by Tom Reddy
The entrepreneur and chairman of Aer Árann, Pádraig Ó Céidigh, also announced that he was considering standing as an independent, having been approached by a number of business and community leaders. ‘I have a clear vision of the Irish as a people and our unique qualities,’ he said.
In the coming days, political endorsements for Norris began slipping away as three independent TDs withdrew their pledge to support his nomination just days after the Sunday Independent published the clemency plea. Most significantly, Finian McGrath, the Dublin TD who had co-ordinated Norris’s Oireachtas nomination bid, withdrew his support, saying that ‘children and the Presidency have to come first’.
The Waterford TD John Halligan also announced that he was withdrawing his support, as did the Donegal South-West TD Thomas Pringle. Deputy Halligan felt it was
a great error of judgment on his part to write the letter to the Israeli authorities appealing for leniency for Ezra Yitzhak Nawi. The office of the president must be beyond reproach and so, after consulting with my supporters, I have decided it would be inappropriate of me to support his bid for nomination.
The online news site www.thejournal.ie conducted an opinion poll that attracted almost a thousand voters. Three out of four said the revelations about Nawi would damage Norris’s bid. On Eamon Dunphy’s Sunday chat show on Newstalk radio the former presidential hopeful Fergus Finlay called on Norris to resign from the race, and to consider his position in the Seanad.
Clearly this is a smoking gun. It does mean that any further defence of David is impossible. He really needs to get out of being a candidate and reflect long and hard on his own future. He is probably hurt, wounded, baffled. He probably thinks the world is out to get him.
Meanwhile the independent Dublin TD Maureen O’Sullivan voiced her support for Norris, saying he should be allowed to be judged by the electorate. ‘He was looking at mitigating circumstances regarding the sentence. He has been targeted in a particularly nasty way, right from the beginning.’
The August public holiday edition of the Irish Daily Star was unequivocal in its insistence that Norris was wrong and that he should resign from the campaign, and consider his position in the Seanad.
It is wrong and it also shows a sad absence of an open and explicit regard for the young victim in this case. Most worryingly was Norris’s claim that the judge in the trial was ‘factually incorrect’ in saying ‘there was absolutely no difference’ between the case against Mr Yizhak and a similar case involving heterosexuals.
The politicians who are standing by Norris, despite this latest controversy, should also have a long rethink. Do they really want to be associated with someone who tried to plead clemency for a man convicted of statutory rape?
The Daily Mail reminded readers of an interview by Jason O’Toole published in the paper the previous year. In it Norris said that his relationship with Nawi had continued longer than was suggested as the controversy broke, and that he did not believe in an age of consent.
Norris was due to be the guest presenter on that night’s episode of Vincent Browne’s political chat show, but as the media clamour grew too loud he pulled out.
Norris had phoned the PR consultant Paul Allen on the Saturday from a friend’s home in Monkstown, Co. Dublin, where he was staying while the media were camped outside his house in North Great George’s Street. They met on Sunday as Norris celebrated his sixty-seventh birthday and agreed to meet again the following day, when Allen advised him to resign. Allen later recalled: ‘You cannot go any further with this, I told him.’ At three in the afternoon Norris agreed to the inevitable, and the team got to work on an exit strategy.
The following day, Tuesday the 2nd, the media were summoned to a press conference to be hosted by Norris outside his home. Norris, Allen and McCabe were across the road in the home of Norris’s friends, the barristers Muireann Noonan and Tony Collins. They could look through the curtains and watch the event on Norris’s doorstep. The speech was completed and copies printed. Norris left his friends’ house by the back door and drove around the block in his black Jaguar, pulling up outside his own house at 3 p.m. in front of the assembled throng of about fifty reporters and photographers. Then, behind a red rope, his hands sometimes trembling, his eyes glazed, the toll and strain apparent on his face, he said:
I deeply regret the most recent of all the controversies concerning my former partner of twenty-five years ago, Ezra Yizhak Nawi. The fall-out from his disgraceful behaviour has now spread to me and is in danger of contaminating others close to me, both in political and personal life.
It is essential that I act decisively now to halt this negative process. I do not regret supporting and seeking clemency for a friend, but I do regret giving the impression that I did not have sufficient compassion for the victim of Ezra’s crime.
I accept that more than a decade and a half later, when I have now reviewed the issue and am not emotionally involved, when I am not afraid that Ezra might take his own life, I see that I was wrong. He served his time and never offended again.
Yes, his actions were terrible, but my motivation to write the letter was out of love and concern. I was eager to support someone who has been very important and continues to be important in my life. I have been involved in many campaigns and have written many hundreds of letters on behalf of people in every continent—persecuted Tibetan monks, East Timorese, death-row prisoners in the United States of America. It is very sad that in trying to help a person I loved dearly I made a human error.
Norris did not take any questions. He was applauded by a few onlookers as he delivered his final line, a quotation from Samuel Beckett: ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.’ Then, with a big smile and a final theatrical wave for the cameras, he turned and closed his door on the world.
