The Race for the Áras

by Tom Reddy

  Chapter 13

  FRONT RUNNER

  ‘What a journey this has been so far!’ said a hugely enthusiastic David Norris, waving his arms for emphasis and grinning at the relaunch of his campaign on Wednesday 5 October. ‘There is another journey that begins today. The last part of the journey has twenty days to go. It will be the best part of all. Come along with me. It will be worth it. Let’s change Ireland for the better.’

  The relaunch was a tense affair in the Dublin Writers’ Museum in Parnell Square, a short distance from Norris’s home. ‘Put the Message in the Bottle’ by Brian Kennedy and ‘Ain’t No Stopping Us Now’ pumped out over the PA before Norris came out to read his speech and answer questions.

  The main policies enunciated by Norris for his campaign manifesto were that electing an independent would wrest the Presidency from the grip of the political establishment; that this was a referendum about change; that it was an opportunity to tear down the ‘monstrous inequalities’ in Irish society; and that he wanted to give priority to human rights and the inclusion of marginalised people and build a new society based on others rather than on self-interest.

  The questions inevitably were about media reports about his disability pension, for hepatitis, and the legal advice he had received about why he could not release the Nawi letters. Norris said that his hepatitis had been diagnosed in 1994. It was not hepatitis A, B or C. The following year Trinity College required him to give up his job as a lecturer on the grounds of disability, and he received a disability payment, which was not funded by the exchequer. He retired from the college in 1999. In the sixteen years during which he received the payment he was a member of Seanad Éireann. He told the press conference that he was fit for the rigours of the Presidential campaign. ‘Yes, I am, absolutely,’ he confirmed.

  Keeping a sense of proportion on the campaign, Miriam Lord in the Irish Times said there was a bizarre series of questions from the media about the A, B, C, D or e versions of hepatitis, and it got personal on both sides. ‘One wondered if he was going to be asked to produce his liver and slap it up on the platform for general inspection.’

  Norris also read out a legal statement that gave the reasons for not releasing further letters appealing for clemency for Ezra Nawi. ‘Under Israeli law nothing may be published about proceedings in a closed trial without the approval of the court,’ the statement from the Israeli legal firm Avitan Koronel said. This applied to letters Norris had written to lawyers acting for Nawi; and if other letters to public representatives were disclosed he could face the prospect of ‘expensive litigation’.

  On Thursday the 6th a REDC-Paddy Power opinion poll showed Higgins picking up seven points to top the poll at 25 per cent, Gallagher up ten points to 21 per cent, McGuinness holding at 16 per cent, Norris dropping back to 14 per cent, Mitchell losing three points to 10 per cent, Davis dropping three points to 9 per cent, and Dana losing one point to drop to 5 per cent.

  In the cattle mart in Raphoe, Co. Donegal, Mitchell picked up the results of the poll on his iPhone as the constituency TD and minister of state Dinny McGinley introduced him to local farmers. Outside, the rain lashed down, reflecting the Mitchell camp’s political mood. ‘I think as the campaign goes on the Fine Gael vote will turn out,’ said Mitchell in the canteen as he sipped vegetable soup. ‘The highest rating anyone is getting is in the low 20s, so the Fine Gael vote alone, if it turns out, would change that. People will stop looking at this as a beauty contest and start looking at people’s credentials.’

  The Irish Independent reported the following day as it assessed the REDC poll:

  Fine Gael will attempt to mount a desperate attempt to ‘save face’ after party insiders accepted that Mitchell’s chances of becoming the next president are now ‘doomed’.

  Mr Mitchell’s campaign lay in tatters last night as a second opinion poll in two days showed the party’s candidate trailing second last out of the seven candidates in the race for the Aras. Now the poor performance is heightening divisions within the party—despite Director of Elections Charlie Flanagan claiming that it was a ‘myth’ that not all its TDs and senators were canvassing for Mr Mitchell.

