by Tom Reddy
Across the page the columnist Brendan O’Connor took a philosophical view of the campaign and all its utterances. He asked how the campaign had become
one of the most real, and most gripping, bouts of soul-searching this nation has had in years? …
Having spoken about nothing except money for years, in the last couple of weeks we have suddenly started talking about everything, about who we are, where we’ve been, where we’d like to go next and how we would like to see ourselves.
In the same paper, Mitchell took out quarter-page advertisements, the largest seen in the print media during the campaign.
‘Why vote for Gay?’ the advertisement asked. ‘He understands the hardship people are going through, he would use his political experience and international contacts to support the Government in generating jobs, and has a strong record of serving the people as a public representative.’ The five photographs used in the advertisements were badly lit, poorly posed and without captions, raising questions about who had an overview of the campaign.
In the Sunday World the outspoken columnist Paddy Murray hit out at McGuinness. He was proud of the send-off he got from Derry but made no reference to five named people who were killed in the city by the IRA when he was a member. ‘McGuinness talks about “regrets” but he rarely says sorry. He wants to be our president. I’d say over my dead body, but he might take me literally.’
Mary Davis was the lead story in the Sunday Times, which reported that she had received funding for her campaign from the telecommunications billionaire Denis O’Brien and had voted on three decisions concerning his ownership of Irish media when she was a member of the Broadcasting Commission in 2008 and 2009. Davis had ruled herself out of votes in relation to O’Brien’s companies when she joined the board in 2004, citing a conflict of interest, as O’Brien was chairperson of the Board of Special Olympics Ireland when she had been CEO. The Times reported that she had received legal advice in June 2008 that a potential conflict of interest no longer existed, as she had moved to Special Olympics Europe-Eurasia the previous May. Her spokesperson said that any conflicts of interest that may have arisen were made known by Davis to the board.
Speaking to reporters at Limerick Racecourse, where she was canvassing later that afternoon, Davis insisted that there was no conflict of interest between the Broadcasting Commission and its dealings with O’Brien, who has extensive holdings in commercial radio and a controlling interest in Today FM, Newstalk and a number of regional stations. ‘I have acted on the board of the bci with full integrity and taken full responsibility at all times,’ Davis said.
The Sunday Independent’s lead story reported that Fine Gael and the Labour Party, ‘in what amounts to a shift in tactics in dirty tricks,’ now intended to concentrate on Gallagher and his past association with Fianna Fáil rather than on McGuinness.
Yesterday there was a view within Fine Gael that because Mr Mitchell had failed to connect with the public it was to be expected that the Party would support the candidate of its coalition partners. As old hostilities threaten to break out again in Fine Gael, the possibility remains that the coalition strategy will backfire, particularly if voters perceive Mr Gallagher to be a victim of unfair attention by the Government parties.
On RTE’s Sunday radio programme ‘This Week’ Mitchell took the opportunity to swipe at Gallagher, Higgins and the media themselves. He criticised Gallagher:
If we choose celebrity over substance I think we are making a very big mistake. I think there are people who are very good candidates but really don’t have the vision and experience that I have.
Mitchell went on to say that young people should not be pushed into becoming the
Skype emigration generation while we sip champagne in the Park, reciting poetry. In every job I have done I have brought a sense of experience and innovation. I will be the person to put jobs and the future of the country on the agenda.
He insisted that the Fine Gael organisation was totally behind his campaign.
I’m telling you this now. The likelihood is that I’ll win this election. I will let you know in three weeks’ time.
He criticised the media too, saying that he favoured intense scrutiny of the candidates, particularly McGuinness on his past record.
I think you should start asking some of them very difficult questions. When I started asking Martin McGuinness difficult questions, people say I am attacking him.
Dana was interviewed by the Examiner, which reported that she was willing to renounce her US citizenship ‘if it was the wish of the Irish people.’ She also produced her US naturalisation certificate, dated 8 October 1999, to counter the claim that she had become a US citizen when she ran for the Presidency fourteen years earlier.
The McGuinness campaign over the coming days was to be held to account for IRA atrocities, and in the full and embarrassing glare of the media. Campaigners would admit later that the political dynamic in the Republic was different from that of the North. In the North the Troubles had been analysed, dissected, discussed and come to terms with; however unsatisfactorily, a conscious decision had been made to move forward rather than dwell on the past. But in the Republic legitimate grievance, loss and pain had not been addressed, and there had been no accountability.
On a brisk Monday in a shopping centre in Athlone, David Kelly stood with a framed photograph of his father, Private Patrick Kelly. His father (35) and Recruit Garda Gary Sheehan (23) were shot dead in a gun battle with members of the Provisional IRA, which had kidnapped the supermarket executive Don Tidey in December 1983 and held him in Derrada Wood, Co. Leitrim. No-one was ever convicted for their murder. Private Kelly, from Moate, Co. Westmeath, had served three tours of duty in Lebanon and was the father of four young sons, the youngest eleven weeks old when he was shot.