Later that evening he confirmed that he would not be resigning from the Seanad. He then began packing for a trip to his other home in Cyprus to avoid the media glare.
Meanwhile the Irish Times reported that
a number of letters written by Mr Norris on behalf of Mr Nawi have not come into the public domain. Ex-campaign workers said he wrote a number of letters appealing for clemency for Mr Nawi to a range of public figures in Israel and beyond. After they were shown the letters last Thursday, a number of Mr Norris’s campaign team resigned.
There would be much speculation about the content of the letters, and demands that they be made public, but they were not released.
Always robust in protecting its reputation, the Israeli embassy in Dublin issued a statement saying that allegations that it had been involved in the publication of the letter written by Norris to the court in Israel had ‘absolutely no foundation’. In a statement the embassy said, ‘No such letter was or is in the possession of the Embassy; as in Ireland, the judicial system in democratic Israel is entirely separate from the Government and Ministry of Foreign Affairs.’
After Norris resigned, Harry McGee in the Irish Times revealed the identity of the blogger who publicised the sentencing of Nawi for statutory rape in 1997. John Connolly, who blogs under the title ‘The System Works’, which advances strongly pro-Israeli views, rejected any claims of conspiracy or an orchestrated smear campaign. He said his source was a regular correspondent with his blog, came from a trade union background and had once campaigned for Michael D. Higgins but was not associated with the Labour Party. The party immediately issued a denial that it or its candidate had anything to do with the Norris controversy.
Connolly’s role drew scorn because of its political agenda, but it also won praise for bringing about ‘the first major victory of the Irish blogosphere’, according to the Irish Independent. According to Connolly,
there have been a lot of conspiracy theories. I have received a lot of messages that I am smearing David Norris and am an Israeli agent. There are rumours about nonsensical things about my connections with Israeli diplomats and with Mossad [the Israeli secret service]. Nobody smeared David
Norris. He did not deny anything that was put out on my blog.
Connolly, from Bandon, Co. Cork, is a graduate of Griffith Law School in Dublin and has lived in England. He confirmed that he had posted his story on the Israeli embassy’s Facebook page.
Back-room campaign experts and the candidates themselves would all say that the social media had a role to play, but it was only when these were taken up and put into the mainstream electronic or print media that there was clear cause and effect. However, it was clear that they were growing in importance and in reach for political campaigns—as they would again in the 2011 presidential campaign.
The bookies Paddy Power updated their latest betting for the Áras. Michael D. Higgins was firm favourite at 5:6, Gay Mitchell a close second at 13:8, Mary Davis 5:1, Seán Gallagher 12:1, Brian Crowley 16:1 and Mícheál Ó Muircheartaigh and Mary Hanafin 50:1. They also opened a book on whether Fianna Fáil would run a candidate, with the betting at Yes 5:4 and No 4:7.
The outspoken Star columnist Terry McGeehan summed up his relief that a potential constitutional crisis had been avoided after Norris withdrew.
There are those today who might actually feel sorry for David Norris. But this man has now been demonstrably shown to be unfit to hold high office. He has shown unbelievably bad judgement in writing these letters of support in the first place for the rapist of a child.
He has shown not only bad judgement but also unforgivable arrogance and unpardonable contempt towards the people of Ireland, who up to now were innocently on course to install him in the Park. So, let’s shed no tears for David Norris.
Instead let’s breathe a deep sigh of relief—tinged with white hot anger—that he was rumbled before he got the seal of office to represent the Irish Republic at home and on the world stage. We were fecking blessed.
The editorial of the Irish Times was more sober in its language but said Norris had no choice but to resign. It felt that his withdrawal should not be the end of the matter, because it was possible that Norris, as the most popular candidate in the field, would not qualify as a contender. This was unacceptable, and the Government ‘should ask the proposed constitutional convention to review nomination requirements for the position, rather than confine their assessment to cutting the presidential term from seven to five years.’ It also said that petitions by politicians to the courts on behalf of constituents should be banned, as well as appeals to Ministers for Justice seeking reductions in fines and penalties already imposed by the courts. It concluded: ‘If Mr Norris’s derailed attempts to secure a nomination result in these political flaws being addressed and repaired, he will have done democracy some service.’
The following day the Irish Independent revealed that Nawi had fought a five-year legal battle, involving two appeals, to avoid being jailed for the statutory rape of a boy. He was sentenced to six months in prison after a plea bargain was accepted by the Jerusalem High Court. He was jailed in November 1997 but released three months later.
Dearbhail McDonald in the Irish Independent repeated Israeli media reports that Nawi also had convictions for the illegal use of a weapon, for possession of drugs for personal use, for entering a closed military area and for threatening behaviour.
McCabe wrote of his experience for the Sunday Independent, saying that fifteen months earlier he had met Norris for coffee in Leinster House and told him he needed to build a ‘national support structure’ and could not be a ‘marginal or issues based’ candidate.
