“Smear the bejaysus out of her”, said Ivan Yeats of Catherine Connolly, a week or so ago, in the context of advising Fine Gael on how to beat the left-wing candidate for the Irish Presidency.
And, though they distance themselves from that advice at every opportunity, this is exactly what Fine Gael are doing. They are entirely correct as a matter of strategy to do so, because in fairness to Yeats it was good advice. For two reasons.
The first and obvious reason is that Catherine Connolly’s record is relatively easy to present in a less than flattering light. Consider the fact that we are very legitimately debating the merits of electing a far-left President who once hired a gun-toting far-left extremist to work in her office without Garda vetting. That’s a fair reflection of where Irish politics is right now: We’re debating whether that’s a good idea or not.
The second reason, of course, is that Heather Humphreys as she is being presented to the public doesn’t have much to recommend her as a candidate for the office beyond the likelihood that she will do next to nothing if elected. She now says, in the closest we’ve gotten from her for a vision for the office, that she will lead trade missions to America and whatnot to open doors for Irish business. I rather fancy that Maria Steen might have been a better ambassador to Texas and Arkansas and New York than Mrs. Humphreys, for all that the latter is a sound Monaghan woman.
Fintan O’Toole wrote about this yesterday, sounding as if he was leaning towards Connolly (which would not be a shock). Here is what he said:
The point of picking anodyne candidates in Gavin and Humphreys was to both grasp the office and squeeze it more tightly into benign blandness. Hence what Humphreys as the sole survivor is really offering: harmlessness. If you want a defanged presidency in which no boats are rocked, no consciences are pricked and no thoughts are stirred, she’s your woman. As she herself has emphasised, the height of her ambition is to “work to open doors for Irish businesses overseas”.
This is the implicit proposition: vote for Humphreys and you won’t have to think about the presidency again until 2032, a time so distant that it is vaguely possible Dublin will have a Metro by then.
Yeats and O’Toole are saying the same thing, just using different words. The Presidential Election is really a contest between something, and nothing. Connolly offers something, Humphreys nothing. The only question of relevance then to the voter is whether that “something” is good or bad.
What neither Fintan nor Ivan can bring themselves to ask, I fear, is why “nothing” has become the default option for Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil. Why is it that the Irish establishment is entirely unable to offer a vision for the Presidency beyond “do no harm”?
Here’s a basic question: What are Heather Humphreys’ core values? I ask that question because I have a nagging fear that I might be able to articulate the truth of them better than she can, or her party can: Why, for example, has she been afraid to talk about her faith? She is, so far as I know, a committed christian and churchgoer who believes in the value of charity, the importance of family, and the deeply presbyterian values of hard work and honesty and being straight with people. She is a daughter of the land with a deep connection to farming and the rural way of life. She is a political moderate who instinctively abhors extremism, but this is not an identity in itself: If I am right from what I know of her background, she is a believer in law and order, supporting small businesses, helping young people build lives in their own communities, and being prudent with the national finances.
She is also, I think, personally much more conservative than she lets on in relation to social issues. People like me should be voting for her. But I will not be.
One reason I will not be is because Heather Humphreys is running as somebody she is not. Yesterday for example, she came out and claimed that she believes “services” should be added to the moribund Occupied Territories Bill, a claim that will win her not one single vote (people who care about that already have a candidate) and is besides, I would say with 99% confidence, entirely false. Heather Humphreys is many things, and a keffiyah wearing Paddystinian is not one of them.
Besides, how on earth can you oppose Catherine Connolly on the grounds that she would be a loudmouth on foreign policy while being a loudmouth on foreign policy yourself? Especially one that sounds the same? She should have said that as President, she would leave foreign policy to the Government and focus on the needs of Irish people. That would have been an actual contrast with her opponent. An actual choice. It would also have at least sounded authentic.
There is at present only one candidate in this election telling us who she is and what she stands for, and it doesn’t particularly matter if some of that is batshit crazy. People like to vote for candidates, and Connolly is enthusing enough voters to win a low-turnout race.
Here’s my advice to Humphreys, knowing as I do that it won’t be taken: Tell us who you are. Tell us why you believe the things you believe. For God’s sake, tell us the truth: There are many words one could use to describe Humphreys, but “extremist” is not one of them. There’s nothing wrong with being a personally conservative granny from the border counties who believes in hard work and common sense and doesn’t have any fancy notions about international affairs. There’s nothing wrong with believing that enterprise is a virtue and that people should get married and stay married, or that farming is a way of life that needs protection from climate change true believers, or that it was hard being a Protestant in the border counties during the IRA’s war. Her talk of peace might be enhanced a little by telling us what it was like, as a young Protestant Irishwoman from the same area, living through the murder of Senator Billy Fox.
These are normal things to believe. They are things people would expect her to believe. And they would make her something, rather than being, as she is now, the human embodiment of a void.