by Tom Reddy
Convention day was ‘daunting’, O’Meara told the meeting. It was also Father’s Day, she reminded them, saying she was glad her father hadn’t had to witness the arrival of the International Monetary Fund eight months earlier. Dissolving into tears, she said:
My father, who was born in 1917, was raised through the Civil War and the War of Independence. He worked hard, like many others, to build this country, and he loved it and believed in it. And I thought, thank God he’s not here to see this.
She recalled later that ‘it was very emotional for me, it was personal and it was difficult,’ saying that her son had to leave Ireland to find work in Australia.
The count was decisive. O’Meara won 7 votes, Finlay 18, but Higgins was the clear winner with 37.
Gilmore spoke to the media after the convention. Higgins, from the same county, had been a mentor and strong supporter in earlier days in the party and had twice proposed him in leadership contests. Gilmore recognised the lack of control that he, or Labour Party head office, would have over the campaign and candidate.
This is not a campaign that the Labour Party intends to micromanage, to control what Michael D has to say. We’re going to respect from today Michael D’s independence as a candidate, the same way as we will respect Michael D’s independence as President when he’s elected.
It was a recognition of tensions that would emerge, but that never flared into public view, between Higgins’s hand-picked team and Labour Party head office. On one occasion Higgins would flounce out of the office after a row.
Higgins’s ambition for the Park was more than twenty years old, but the planning for the 2011 election began twenty months before the vote. In the summer of 2010 Kevin O’Driscoll, an old friend of Higgins and his former programme manager during Higgins’s tenure as Minister for Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht, called to visit him in hospital as he recovered from an operation on his knees. Higgins had previously expressed an interest in running for President, but now he told O’Driscoll that he was going to run the following year and that he was going to retire from the Dáil.
Over the coming months they would discuss putting together a team and a policy platform. They were joined by the retired civil servant Chris O’Grady, who had worked in the film section of the Department of Arts when Higgins was minister and would be an important speech-writer. In May 2011 O’Driscoll, who would be his election agent, was on holiday in Antibes in the south of France, and he invited Higgins and O’Grady to join him in the Mediterranean sun, where they put the finishing touches to a shadow campaign.
Alice Mary Higgins, the candidate’s daughter, was central to the management of the campaign as joint deputy director of elections with her colleague Councillor Brian McDowell, a member of the party staff.
The former Labour Party press officer Tony Heffernan would be coaxed out of retirement for the campaign. Greg Sparks (accountant), Morgan O’Sullivan, David Leach (national organiser), Ita McAuliffe (general secretary), Michael Treacy (parliamentary adviser) and Shauneen Armstrong completed the team. Mags Murphy looked after the tour logistics.
Constantly at his elbow during the campaign was Higgins’s wife, Sabina Coyne, who supervised the Galway campaign with their son Daniel, which would deliver 60 per cent of the vote in the county. Another son, John, made a campaign video featuring his father through the decades. The core team met for the first time a fortnight after the selection convention and from then on once a week in the Mansion House.
A sliding scale of financial contributions was also drawn up by head office, requiring contributions to the campaign of €2,000 each from ministers and MEPs, €1,500 for ministers of state, €1,000 from Dáil deputies, €700 from each senator and €500 from party councillors. The Labour Party was to contribute approximately €320,000 to the campaign.
The Fine Gael aspirant Pat Cox was subsequently admitted to membership of the St Luke’s Branch of the party in the Cork North-Central constituency, and two weeks later he confirmed at a press conference in Dublin that he had his nomination papers signed by twenty members of the Oireachtas, thirty of the party’s county councillors and five of the National Executive for the convention planned for the following month.
The Fine Gael electoral college gives 70 per cent of the votes to TDs, senators and MEPs, 20 per cent to the councillors and 10 per cent to the Executive Council.
Cox’s parachuting into the party, and his support from the party hierarchy, had raised tensions in the party. He was seen by some as an opportunist ‘blow-in’, despite his valuable international reputation.
Mairead McGuinness, who had made it clear that she joined the party when it was ‘neither popular nor profitable’, was still relatively new in the party, while Mitchell, despite his feisty image, had served the party long and loyally. Bruton had been the original favoured candidate, but now there would be a dog-fight for the nomination, with no overt guidance from the party leadership.
In the Irish Times, Stephen Collins in his Saturday column described the presidential election campaign as the strangest in the history of the country.
Fine Gael probably has the most to lose if it gets it wrong. It became the biggest party in local government for the first time in 2009 and the biggest in the Dáil for the first time in February and so the Presidency should be its for the taking.
He added that some of Mitchell’s strongest supporters came from the ranks of those who had tried to depose Kenny only a year earlier. He continued:
While he has Kenny supporters, the potential for opening old wounds is there. ‘There is every chance now that we will revert to type, have an all-out internal war and then run a disastrous campaign,’ said one experienced party activist.
In the following day’s Sunday Independent, John Drennan wrote how the election would reveal the true state of our politics.
