by Tom Reddy
Reaching the target vote of 12½ per cent had to be a priority for those trailing with less than 10 per cent in the opinion polls—Norris at 8 per cent, Mitchell at 6 per cent and Dana and Davis at 3 per cent—if they wanted to recover any election expenses as a rebate from the tax payer.
The three Sunday opinion polls prompted fierce debate in the Higgins camp. Should he go ‘negative’ and increase the pressure on his only serious rival, Gallagher? He was advised to do so. He took the advice to heart and launched a blistering attack on Gallagher when he met journalists on a canvass in Grafton Street on a wet and windy Sunday afternoon with the Tánaiste, Eamon Gilmore. ‘I am a hundred miles from the Celtic Tiger,’ he said, describing himself as someone who had never had a share, who had never had a company. ‘It’s all in the public realm, every single aspect of what I do: what I own, what I am, what I do, my history … Why did I offer myself? Because I love Ireland.’
Higgins was reverting to type after a disciplined campaign of concentrating on short sound-bite answers. ‘I am saying that I am more substantial and I am clearly the better candidate. We stand for a different version of Ireland.’ Voters would focus on what both he and Gallagher had been doing for the past fifteen years.
Higgins said he had made the case against the excesses of the ‘Celtic Tiger’ and the property boom in the Dáil and had voted against the unlimited bank guarantee.
When I had the opportunity of being minister I founded a television station; I refunded the film industry; I built these canals, the Chester Beatty Library, Collins Barracks, the Folk Museum in Mayo and seventeen theatres. That’s real. You don’t have to go searching in the Companies Office to find that.
The following day’s front page of the Irish Daily Mail characterised his attack as ‘Higgins has meltdown’.
Chapter 14
STEWARDS’ INQUIRY
‘What have you added to the knowledge of the people about the Presidency? With the questions you put to us tonight, what is that all about?’ an enraged Gay Mitchell asked Pat Kenny on the live ‘Frontline’ television debate.
It was clear that the pressures of the campaign had prompted the tirade. Mitchell was languishing in the polls, and his own party was not delivering its national poll popularity to his campaign. He had been campaigning on serious issues, understood the role and both the limits and the requirements of the Constitution—and he was being asked what he considered an irrelevant, fatuous question.
Hundreds of thousands of voters, the biggest television debate audience, were watching, and he was arguing with the moderator—not with the other candidates—to win the hearts and minds of the viewers.
Standing behind a wooden lectern in a line with the other candidates, he prodded the air with his finger and unleashed his tirade, driven by weeks of frustration. It was Monday night, the polls would open on the following Thursday, and vital, valuable time was ticking away.
The straw that broke the camel’s back was a question about the businessman Denis O’Brien, which was followed by a question to all the candidates, Would you appoint him to the Council of State? Earlier Mitchell had been asked about his own poll rating and said for the umpteenth time that he thought the opinion polls were inaccurate. He asked:
What is the relevance of that question? The President is supposed to be about leading the country, about being fair, about being inclusive. What is the relevance of that question? What is the relevance of most of these questions? What do you have to say about it, Pat? Why did you have to put most of those questions to us tonight?
Kenny was equally robust in his response.
At the very beginning we gave you the opportunity to describe your Presidency, how you might be regarded seven years from now, and you were all given ample opportunity to describe that, and then we moved on.
Then, most tellingly, Kenny went to the heart of the need for public scrutiny of the presidential candidates.
Can I just say to all, asking these questions, as diverse as they are, gives people an idea as to your temperament, your character, and it’s certainly brought all those aspects out in the candidates tonight.
On the online version of the Irish Independent at www.independent.ie the former Sunday Tribune columnist Diarmuid Doyle reviewed the ‘Frontline’ programme.
Mitchell, the feisty no-hoper from Inchicore, finished last night’s Frontline debate on RTE 1 in total meltdown, a question about Denis O’Brien’s suitability to be on the Council of State having finally pushed him over the edge.
A few minutes earlier, he had announced his desire to throw excrement over somebody unnamed. While we were all trying to figure who he could possibly be talking about, he started to fire broadsides at Pat Kenny …
Mitchell usually looks like he’s chewing on a bag of scorpions, but this was of a different order of crankiness altogether.
He’d been an irrelevance for most of the debate, and somewhere along the way—perhaps when asked whether he accepted personal responsibility for the huge gap in popularity between him, at less than 10 per cent in the polls, and his party, at close to 40 per cent—he realised that the game was up.
He had neither the charm nor the wit to recover. All that was left was a scream of despair.
In Killarney on the morning of Monday the 24th, Mary Davis, who was trailing in the opinion polls in joint last position with Dana, was the first out of the traps to open fire on the poll leader, Gallagher, saying the race was far from over. ‘I absolutely think I can turn things around,’ she said. ‘I think a lot of people are undecided, and they are still waiting.’
Coverage of her membership of state boards had damaged her campaign, and some of the stories were very unfair, she contended.
There is absolutely no doubt that had an effect, and it came at a very crucial time in my campaign. It was an attack. The emphasis was on how to take me out of it. It was like demonising me for serving on three state boards, and no word at all about the eighteen voluntary organisations that I had served on. I was making a real difference in people’s lives.