When McGuinness and his entourage came through the main entrance, Kelly confronted him, brandishing the picture of his murdered father. ‘I want you to get your comrades who committed this crime to hand themselves in to the Gardaí,’ he said. McGuinness responded: ‘I don’t know who was responsible for the killing of your father, but I fully and absolutely sympathise with you. This is in the past. You are heartbroken on account of it, and my sympathy is 100 per cent with you and your family.’
Kelly rejected McGuinness’s words. In front of the cameras he said that McGuinness’s assertion that he had left the IRA in 1974 was ‘a blatant lie’ and that he was ‘trying to fool the Irish people.’ His father was ‘loyal to this Irish Republic and I’m loyal to him as a son, and I’m going to get justice for him. Before we can have reconciliation … there has to be truth, especially for people running for the Presidency of the country.’
The following day the brother of the murdered detective-garda Frank Hand said that there was never an apology for the IRA’s actions. McGuinness’s words to David Kelly were not an apology. ‘They were an oblique contrition,’ he said.
Frank Hand was twenty-five and married five weeks when he was shot while accompanying a cash delivery to a post office in Drumree, Co. Meath, in 1984. His brother Michael told the Irish Independent that the idea of McGuinness as supreme commander of the Defence Forces was ‘an abhorrence’.
I find that impossible to accept. As far as I’m concerned, he has my family’s blood on his hands. Both my parents are dead now, but to my mind it resulted in their early death. It broke their hearts and caused difficulty in my family. There were seven of us. He was the middle brother. It was very traumatic.
I accept that he [McGuinness] was instrumental in bringing things about [with the peace process], but I think he has blood on his hands and he’s an inappropriate candidate for the presidency of our country, of my country. And particularly for a country where my family gave blood for our country. I can’t accept how someone like that can lead the army and get the loyalty of the army and the police when his colleagues were the ones who shot down my brother in cold blood.
The Evening Herald columnist Andrew Lynch encaps
ulated McGuinness’s problems with his past.
The question is for how long can the Sinn Féin candidate keep running away from the truth? The voices of the IRA’s many victims are finally making themselves heard—and with any justice, this could eventually become the crucial factor that keeps one of the Provos’ most notorious leaders out of Áras an Uachtaráin The pressure is on McGuinness and is likely to be kept on in tonight’s Primetime debate hosted by Miriam O’Callaghan. Thousands of voices will be encouraging Miriam from the grave.
There were two debates on Wednesday 12 October, one hosted by Barnardo’s and chaired by Olivia O’Leary, but it was the later RTE ‘Prime Time’ debate, presented by Miriam O’Callaghan, that provided drama. Dana issued a statement:
It has come to my attention that yet further allegations, this time of a most untrue and malicious, vile nature have been levelled against a member of my family. Let it be known that lawyers have already been instructed to forensically investigate a particular communication that spread this vile false allegation which attempts to implicate me and destroy my good character.
She made the prepared statement on the programme after being approached by a newspaper. O’Callaghan, who had been given no notice of Dana’s intention to read out a statement, pressed her for details. Dana declined to provide any.
We have been advised that all possible lines of inquiry regarding this communication is being pursued with prosecution authorities in the United States. I assure the Irish people that I will leave no stone unturned to expose the malicious intent at the heart of these untrue allegations.
‘What are you talking about?’ asked O’Callaghan, as baffled as the viewing public.
The other highlight of the programme was O’Callaghan’s blunt and unrelenting questioning of McGuinness. ‘How do you square, Martin McGuinness, with your God the fact that you were involved in the murder of so many people?’ she asked.
‘I think that’s a disgraceful comment to make,’ said McGuinness.
‘You were in the IRA,’ countered O’Callaghan.
‘I was in the IRA. I joined the IRA as a result of the conflict that broke out on the streets of Derry when I was eighteen years of age …’
O’Callaghan went on to ask him whether he went to Confession, and about his membership of the IRA, which he said he left in 1974. She said she would ‘park’ what had happened in the past and asked questions about the IRA murders of members of the Defence Forces, such as Private Patrick Kelly.
‘What have you done for that man, David Kelly, since you spoke to him, in terms of naming the people who killed his father?’
‘Sure I don’t know who killed his father,’ McGuinness replied.
‘But you’re a republican: you know everyone in the republican movement.’
McGuinness then appeared to lose control. ‘I think that’s a stupid statement for you to make,’ he said.
RTE said it received more than a hundred complaints about how O’Callaghan had questioned McGuinness in the debate, which attracted an average viewership of 654,000. Sinn Féin would later deny assertions that it ‘orchestrated’ complaints against RTE.
After the programme McGuinness confronted O’Callaghan in her dressing-room. The Evening Herald stated the following day: ‘The IRA godfather went into a hissy fit at the RTE studios and tried to intimidate the mother-of-eight, insiders revealed today,’ saying that McGuinness went ‘ballistic’ over her line of questioning. ‘“There’s no doubt that he tried to intimidate her. She looked quite shaken after it but there’s no way she’s going to let something like that get to her,” said a witness to the sinister encounter.’