Rather like the great struggle between Mary Robinson and Brian Lenihan Snr, which morphed into a battle between the patriarchal Old and a better New Ireland, or the triumph of McAleese, which signified the return of FF to the centre of the national stage, this current campaign will also send out a number of key political messages.
In spite of all the feigned indifference, Mr Kenny is more than keen to strengthen FG’s imprint on the institutions of the State, for should FG secure the Presidency the great purpose of stealing ff’s clothes to such an extent that FG becomes the new natural party of government will be complete.
Across the page, Eamon Delaney warned that allowing Cox to be considered for the race might prove a fatal move for Fine Gael. Bluntly he asked:
Has Fine Gael lost its mind? … Mitchell is a populist, sure-footed, with long experience of politics—Irish politics—and, crucially, he has a vision for the job, which McGuinness doesn’t appear to have. He is politically right of centre and, most importantly, a big vote-getter—the biggest nationally. All due respects to Pat Cox, but what does he stand for?
Delaney went some way towards answering his own question.
He appears arrogant: cold and careerist. I was in the company of some ex-PDs recently who rated his intellect and ability but their comments gave the impression of someone with an immense sense of entitlement.
Indeed his ego was already evident in those media interviews where he first offered himself as a candidate, including all the Hamlet soul-searching stuff about ‘having a dialogue with himself’ about whether to enter the great contest …
Mairead McGuinness represents another equally feisty FG element and could have strong rural appeal, but she is too studied and too cautious, and seems to be waiting to kick into action as a key replica of Robinson/McAleese …
As for Cox, he may have the ability, but he is too cool and detached. One feels that his ambition is his own, as opposed to one shared by the country and, crucially in this case, the Fine Gael party who have to get him elected.
The Sunday Times published a substantial editorial that cautioned that, with Fine Gael scoring a poll rating of more than 40 per cent,
the presidential election was theirs to lose.
But failing to persuade John Bruton, a former Taoiseach, to stand has been a blow. The party’s response, making overtures to Pat Cox, could backfire. Mr Cox, a former president of the European Parliament, will be regarded by many of the Fine Gael faithful as a blow-in, a fair description of a person who was formerly a member of the Progressive Democrats. Mairead McGuinness, who gave up the prospect of a near-certain seat in the general election, had expected to be the party’s choice. She will not be pleased by Mr Cox’s intervention, and nor will Gay Mitchell, a formidable operator, who has put his name forward.
Not only has Mr Cox upset the balance of power in Fine Gael but his devotion to Brussels could be a lightning rod for the growing number disaffected by the EU who believe that Ireland’s interests are no longer aligned with those of Germany and France. It could be Lisbon all over again.
McGuinness had been busy canvassing the electoral college and made a virtue of her Fine Gael credentials when questioned about how her campaign was progressing. She had been meeting party members since she announced her campaign, but it was too soon to identify the leader in the three-horse race. Savvy politicians will never hex their own campaign by saying they are leading, or annoy an electorate into either complacency or anger at a show of confidence or arrogance. Taking a swipe at Cox, McGuinness said that
the vibe from the grass roots is extremely solid for my campaign. I’ve always believed that you build solid from the grass roots up, you don’t do it from the top down … I was perhaps out of the stall way earlier. But the fact is I have been out there; people are saying to me that they knew me from way back. I was interested in contesting the Presidency on the basis of what I have to offer.
Liam Twomey, a Wexford TD, referred to the resentment against Cox when he confirmed to the Sunday Business Post that the former MEP and minister of state Avril Doyle would announce in a couple of days that she would seek the party’s nomination. According to Twomey—like John the Baptist, heralding his candidate—after listening to ‘some hard-hitting’ comments about Cox’s entry into the race, Doyle believed that she offered ‘the same ability, appeal and experience’ but that she
has also dedicated her life to Fine Gael at national and European level and would bring this to the campaign … Avril has huge regard for Pat Cox, but feels that within the electoral college he has lost momentum, and she shares many of the characteristics of Pat Cox.
The Fine Gael stage was becoming crowded. Doyle’s candidacy would reignite the fierce rivalry between McGuinness and Doyle that had characterised a previous election in Leinster for a seat in the European Parliament. In the event they both won seats in the Leinster constituency, as their campaigns and public skirmishing kept them in the headlines throughout the campaign. However, three of the candidates were now from the east, a consideration that might give Cox, from Cork, an edge.
Formally announcing that she would be running, Doyle emphasised her Fine Gael credentials and her service to the party and said she was unique in being born and raised in Dublin but having been living and working in Wexford for thirty years.
I believe I’m the one who can most credibly represent urban and rural Ireland and all the best traditions of Fine Gael … I believe the experience and drive I represent offers my party the best chance of electing a Fine Gael President for the first time.
On Thursday 30 June the Irish Independent published a survey of the four Fine Gael candidates as they prepared to address the parliamentary party at a special meeting convened in their new party rooms in Leinster House. They were given eight minutes each to make a pitch for the vote of their parliamentary colleagues.