  The Independent’s editorial-writer was not impressed and described Mitchell’s campaign the following day as ‘rapidly coming to resemble the political equivalent of a train wreck.’

  The director of elections, Charlie Flanagan, would rebut the ‘doomed’ label applied by the Independent, saying that every member of Fine Gael had been ‘working around the clock’ for Mitchell. But the same afternoon he sent a letter to members of his parliamentary party. ‘I asked earlier in the week that you would let me have details of your Facebook/Twitter operator in your office to assist in Gay’s campaign. I received a mere 33 replies! This is just 30 per cent!!’ Also belying the party hierarchy’s confident public statements about the campaign, he added: ‘I have been in contact with the FG regional organisers and I’ve received mixed reports on the posters, literature and canvass. In some constituencies there is little or no activity.’

  Yet another opinion poll on the same day, Thursday the 6th, showed voters’ intentions bunching around the three leading candidates, with Higgins at 23 per cent, Gallagher 20 per cent and McGuinness 19 per cent.

  ‘For Mitchell and Norris the poll is little short of a disaster,’ the Independent said, with the two candidates scoring 9 and 11 per cent, respectively. ‘The big surprise of the poll is the performance of Gallagher, who is now in with a realistic chance of winning the office if he can maintain the momentum he has generated in the past few weeks.’

  The magazine Dubliner that was inserted in that Thursday’s Evening Herald carried a three-page polemic by Eoghan Harris that set out ‘ten compelling reasons that make Martin McGuinness an unfit person to be President of Ireland.’ The Sunday Independent columnist had moved his political affiliations across the political spectrum over the years and now offered personal reasons why he rejected McGuinness as President, ‘a role that would retrospectively justify IRA murders and act as a recruiter for a new generation of gormless gunmen.’ The cartoon of McGuinness with an automatic rifle and a devil’s tail would be reprinted later as part of a full-page editorial in the Herald as the country was about to vote.

  Reason number 1 was that even the remotest chance of Ireland becoming a ‘Provo Cuba’, with McGuinness as President, would freeze foreign investment. McGuinness’s Presidency, said Harris, would be a Trojan horse. McGuinness did not understand the political culture of the Republic: he was delusional in comparing himself to Mandela—who had accepted twenty-six years of imprisonment rather than engage in reprisal murders—and his ‘fight for freedom’ was a futile waste.

  His other reasons were that McGuinness should not be given the use of Áras an Uachtaráin as a safe house; his IRA killed seven members of the Garda Síochána and six Irish soldiers; his IRA waged war on children and on writers; his CV was a tissue of lies; and his presidential campaign was a personal therapy so that he could enjoy a sulphurous fame by presenting past criminal acts as a fight for freedom and could also be rewarded for calling off the campaign when he ran out of road.

  The following Saturday afternoon a phone-caller to the Sunday Independent offices threatened to kill Harris. The caller said, ‘Eoghan Harris should be shot for what he is writing about Martin McGuinness—and I think I am the man to do it.’ The Gardaí were alerted and called to Harris’s home to speak to him about the threat.

  A letter-writer in the Irish Times, John McDwyer of Carrick-on-Shannon, asked:

  Since we seem intent on dredging through the past misdemeanours of the presidential candidates in order to diminish their candidacy, I want to know, from the other six, if any of them ever attended a Dana concert?

  By coincidence, Dana was about to take centre stage as information emerged about a court case in the United States in 2008 over the ownership of some of Dana’s religious recordings. The court papers provided an insight into Dana’s business dealings a
nd a bitter family row. The Irish Times on its front page seized on the revelation that Dana became a US citizen before putting her name forward for the 1997 presidential election. Dana’s estranged sister, Susan Stein, a nurse who had moved to the United States and married a dentist, told the court that a decision was taken not to inform the Irish electorate.

  When she ran for the presidential election in Ireland, John [election adviser] and Damien [Dana’s husband] and I had a meeting. She had just acquired her American citizenship at the same time she was running for president of a foreign country, and the decision was made that it wouldn’t look very good if the people of Ireland knew that she was an American citizen.

