by Tom Reddy
Byrne reacted cagily to the opinion poll.
All I will say is that it’s very heartening and satisfying that so many people think so well of me, and I’m very grateful for that. But I don’t think it proves that the people of Ireland are behind me—it proves that some are. I’m fully aware that there’s a great number of people out there that bloody detest me.
He admitted surprise at scoring so highly in the popularity stakes with young people.
Women, maybe, but young people? That’s very surprising. I wouldn’t have thought that’s where my support was. I know from huge experience that poll and votes and opinions change vastly as we go along the line. I’m talking to people and getting all kinds of advice and all kinds of help and have all sorts of interested parties talking to me. But there’s no time limit on when I must make a decision, so I’m taking my time.
He went on to say that he would make a decision within the next week.
Definitely in the next week. I think so. It has to be done. I don’t want to drag it on.
Michael D. Higgins responded diplomatically while managing to emphasise his own credentials and to raise doubts about Byrne’s political abilities.
I know from all of my time—I was Minister for Broadcasting—he is one our most distinguished professional broadcasters, with enormous audiences over a very long lifetime. He will find politics and the background of issues very different to dealing with the issues of the day.
The following morning, Friday the 12th, Sam Smyth in the Irish Independent again offered Byrne some advice, this time drawing his attention to the scrutiny he would inevitably come under and to the political dichotomy he could face as head of state and as an avowed opponent of the EU, which, with the IMF, was bailing out the country.
Referring to the ‘mad people in Brussels’ remark, he said Byrne was ‘an old pro who delivered a very glib remark designed to make maximum impact in yesterday’s headlines, and it achieved the desired result.’ But he cautioned that
Europhiles will switch to adversarial interviewer mode and question his credentials to make such withering judgements about a subject in which he has so spectacularly failed: finance.
Recalling his double failure with pension plans, Byrne can be certain someone will rework Oscar Wilde’s quip about losing one parent being unfortunate but two being careless.
Asked about a possible alternative to the eu, most would expect a potential presidential candidate’s answer to use more grey matter than purple prose. And he would be expected to come up with a detailed inventory of his views on most subjects, although the EU will attract most interest after his anti-EU comments and yesterday’s poll. The one fact that can’t be avoided is this: if the EU hadn’t been there to dig us out last year, this state would have been bankrupt.
The EU and IMF pitched in a net €68 billion last year to allow civil servants, nurses, teachers, Gardaí and others to draw wages from the exchequer.
As a potential president, the media—and the other candidates—would want nothing less than full disclosure of his financial dealings. After all, mainstream elected politicians are expected to declare everything they own or have beneficial interest in. Full disclosure of all their income from salaries, pensions or investments is mandatory, not only for them but for their spouses.
Gay Byrne has been very candid about his personal finances, although most people would feel that having to make public their tax returns is grossly prurient and intrusive. But crossing over to the world of elected politics requires the candidate to suspend their sensitivities about privacy and personal space.
Unlike members of the Oireachtas and their spouses, who had strict rules applied to them about reporting their financial affairs and interests to the Standards in Public Office Commission—which then made them public—the business or property interests of presidential candidates do not have to be declared. The only requirement is that details of election expenses and donations received be reported.
A consideration for every candidate would be the rewards of office: lavish accommodation in a mansion with private grounds set in the largest enclosed parkland in any European capital, armed Garda security, round-the-clock chauffeur, use of the Government jet, overseas travel with five-star accommodation, invitations to hot-ticket events, and expenses, in addition to the salary of €325,508.
At this time the Daily Star trumpeted an exclusive story saying that President Mary McAleese would leave office with a pension pot of €7 million, equalling an annual pension of just over €162,000, or €3,100 a week for life. However, it also noted that she had taken a number of self-imposed pay cuts since 2008, reducing her salary to €250,000. Comments by Peter Mullen of the Irish National Teachers’ Organisation, drily noting that the President’s annual pension would pay for the hiring of five primary teachers at an entry-level salary of slightly less than €30,000 a year, were also recorded. The editorial in the Star was typically blunt:
For a society that’s crippled with debt, unemployment, cutbacks and multi-billion-euro bail-out repayments, the massive pension is ridiculous. Many taxpayers haven’t the price of a pint, literally, yet the President will soon pocket enough each week before tax to buy 700 pints in Dublin’s poshest pubs.
The Government is laying off special-needs assistants and increasing class sizes, yet it can stand over a massive €3,100 a week to keep the President in luxury for the rest of her life. For most people, their pensions are hammered—but not for our President and politicians. It seems there’s one recession for ordinary folk—and no recession at all for the Golden Circle.
In the same day’s Irish Independent, Sam Smyth continued his articles about Gay Byrne, noting that ‘others who have reversed their position from curious interviewer to reluctant interviewee have had serious regrets—and not just his colleague, George Lee.’
