facebook, where he had thirty thousand fans and twenty thousand Twitter followers. The following day another ‘Team Norris’ member, the youth organiser Orla Foley, resigned from the campaign.

  In an effort to limit the damage, Norris gave the Sunday Independent a copy of the letter he had written fourteen years earlier. He also provided a copy of a character reference he had written for Nawi, which he signed ‘Senator David Norris, Bureau Member, Irish Foreign Affairs Committee’. The story, and an exclusive interview with Norris, was splashed over five pages in the 31 July edition.

  Norris’s lengthy letter, on Seanad notepaper, was written to the judges of the Israeli High Court and pleaded for mercy for his former lover, who he had known for the previous twenty-three years. According to Norris, the letter was given to Nawi’s lawyers to use as they felt appropriate, and it suggested that they could forward it to the court if they felt it appropriate. In the letter he said:

  I was elected to my parliamentary position ten years ago for the first time and have been re-elected on several occasions since. At the recent election held last month I received the highest vote ever recorded for the Senate, being elected on the first count, and have been widely mentioned as a possible presidential candidate in the forthcoming elections for the Presidency of Ireland.

  The lengthy and detailed ‘humble plea’ asked for a non-custodial sentence for his ‘close and personal friend’, who he had first met in December 1975. Listing mitigating factors, he said Nawi had ‘unwisely pleaded guilty’ and had been the victim of a violent and abusive father. He also questioned the behaviour of the police, claiming that the arrest ‘took place in a curious and troubling manner.’ The circumstances were deeply worrying, he said. ‘Mr Yizhak was lured into a carefully prepared trap.’ Norris volunteered to inform the court about Nawi’s character and about the legal system and its similarities to Irish law.

  However my most urgent plea would not be on technical grounds, which at the end of the day I feel diffident in attempting to argue before this distinguished court. The strongest argument is ad misericordiam [for mercy].

  Secure in the knowledge that Mr Yizhak will not offend again in the same way, that he is prepared to make financial compensations available to the young man involved, that lasting and perhaps permanent damage will be done to his psychological and material welfare by being imprisoned, by virtue of the fact that there is a possibility that he may attempt suicide in prison, by virtue of the fact that his elderly mother’s principal support and reassurance will be removed, I earnestly beg that the court may see the possibility of securing justice not by sending him to prison but by imposing a non-custodial sentence.

  Interviewed by John Drennan, Norris made an implicit admission that he had made a major political error. Of Nawi’s conviction he said:

  Some people will think it should have cropped up immediately. But I had compartmentalised it away. It was a shocking and painful experience … I anticipated there would be attacks. I trawled back ten years and we anticipated that would be enough.

  According to Drennan,

  the senator’s subsequent admission that ‘nobody knew this was coming. I never alerted people but it was so long ago and so hurtful’ goes a long way to explaining why two of his top campaign team resigned so abruptly … Norris, who has been publicly critical of the treatment of Palestine by Israel, refrained from commenting on suggestions that he had been stitched up. But he did say: ‘There is something sinister about it all. It has all the appearance of a stitch up, but I’m too close to the situation.’

  In a compelling story, Norris said that when the full truth emerged he was shattered. ‘But when you see someone drowning and their head surfaces, you don’t push it back under. You pull them ashore and you confront them with what they have done.’ He said the furore and ‘the secret internet campaign’ that sparked it was ‘guilt by association. I am not Ezra. I have never lived his lifestyle. I loved him. But it has been many people’s fate to love people who have defects.’ But he said he intended to continue his campaign. ‘I’m not hiding behind shadows. I have to take it on the chin and reassure people all over the country that I’m the same person I was last week.’

  However, Norris’s worst fears were being realised. Political support was wavering, maybe even slipping away from his candidacy. Two senators, Prof. John Crown and Mary Louise O’Donnell, publicly called on him to issue a statement clarifying the controversy. Later Senator Jillian van Turnhout, who withdrew her support for Norris, would post on her Facebook page about the ‘constant barrage’ of calls and emails, ‘some abusive and it now feels like harassment’.

  Meanwhile a different letter was dropping through letterboxes around the country. The Fianna Fáil MEP Brian Crowley had written to every party TD, senator and MEP asserting that the party was capable of conducting a successful campaign with him as candidate. ‘I believe I have the character and competence to communicate that spirit which defines our country, our people and our history,’ he said. He referred to previous conversations he had had about the office with Micheál Martin and to his agreement with him not to make any public statement until the party decided its strategy on whether to run a candidate. ‘However, we are now in the run-up to decision time in early September and many of you have asked me to reconfirm my
position, which is the reason for this correspondence.’

  Crowley (47), from Bandon, Co. Cork, the son of the former West Cork TD and senator Flor Crowley, was paralysed from the waist down at the age of sixteen after he fell off a roof on which he had been playing rugby with friends. He always had an interest in music and in politics, often travelling to meetings with his father. He volunteered as a late-night DJ on the WKLR pirate station with the programme ‘Brian Rogers and the 25th Century’, earning him the nickname ‘Buck’ for a long time.

  Albert Reynolds, the Taoiseach of the day, made him one of his Seanad nominees in 1993, saying,

  When I had the opportunity to search around for people for the Senate I thought about him, because he could fulfil so many roles in the Seanad. Here was a guy in the prime of his youth who had met with this adversity, and while many people might be inclined to lie back or write off their future life, he got a new injection of life. I thought he would be a glorious example to the youth of the country and to those with disability.

  Crowley was first elected to the European Parliament in 1994 and was a consistent poll-topper, being returned at every election. A hard constituency worker, he remained hugely popular, and supporters believed that he had charisma and cross-party appeal and that he had a distance from the toxicity associated with members of the Fianna Fáil Government.

  Meanwhile there was increasing speculation that Dana (Rosemary Scallon) and the distinguished artist Robert Ballagh might enter the race. Ballagh (68), a lifelong socialist and republican, had taken soundings about running a broad left-wing programme in opposition to economic cut-backs and the bank bailout. He had discussions with Gerry Adams, president of Sinn Féin, Richard Boyd Barrett of the People Before Profit Alliance and the leader of the Socialist Party, Joe Higgins.