  Stein now barely spoke to her sister, she told the Irish Independent.

  If we walked past each other in the hall we would be civil to each other. But we have no personal contact any more, which is unfortunate. It is very sad.

  Dana dismissed the issue, saying she hadn’t sought to keep it a secret: ‘Why would I? Wasn’t de Valera [an American citizen]?’ As she went through the citizenship process she claimed she had been assured that she could retain her Irish citizenship and that if she couldn’t she wouldn’t have taken up US citizenship. She added that the sides in the family dispute had reached agreement two years earlier and that part of the settlement was that they would not comment further.

  The Irish Times described the bitter family dispute. Heartbeat was a music company established in the United States by Dana and members of her family to promote her music, and it also employed members of her family. The bulk of the company’s turnover of $7.6 million between 1996 and 2005 was used to promote Dana and her music. She could earn $5,000 for a personal appearance, according to her sister. There was no written agreement over copyright. Heartbeat got into debt, Dana and her husband fell out with the company, and litigation ensued over the alleged underpayment and non-payment of royalties to Dana. The court papers included increasingly bitter correspondence between the two sisters, who had originally sung together and had won a contract with Decca Records.

  Dana cut her first record in 1967, when she was a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl, Rosemary Brown. The song, appropriately called ‘Sixteen’, was written by her school principal and music teacher, Tony Johnston, who recognised and nurtured her talent and guided her through her school exams. Rosemary was one of seven children. Her father, Robert, played the trumpet; her mother, Sheila, played the piano. Musically gifted, she also spent time living with Johnston’s family in Tamnaherin, Co. Derry, a few miles from her home but a world away from the Troubles.

  In 1969 Dana entered the Irish national song contest and came second. The following year she entered and went on to win the Eurovision Song Contest and to sell two million copies of her winning song, ‘All Kinds of Everything’, throughout the world.

  It was not until 1980 that she had another number 1 hit with ‘Totus Tuus’ (Latin for ‘Totally yours’), a song she had jointly written with her husband and manager, Damien Scallon, in tribute to Pope John Paul ii, whose motto it was. (Earlier in October 2011, Dana and Damien marked their thirty-third wedding anniversary. They had written the song on their honeymoon.) She subsequently signed a contract with World Records at the National Religious Broadcasters’ Conference in Washington, and when the Pope visited New Orleans in 1987 he asked Dana to perform the song in front of an audience of 85,000 people. Four years later she moved to Birmingham, Alabama, with her husband and four children and began a career on Christian television and radio.

  In Co. Kerry on Friday the 7th Dana said she had taken US citizenship because her husband went to work there and she wanted the family to remain there legally. She also said her family had no memory of comments reported in an American court that Irish voters should not be informed of her dual citizenship.

  Hurt by the coverage of the divisions in her family, Dana hit out at the media, saying that every family had its disputes but that the media had ‘reached a new low’ and a ‘very low ebb.’ She said that, ‘at the bottom of it all, I love my family, and we have reached agreement.’

  Later in the day she was explaining herself on the RTE one o’clock news with Seán O’Rourke. She said that before she took the oath of allegiance the American official said she could not give up her Irish citizenship, and she was assured that this was not a problem, as there was a ‘unique relationship’ between the United States and Ireland. ‘I was perfectly assured that I could take up dual citizenship, with no conflict with my Irish citizenship,’ she said. She also said that she didn’t take up US citizenship until 1999, not 1997, as reported in the media.

  At a rally in Cork, Higgins was asked about Dana’s citizenship.

  It is not up to me to speculate. It would have been in the public interest if it had been made known. It is clear from what I have read that this is a matter that has a family dispute to it, and that must be very distressing. I have always drawn a distinction between the personal circumstances of my competitors and the political circumstances.

  In a two-page spread in the Irish Daily Mail, Mitchell talked about himself, the love of his life and the Presidency. It was a revealing interview, showing the love between Gay and his wife, Norma, ‘my real director of elections,’ and gave him the oxygen that the campaign had not permitted so far to allow his warmth to be displayed publicly.