He wrote that they established twenty teams across the country, with two hundred volunteers, and at close of business had thirty thousand fans on Facebook, twenty thousand followers on Twitter, and Norris had personally addressed sixteen county and city councils. And Norris’s exit? ‘In my view his exit was the correct decision and was handled in a professional and dignified manner.’
Chapter 4
THE RINGER?
Government TDs and senators had been reading the opinion polls with increasing trepidation. There was no doubt that they were going to take a beating from the electorate. As time progressed, the question became not how many seats they would lose but how many seats could be saved. Fear stalked the offices of the Green Party and Fianna Fáil in Leinster House.
Fine Gael seemed unassailable—and the party leader, Enda Kenny, a racing certainty to be the next Taoiseach—and the Labour Party unbeatable in Dublin. Sinn Féin was showing well and might even beat Fianna Fáil into fourth place. Seats were going to be lost, dynasties destroyed and history changed. The question was: just how bad would it be, and how accurate were the opinion polls?
‘It was like a delayed funeral,’ wrote Olivia O’Leary, political analyst with ‘Drivetime’, assessing the election for the RTE publication The Week in Politics: Election 2011 and the 31st Dáil. ‘The government had died a long time ago, but it still had to be buried. Ultimately, most people just wanted the government out. The cold certainty with which they delivered the verdict was breathtaking.’
On Friday 25 February the country voted.
Fine Gael won an unprecedented 76 seats, an increase of 25 seats on the 2007 election. The Labour Party increased its total to 37, up 17. Sinn Féin won 14, an increase of 10. The Socialist Party won 2, having none in the previous Dáil. Similarly the People Before Profit Alliance won 2, having had no previous representation. The number of independent TDs increased from 9 to 15.
The Green Party was wiped out. Fianna Fáil was devastated, losing 58 seats, reducing its representation to 20—a historic hammering for any party and a humiliating result for Fianna Fáil.
The changed demographics in the Oireachtas would concentrate the minds of potential presidential candidates as they weighed up seeking support from the newly constituted political parties and from a range of independents and smaller parties.
Fine Gael and the Labour Party would look to the huge public endorsement they had received and would seek to transfer that to their candidate. For Fine Gael it could be the first time to elect a party nominee to the Áras, topping its successes in the local elections and the general election; for the Labour Party it was a chance to follow on the Robinson Presidency. For Fianna Fáil it posed a hard question: would there be any support for a candidate to be elected to the highest office in the land?
The presidential race had vanished from view in the media. The October election might seem a long way off, but away from the public gaze potential candidates were conscious of the time limits for winning a nomination. There were a lot of dominoes to be put in place, and summer would be a political vacuum as the Oireachtas shut down and councillors too went on annual holidays.
To win a nomination to be on the presidential election ballot there were three routes. A potential candidate could nominate themselves, but only if they were a former President and had served only one term of office: two terms and you were disqualified. In theory Mary Robinson was in the frame for the 2011 race, but she let it be known that she was not going to contest the election. However, it does not rule her out from qualifying as a candidate in a future presidential election.
The traditional route for candidates is as political party nominees. This requires the support of twenty members of the Oireachtas—less than 10 per cent of the total number of TDs and senators. However, the political parties had a history of selecting a single candidate to represent them, nominating from their own ranks and then closing those ranks. The number of independents and small parties had never reached a critical mass or likely agreement on a representative candidate, but the 2011 general election opened that possibility for the first time.
Finally, a candidate could follow the path pioneered successfully fourteen years earlier by Dana and by Derek Nally and seek a nomination from four of the country’s county or city councils.
Again, the same rules were likely to be applied by members of the major political parties, where they would be whipped in to support their own candidates, block others or abstain. A free vote would be the ideal for any non-party candidate see
king this route, but that was unlikely. If a political party had decided to nominate a party candidate it would use its parliamentary party to give the candidate that authority and then whip members to dissent or at least to abstain and exclude any other possible candidate, thereby reducing the number of candidates on the ballot paper.
Time was ticking away on the political calendar, and May was going to be a crucial month. It was an ideal time for testing the waters of public opinion and for anyone who was going to commit themselves, allowing them to make initial contacts before the summer hiatus and ideally positioning them for formal nominations in the autumn.
On Sunday 1 May, Nick Webb, the new business editor of the Sunday Independent, who had succeeded former senator Shane Ross, a newly elected independent TD, would kick-start a month of media coverage of the Presidency. He announced that the entrepreneur and ‘Dragons’ Den’ television presenter Seán Gallagher was ‘to blow open the race for the Park by standing for President.’
Gallagher was a joint founder of Smarthomes, which provided wiring and equipment for new houses. At its zenith it had a staff of seventy and a turnover of more than €10 million a year. Gallagher had left the business with the downturn in the economy and joined the hit RTE programme with Sarah Newman of Needahotel, Bobby Kerr of Insomnia, Niall O’Farrell of Black Tie and the radio show host and media trainer Gavin Duffy.
The news pages carried a brief reference to the emergence of the new candidate, saying Gallagher hadn’t declared but had claimed the backing of the independent senator and former supermarket magnate Feargal Quinn.