Lee, a former economics editor with RTE, was unveiled two years earlier as Fine Gael’s by-election parachute candidate for Dublin South after the death in July 2008 of the Fianna Fáil minister Séamus Brennan, who had held six ministerial and three minister of state positions since 1987. Lee was an opinionated commentator who had previously worked in the Central Bank as an economist and had won popular approval as he cautioned against Government fiscal policies before the crash. On the campaign trail he was met with excited crowds, glad-handed and kissed by enthusiastic voters. They were looking for change and hope, and they channelled that demand into Lee. As expected, he easily topped the poll, sweeping into office on the first count. It was a harbinger for Fine Gael and an accurate reflection of the public mood and support for the party for the 2011 general election result.
Lee, however, who had enjoyed the limelight in RTE and on the campaign trail, was relegated to the backbenches. He felt that his input and undoubted professional expertise were not being utilised by the party in the formulation of Fine Gael’s economic policy for the looming general election. Disillusioned, in a bolt out of the blue he resigned not just from Fine Gael but from Dáil Éireann. Fortunately for him he was able to return to RTE as a business reporter, as he had made his decision within the twelve-month window provided for his leave arrangement. Any later and he would have had to resign from RTE. The importance of ‘minding the talent’ had been lost by Fine Gael in Lee’s case.
Ironically, the man Lee had replaced in Dublin South, Séamus Brennan, was Government chief whip in the previous Fianna Fáil-PD Government, which had to rely on a three-line whip and on the crucial make-or-break votes of four independent candidates. Brennan made sure they were given access to ministers and were minded and mentored to ensure that they supported the Government in what was to become a full five-year term.
Across the Liffey, in the plush new Irish Times building, the columnist Fintan O’Toole also offered his analysis of where Byrne’s campaign would have to go—and what it would have to avoid. He argued that there were two Byrnes: Gaybo the television host, which was a carefully crafted persona, and the intensely private Gay Byrne.
He referred the other evening to ‘all the love and affection from all over the country’ that’s been wafting his way.
But who is it that the Irish people really love? Is it Gaybo or Gabriel Byrne? Given they don’t really know the man himself—a man who has retained his privacy throughout a lifetime of fame—the love is surely for the persona rather than the person.
Gaybo is not a man but an image. That image is of someone who floats above Irish life without ever being entirely a part of it. The paradox is that Byrne had such a huge effect on attitudes in Ireland from the 1960s onwards because he perfected the art of appearing not to be trying to affect anything.
He made himself into an Irish Everyman, able to open up discussion on any issue because he seemed to have no personal stake in it. On his radio show especially he became the nation’s father confessor, listening calmly and without judgment to all of its sins and anxieties, its private agonies and dark secrets.
This is precisely what attracts many people to the idea of President Gaybo. In this time of deep anxiety there is an allure to the idea of a father confessor in the park who is calm, unruffled, dapper, smooth, stoical—the reverse image of our bedraggled, overwrought, scared-stiff selves.
O’Toole, who was firmly on the left of political opinion, said that Byrne could never be considered as a neutral and would have to address his status as an independent, as in his autobiography he revealed that he voted Fianna Fáil. O’Toole also believed that it would be impossible for Gaybo to clock up thousands of hours behind an on-air microphone without his views emerging occasionally. ‘And what has emerged is a bog-standard, unreflective and instinctive right-winger,’ he said in a scathing judgement.
So while the nation may be turning its lonely eyes to Dr Gaybo, the suave man who is above it all, it will first have to push past Mr Byrne, the mere mortal who votes Fianna Fáil, hates taxes, thinks Brussels is full of mad people and can get irritated by uppity women …
If he could get through the long months of a campaign as Gaybo, with Mr Byrne locked safely in the attic, it would be the greatest performance of his brilliant career.
The opinion page article on Friday 12 August was illustrated by Martyn Turner, with a cartoon of Byrne in front of a full-length mirror clutching the results of the opinion poll. The cartoon was titled ‘The style icon President’, and its speech bubble said, ‘Once more, I find myself in the presence of greatness.’ This was a reference to his voice-over radio advertisement for Newbridge Silverware’s Museum of Style Icons, which included the film stars Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe, among others.
Further south of the city, in Donnybrook, all the daily papers were strewn on a square coffee table and on the two leather sofas in the reception areas on the ground floor of the RTE radio centre. There had been nominal coverage of any candidate other than Byrne in the print media, such was the megawatt bulb that bathed his ‘will he, won’t he’ game of speculation.
The Irish Examiner published a report that the independent candidate Seán Gallagher had moved to sever his links with Fianna Fáil, saying he didn’t want to be ‘demonised’ because of his past links and that it was ‘nonsense’ that he had any links at present. According to Gallagher, ‘I was a member of the party and I think it’s really dangerous and disappointing that the media and others might now try to demonise people who were voluntary members of a political organisation.’ Gallagher confirmed that he was involved in Ógra Fianna Fáil in the 1980s but said he had no links with the party between 1993 and 2007. He had directed the re-election campaign of Séamus Kirk in Co. Louth, chairperson of the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party, and attended two Fianna Fáil Ard-Chomhairle meetings in 2009.