  He told how he had organised a situation so that he could be alone with Norma and propose to her. They had been going out together, and he arranged to pick her up during her lunch break and drive her to St Anne’s Park, with its beautiful rose garden.

  The interviewer, Jason O’Toole, asks, ‘Did he get down on bended knee?’

  ‘No, not quite,’ he laughs.

  ‘I must get him to do that,’ Norma interjects. ‘It’s romantic for me, so when I pass by each time I think of the fact that I was proposed to outside that gate.’

  ‘I’m thinking of getting a plaque put up there,’ Gay quips.

  O’Toole writes:

  It’s obvious from the good-natured banter between them and their habit of finishing each other’s sentences that they are a very close couple … ‘Everybody knows that the closest person to me is Norma … I said when I was selected at the convention by Fine Gael: “Charlie [Flanagan], you may think you’re the director of elections, but everyone knows Norma will be the director of elections.”’

  On the front page of the Irish Daily Mail the paper revealed that Gallagher had been a member of the Fianna Fáil National Executive until January 2011—despite claiming, as recently as that week, that he left two years ago.

  The paper’s political correspondent, Ferghal Blaney, said they had uncovered a ‘smoking gun’ letter written on 5 January in which Gallagher tells the party’s general secretary, Seán Dorgan, that he is regrettably quitting. ‘In it he makes none of the sharp attacks in private that he has since made in public, while campaigning for votes.’ The letter of resignation was reprinted in the paper.

  A campaign spokesperson countered that Gallagher had not been active in the party for the last two years, and that he had indicated his intention of resigning in September 2010 but had made it official only in January 2011.

  The Sunday Business Post’s political editor, Pat Leahy, took an overview of the campaign, saying that it was now being directed and dominated by the media.

  More than any other election in Irish history, this one is being fought out on the airwaves and on the front pages of newspapers. More than ever before, the role played by reporters, editors, radio and television producers and presenters is shaping the course of the campaign. All of the major developments of the campaign have been generated by the media’s interrogation of the candidates. Increasingly the candidates are talking about the media’s agenda rather than their own.

  And it is having an effect. The polls published last week, a RedC poll by Paddy Power and another in the Irish Times, showed that media focus on stories unfavourable to candidates usually tends to damage them. The oft repeated c
laim—by several of the candidates—that they wouldn’t dream of negative campaigning because it doesn’t work is false on at least one account, and in most cases two. Negative campaigning often does work. That’s why they do it. Negative publicity has destroyed David Norris and severely damaged Mary Davis.

  Gay Mitchell’s upfront attacks on Martin McGuinness since last weekend—egged on by influential commentators—have torpedoed his own campaign, rather than the Sinn Féin candidate’s. The lesson seems to be: best leave the media to do the dirty work.

  Leahy also explored some of the candidates’ profiles and media exposure. Dana had largely been ignored by the media, he said.

  Her supporters believe that this is because she is a representative of a conservative brand of Catholicism and Euroscepticism which is disliked by many people in the media. There is at least some truth in this, though not as much as Dana thinks. But really her lack of traction can be explained by the fact that she is at five per cent in the polls.

  The candidates are presenting themselves for the highest position in the land more or less entirely on the basis of their personal character and their records. Most people would agree that voters have a right to know about their past and their character, and that’s the media’s job. But what is unusual by Irish standards is that the process has been led, defined and narrated by the media. It’s not just part of the campaign. It is the campaign. For Irish politics, that is new.

  The Sunday Independent’s editorial was strident.

  Our concerns about Mr McGuinness are not confined to the lies, economic destruction, murder and repression of free speech that Sinn Fein and the IRA are so intimately linked with. The central philosophy of a peace process that has brought Mr McGuinness to a position where he can realistically contend for the Presidency was one of moral reservation where lies were presented as truth in the hope that this would serve the greater good.