That morning, 13 October, the Irish Sun revealed exclusively that Dana had phoned the police in the United States to ask them to investigate a baseless allegation of sexual abuse against a close relative sent to her by email from America. The allegation referred to a period a number of years previously, and there was never any arrest, conviction or prosecution.
On TV3 on Friday the 14th she confirmed that the allegations were about a family member and were of a sexual nature, but she declined to elaborate further.
It is of a sexual nature regarding a member of my family, and I know that it is not true—I know it is not true because the first time it was ever raised was in a court case in a family dispute—never before. It was not acted upon at that time. The second time it’s raised is now in the middle of my election campaign, with the obvious desire of trying to destroy my character.
She said that the allegation came out during a court case taken against her sister, Susan Stein, and that it went back thirty-five years. ‘I will not step down,’ she said. ‘I will not bend under this and I will not be broken under this.’
In a statement she issued after the interview she claimed that a ‘despicable and malicious campaign of hatred’ was being directed against her and her family.
The Sunday Business Post of 16 October reported a surge in support for Gallagher, poising him for the Áras, according to its latest REDC poll. It now seemed to be a two-horse race, with Gallagher speeding ahead with an eighteen-point jump, to give him 39 per cent of the vote, and Higgins up two per cent, to 27 per cent. ‘By not putting a foot wrong and appealing to the public’s desire for a non-party candidate, Seán Gallagher has pulled ahead in the latest poll,’ the paper said.
McGuinness dropped three points, to 13 per cent, and Mitchell dropped two points, to 8 per cent, with Norris, Davis and Dana on 7, 4 and 2 per cent, respectively.
Commenting on the poll on RTE radio, Mitchell said:
I don’t want to rubbish the people who took the poll. I’m sure they’re findings they got, but you have to compare it with the same situation in the last Presidential election, when the front runner on 38 per cent ended up with less than 7 per cent. I’ve been speaking to friends this morning who’ve said they haven’t made up their minds yet. In the Presidential election, 40 per cent of people made up their minds in the last week. Hand on heart, I do not believe the polls will be the same as emerges on Thursday week.
The same day a journalist, Greg Harkin, spoke to Susan Gorrell, who claimed she was molested by her uncle John Brown, Dana’s brother, on a number of occasions when she was aged between five and thirteen, and claimed that Dana knew about the allegations for three decades. She told the Irish Independent:
I now realise that perhaps it was a mistake not to press charges at the time, but my grandmother was still alive and my aunt was a public figure, so that led to the earlier decision not to go forward with charges. I know that keeping silent is not the answer, and perhaps by my speaking out at this time it may help other victims who find themselves in the same situation. Although I told my mother and my Aunt Rosemary more than thirty years ago, my father and other relatives did not know until recent years.
On the campaign trail in Co. Donegal, Dana refused to take questions on the issue, saying she wished to ‘leave that behind now.’
The Irish Times reported that Susan Stein said she stood over evidence that her husband, Ronald, gave to a court in the United States in 2008. He said John Brown (Dana and Susan Stein’s brother) had admitted to him in 2005 that he had sexually abused the Steins’ daughter, Susan Gorrell, in the 1980s. The court heard that Brown had denied the allegation while giving evidence by way of deposition.
Meanwhile, with ten days to go, the Gallagher campaign had emailed supporters to ask them to do ten things. They included canvassing, sending text messages to their contacts, using Facebook to urge a vote, and printing a poster from his web site and displaying it. ‘Keep it positive, don’t be shy and don’t give up,’ he urged.
Mitchell had travelled from Dublin to Galway. Now, just after 6 p.m. on Tuesday 18 October, he stood outside the TG4 studios at Baile na hAbhann, near Barna, breathing in the fresh sea air. He had taken the microphone off his lapel and walked off the set as yet another candidates’ debate was about to be staged. Higgins was the only Irish-speaker among the candidates, and th
e station he had legislated to establish was in his home constituency.
Mitchell was fuming over the format, which included an opening address in Irish, to be delivered live rather than recorded. He was cajoled back onto the set just in time for the debate to begin at 7 p.m., which would last for more than 100 minutes and be conducted in both Irish and (mostly) English.
Mitchell was the sixth to speak. He said he wanted to make Ireland a better place for the people of Ireland, and strongly believed that Ireland was on the cusp of something great. As President he wanted to guide the country to that greatness.
The debate, like many others, was a ritual the candidates had to go through, addressing different audiences but with the same now well-rehearsed messages. In the TG4 debate the importance of Irish was stressed by all the candidates; most said they would like to use it more and would address themselves to learning more if elected.
In response to the moderator, Páidí Ó Lionaird, all the candidates said they were proud of the national anthem and that it needed no changes—except Gallagher.
I have mixed views on it. I see the traditional attachment that many older people have with it. I would be open to explore a revision of it, to make it less militaristic and celebrate our strengths. It needs to be modernised.
Although Higgins’s team would say that their candidate was always positive, he referred to the involvement of his main rival, Gallagher, in the building industry during the boom years. ‘There was a speculative economy that Seán might favour and a social economy that I might favour.’