He was non-committal about the party’s former Taoisigh. On Bertie Ahern he said: ‘I’m sure he has done some good, and he has done some things that are not so good.’ On Ahern’s successor, Brian Cowen, he said: ‘I guess what Brian Cowen was doing and his Cabinet were doing was based on what was in front of them; they were making the best decisions they felt at the time. Maybe in hindsight, there were decisions that could have been made differently.’ The headline over the comments was balder: ‘Gallagher anxious to sever his links with FF.’
Gallagher hit out at Pat Kenny’s series of interviews of candidates, criticising the phone calls he had received about his links with Fianna Fáil.
That was an ambush … And somebody was well tutored to come in on that line … They said I had made it a secret … Where is this story that I’m a sort of proxy Fianna Fáil candidate?
It took Gay Mitchell just fifteen minutes to get to RTE from his home in Rathmines. He passed the television building on the right-hand side of the entrance road and wound round the administration building to the radio centre. He was familiar with both buildings: the TV centre which housed the newsroom and where ‘Morning Ireland’ and the ‘News at One’ were broadcast from in cramped studios, and the radio centre.
The radio producer arrived in reception to escort him through the sliding doors and down the staircase into the underground suite of studios that flanked the central courtyard. He was ushered through the heavy, sound-proof door into the producer’s room, which looked through a large window into the studio, where the presenter Myles Dungan was filling in for the holidaying Kenny.
The Pat Kenny show had opened a weekly Friday morning debate about the Presidency by inviting each of the candidates into the studio to talk about their campaign. As this was a heavyweight news programme, no candidate could afford to pass up the opportunity to set out their stall for the listening political correspondents and opinion-formers on one of the top ten radio programmes in the country, attracting audiences of more than 300,000.
Mitchell had already prompted considerable media interest. He had bucked the Fine Gael leader’s preference for Pat Cox to secure the party’s nomination. A formidable vote-catcher, he was also on the right wing of his party, firmly anti-abortion, with strong views on marriage and homosexuality. He was also, unfortunately, a cousin of a well-known Dublin criminal. These had all prompted a media trawl of the archives and a rehash of the past. Despite Fine Gael’s dominance in opinion polls, the last REDC poll put him in third place, with only 13 per cent of the vote.
In the studio, Mitchell was to face down those issues in the first substantial radio interview of his campaign. Defending his ratings, he said that
people are not engaged with this election. When the real election comes people will engage and, as happened in every other presidential election, these polls will wax and wane … I wouldn’t go to the bank and take a mortgage out on these figures.
He also urged caution in taking comfort in high opinion poll figures in the early stages of the campaign, before the electorate engaged with and analysed the candidates on offer. Fourteen years earlier the Labour Party presidential candidate Adi Roche, the charity organiser of the Chernobyl Children’s Project and a popular media figure, polled 38 per cent in the earlier stages of the campaign, but on election day she took only 7 per cent of the vote. It was a mantra he would repeat again and again.
A confirmed Europhile, Mitchell, not surprisingly, dismissed Byrne’s ‘mad people in Brussels’ comment.
I think we have a serious problem when we start blaming other people, particularly when we start blaming the people who have given us the tools to dramatically change this country.
The interview continued:
Dungan: In relation not specifically to Alveda King [who has extreme views on homosexuality and religion], you’ve quite emphatically said that you do not agree with anybody who says God hates homosexuals; but people are asking, Would you be prepared to go a step further? And what is your attitude towards gay marriage?
Mitchell: Well, first of all, I don’t want to do anything that weakens marriage. Secondly, I supported partnership for gay people—no problem with that. And, thirdly, let the hare sit—let’s see if there’s any problems with this, how this works out … Let’s not caricature g
ay people as being different than the rest of us. They’re not different than the rest of us. Gay people have different views about this.
Dungan: But they have different rights; this is what they say.
Mitchell: No, no, some of them …
Dungan [interrupting]: Lesser rights.
Mitchell: No, no, let’s … We—we shouldn’t be saying—we would never say, for example, heterosexual people say this, or heterosexual people say that. There are people in the gay community that are quite happy that they’ve got—that this has been achieved. Now let’s—let the hare sit on this, let’s see how this works out, what problems there are with it, and let’s be reasonable and open-minded about it … But I do not want to do anything that will weaken marriage. Incidentally, because I support different forms of relationships, people who are single parents, people who are … people who are living in, in, in relations that they’re not married. But I think marriage is the ideal, and I think there’s something very supportive of my view that people think marriage is so worth while that they want to have it. I’m open-minded on the idea, in time—not now. I want to see how this—