The large room on the top floor of the block is reached from a lift beside the Dáil canteen or from the floor above outside the chief whip’s office. It was a trophy room in the Oireachtas complex, as it had been the Fianna Fáil meetin-groom before its numbers were reduced by three-quarters and it reluctantly had to hand over the keys. Party representatives had produced tape measures as they argued about representation and heads per square metre in an attempt to decide who should retain or move into the most prestigious rooms.
It was all to play for in the battle for the Fine Gael ticket, said the Independent on its front page. However, the paper found that Mairead McGuinness was leading her rivals, as ten members of the parliamentary party declared for her, although many TDs and senators did not respond to the request to declare for their preferred candidate. ‘There are twelve to fifteen turnips in the party waiting for a sign from the leadership,’ said one anonymous TD. ‘I don’t see Pat Cox getting going unless the leadership comes out and backs him.’ The term ‘turnip’ was being used by parliamentary party members to describe backbenchers who went along with the dictates of the hierarchy, while those who resisted were termed ‘parsnips’. Neither was complimentary, but they pointed up some internal division or, at a minimum, dissatisfaction.
A senior party TD was quoted as saying: ‘Mairead thinks Kenny is backing her; Gay thinks he’s backing him; Cox is the anointed one; and Avril wouldn’t be in it if she didn’t think she had his blessing.’
The political editor, Fionnan Sheahan, summed up the phone survey, saying that each candidate faced their own obstacles in the battle to win support. He said that McGuinness was not universally popular within the party, that Mitchell was not strong in rural areas, that Doyle had left it too late to enter the campaign and that Cox was an outsider.
Only hours after Michael D. Higgins became the first political-party nominee for the Áras, the publisher Niall O’Dowd flew into Dublin from the United States to formally announce his interest in seeking a nomination for the Presidency from both Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin. O’Dowd (58) was born in Thurles, Co. Tipperary, was raised in Drogheda and studied at UCD. His older brother Fergus is Minister of State at the Department of Communications, Energy and Natural Resources and at the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government, with responsibility for the ‘New Era Project’; he also held a number of senior positions on the Fine Gael front bench and was formerly a senator and Mayor of Drogheda.
Over the coming days Niall O’Dowd would run a storming campaign, meeting the media and potential political sponsors—the opposite to his experience in the United States, where he had been centrally involved in the Democratic Party’s campaign for the Clintons. He founded a newspaper, the Irishman, in California before moving to New York, where he would establish an Irish-themed magazine and the newspaper Irish Voice and the hub site Irishcentral.com.
Politically active, he established the Irish-Americans for Clinton campaign in 1991 and led an Irish-American delegation to Northern Ireland after Clinton was elected. He was also an intermediary between Sinn Féin and the White House during the peace process and helped secure an American visa for the party president, Gerry Adams, in 1994.
O’Dowd has consistently worked on behalf of Irish emigrants to the United States and created the US-Ireland Forum, a forerunner of the Diaspora Forum hosted by the Irish Government, in 2009. He remains close to the Clintons and served on Hillary Clinton’s Finance Committee for her 2008 presidential campaign.
In April 2011, at the inaugural Irish American Hall of Fame luncheon in New York, the former president Bill Clinton said his involvement in the Northern Ireland issue was on the initiative of O’Dowd.
O’Dowd declared his interest in the post while he was in the United States after he was approached by a number of people during the visit to Ireland by President Obama, who felt O’Dowd could be an independent candidate who would work with the Irish diaspora. He would refuse to identify the people who urged him to go forward, only saying that he had not approached the Clintons at any time for their support as he considered his potential bid.
O’Dowd’s decision to seek support for a run sparked an article from Walter Ellis, a former diplomatic correspondent and correspondent in Brussels and Belfast for the Irish Times, who lives in both France an
d the United States, questioning his credentials. It also referred to O’Dowd taking the American oath of allegiance. Ellis wrote combatively that O’Dowd
must be the first aspirant to Áras an Uachtaráin who sees Ireland and the Irish as a brand, not a nation … According to an article published on Irish Central [an Irish-interest portal established by O’Dowd] this week, he would, as president, call on the power of the Irish diaspora and bring it to bear on the country’s crippled economy. He would rally the world’s wealthiest Irish people and encourage them to invest in Ireland, North and South, believing that, ‘all things being equal’, heritage clinches the deal.
Like most Irish-Americans, O’Dowd has an atavistic disdain for Britain and its royal family. Of Queen Elizabeth’s State visit he wrote in March: ‘Myself, I wouldn’t cross the road to see her, but I think on balance it is a good thing … hopefully.’
Prince William, he wrote in November, was ‘a member of the lucky sperm club’.
Kate Middleton, now the Duchess of Cambridge, was ‘a good stud mare’, who would be judged by whether or not she produced ‘young colts’ to secure the bloodline.
The recent royal wedding was ‘a fitting circus for a fading empire’. Perhaps as well then that he was not in the Áras when Her Majesty came to call.
A veteran supporter of the peace process, O’Dowd is rightly credited with helping obtain US visas for former leaders of the IRA and for pricking the interest of President Clinton in a cause whose time had come. For he remains at heart an old-time republican.
