Should recent trends endure, and unless this morning’s opinion poll is catastrophically wrong, voters will choose Deputy Catherine Connolly as the 10th President of Ireland on October 24th.
Connolly is different to what has gone before. Michael D. Higgins was always on the left of the Labour Party, but he was still within the Labour Party; a person cannot spend more than 30 years in an Oireachtas parliamentary party without being able to toe a certain line and operate within normal parameters. That is not the case with his presumptive successor.
Since taking office in 2011, Higgins has – building upon the precedents set by Mary Robinson and Mary McAleese – changed the essential nature of the presidency permanently.
Publicly condemning the government, including on foreign policy, is something that none of his predecessors could have imagined themselves doing.
And yet President Connolly is almost certainly going to go much further. One could imagine Deputy Michael D. Higgins travelling on a ‘fact finding mission’ to Cuba or some other Communist tinpot dictatorship and inflicting his poetry on innocent locals, but it is difficult to imagine him going to Bashar al-Assad’s Syria seven years after the beginning of a civil war in which Assad butchered hundreds of thousands.
Higgins could easily have hired some leftist crank or Hot Press reporter in his Dáil office. He would surely never have hired someone who had recently served a sentence for firearms offences, while knowing full well that the applicant might like to overthrow the state.
A more normal politician might have apologised for the Ursula Ní Shionnain episode: pleading forgiveness, feigning contrition. Not so with the frontrunner. Like another female politician of certain convictions, Catherine Connolly is not for turning.
If major controversies arise during a Connolly presidency, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael politicians may be tempted to blame a cruel fate, or failing that, the electorate. They have nobody to blame but themselves.
Circumstances robbed Fine Gael of their strongest possible candidate, but Micheál Martin was the author of his party’s presidential implosion and the two parties acted together to block other alternatives.
Whatever difficulties lie ahead will be the fault of Martin and Harris primarily, but blame should also be apportioned more widely.
The problem is not Catherine Connolly but the institution of the presidency itself, and the way in which successive governments have tolerated its evolution into something which is fundamentally dangerous.
Mary Robinson’s surprise election in 1990 was a watermark moment in Irish history. It marked the end of a conservative era (where the liberals had been swept aside in the abortion referendum of 1983 and the divorce referendum of 1986) and the birth of modern, secular and progressive Ireland.
Out of respect for the institution and her six predecessors, Robinson did relatively little during her term which could be considered inappropriate. The same could be said of Mary McAleese and her tenure.
Yet in a subtle way, the presidency had changed. Media statements became more frequent. An office meant to embody the Republic was personalised and politicised. Paradoxically, people began to see the President (the individual office holder, the flesh and blood human being) as something of a moral figure: above politics, and yet still involved.
The adulation which President Higgins receives is indeed strange, but it has a deeper basis in what the office has become over the last 35 years.
Not long after Higgins was elected, the Fine Gael-Labour coalition under Enda Kenny’s leadership was confronted by the reality that he intended to use the presidency as a blunt instrument with which to advance his own ideological goals.
Stern leadership was called for at that moment, but was lacking. One simple rebuke of President Higgins by a sitting Taoiseach – reminding him of what the office is, why it needs to be that way and how his predecessors had behaved in it – would likely have brought the incumbent to heel.
Earlier generations of Taoisigh would not have tolerated the last 14 years of narcissism. Enda Kenny, Leo Varadkar, Micheál Martin and Simon Harris have not merely tolerated it but have applauded him.
When the history of FFG’s demise is written, the fact that both parties actively campaigned for the reelection of Michael D. Higgins in 2018 will be deserving of mention.
Now, where stands the office and the nation? We will never return to the Douglas Hyde-Patrick Hillery model. Presidents are going to be involved in the national political debate in a way that is unhealthy, and that cannot be fixed.
President Connolly certainly will not fix it, but she will bring this rising temperature to the boil, and this could produce the necessary reaction from a government which should have been provided by Enda Kenny in the early days of President Higgins.
Consider her recent statement that the military build-up in Germany (in response to Russia’s threats to the whole continent) appeared to have “some parallels with the ‘30s.”
Forget the rights and wrongs of this, historically. A presidential candidate can say such a thing without consequence but an Irish President cannot.
If she speaks like this while in office, the President of Germany will be duty-bound to respond forcefully. The German Chancellor and Foreign Minister may respond too, along with the German Ambassador.
A diplomatic incident will ensue which will be considerably more serious than that which occurred when Higgins intervened in the Consultative Forum on International Security Policy.
Geopolitical realities have changed and Ireland is still catching up. There will be many opportunities for President Connolly to share her great wisdom publicly in the coming years on topics such as: the Triple Lock; military spending increases; aid to Ukraine; the Occupied Territories Bill; the Trump administration; the Farage government; and much more.
At some point, the dam will break, and the born coward that is Micheál Martin might even have to respond.
This moment has been coming for decades now.
The Irish presidency was not meant to be monarchical in nature. However, if it could be compared to the British monarchy, its advantages also lay in what George Orwell described as the separation of “the power and the glory” – the hereditary king/ceremonial president would have the glory (the mansion, the soldiers’ salute, the trappings of office and so) but no actual power in charting the nation’s course.
Because of everything that has occurred since 1990, this is no longer true. People are attracted to the job now precisely because the office holder has power – and the worst kind of power, that is power without responsibility.
Good people are ruined by its allure. Before she was president, Mary McAleese was a thoughtful and insightful figure in Irish life, and a devoted and socially conservative Catholic to boot. The sad attention-seeking figure who left Áras an Uachtaráin after fourteen years barely resembles the good woman who first strode in through its doors.
Bertie Ahern was our last strong Taoiseach, a figure of true historical consequence who belongs in the national pantheon. Thanks to the presidential race of 2025, his last participation in Irish political life may well be a pitiful and sulking interview bemoaning the fact he was not allowed to run.
The presidency has become something akin to Sauron’s One Ring: a small thing in and of itself, but tempting enough to bring the best of men into disrepute, the Berties and the Boromirs alike.
A crisis is coming and is long overdue. Whether she knows it or not, President Connolly would actually be doing her country a service by provoking it.