Asked about Gallagher, she said that all candidates had to stand on their record.
I’m not sure all of the answers have been provided at this point in time, but that is a matter for Seán Gallagher. Past records need to be investigated to ensure that everything is above board. The people of Ireland need to be happy about that.
But while Kenny had lit a fire under Mitchell, it was McGuinness who would take the central role in directing the content of the ‘Frontline’ debate, a riveting television production that was to shape the news agenda for the coming days and as time ran out for the candidates, with voting just over forty-eight hours away.
Earlier in the day a joint Google-Newstalk debate, hosted live from noon on the web and on the radio station, gave a clue to a new strategy that McGuinness would adopt with devastating effect later that evening.
The debate, moderated by the bookmaker and former Fine Gael Minister for Agriculture Ivan Yates, who jointly presented the morning news programme, put questions to candidates that had been posted on the internet, which included such diverse topics as religion, the Constitution, same-sex marriages and the candidate’s vision for Ireland.
McGuinness waded into the debate, saying he had no doubt that the poll-topping Gallagher had strong links to Fianna Fáil.
I do think that there is no doubt whatsoever that Seán has been up to his neck in Fianna Fáil. Fianna Fáil is the party that ran the economy into the ground. Fianna Fáil was the party that was involved in the brown-envelope culture, the Galway tent, and involved in betraying the people of Ireland.
Yates, a combative and provocative interviewer on his breakfast show, was in top form for the debate. Referring to the latest opinion polls, which showed Higgins now trailing Gallagher, he thundered at Higgins: ‘This was your election to lose and you’ve lost it,’ he charged.
Slightly taken aback but retaining his calm air, Higgins responded: ‘Well, that’s the kind of commen
t that makes no sense at all. I think Thursday will decide that.’
Despite the blunt questioning, Higgins emerged as the winner in a post-debate opinion poll conducted in association with the Economic and Social Research Institute. He achieved 38 per cent of the vote; Gallagher and McGuinness both won 20 per cent, with Norris picking up 11 per cent. Mitchell achieved 6 per cent, Davis 3 per cent and Dana 2 per cent.
There was now just seven hours to prepare for the final televised debate of what had been a treadmill campaign of interviews and debates. For Higgins it would be a last chance to pull ahead in public opinion, which pundits thought might be showing a ‘soft’ lead for Gallagher, who would revert to his leading position and claim the keys to the Áras.
For Gallagher it was all about staying ahead, safe and sound. He would spend two hours with his advisers preparing for the debate in his four-storey head office in St Stephen’s Green and in the Conrad Hotel. ‘I was like a yo-yo running up and down the stairs during the campaign,’ his media adviser Richard Moore would recall. ‘What we really needed to co-ordinate the team was an open-plan office.’
There had been a shift in the focus of the campaign. The media were taking an increasing interest in Gallagher, who had suddenly been propelled into lead position despite little being known about him. His associations with Fianna Fáil and his business dealings would come under increased scrutiny.
A straw in the wind was that morning’s editorial in the Irish Times and the Evening Herald’s front page, which bluntly asked: ‘Who is he? Key questions around the presidential favourite Seán Gallagher.’ Under the heading ‘Mr Gallagher eyes the prize’ it wrote:
The big news from the poll is the continued surge in support for Mr Gallagher. He has doubled his level of support despite the media focus over the past week on his role in Fianna Fáil and, potentially more damaging, the controversy surrounding some of his business dealings.
The Herald’s lead story was more of an editorial than a hard news story.
He’s storming the polls and looks a dead cert to be our next President. But who is the real Seán Gallagher? As Ireland prepares to elect a man we know so little about, the Herald today probes Seán Gallagher and the man behind the mask.
Perhaps ominously it added: ‘Full story: pages 2, 3 and 12 and 13.’
The page 2 story said:
Nothing, no matter how unpalatable, can seem to stop the Seán Gallagher juggernaut from crashing into the Áras. Fresh links to Charles Haughey, €860,000 payments from one of his companies which received €830k in government funding, and today’s Herald story that he charged €3,000 for one speech are having no effect on public opinion.
Before the Herald hit the newsagents, voting had begun on the islands; soldiers serving overseas had already begun voting. The 760 voters on Tory, Gola, Aranmore, Inishbofin and Inishfree off the Donegal coast were the first islanders to vote that day. Ballot boxes were transported by helicopter, boat and ferry. Voting would continue on Inishbiggle, Inishturk, the Aran Islands and Clare Island the following day and on Wednesday, while islanders off the Cork coast would vote on the Thursday with mainland voters.
That evening, speaking direct to camera after the nine o’clock RTE1 news, Pat Kenny teed up his incipient drama, like an ‘X Factor’ promotion, with the dramatic introduction but without the show’s trademark booming voice:
Seven people. One job. The final debate. What will happen here tonight will impact on voters’ decisions, so there’s clearly a lot at stake.
Fifteen minutes into the debate, after the candidates’ opening statements, McGuinness launched his attack on Gallagher.
The grass-roots members of Fianna Fáil—in my opinion, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with them. But there was something very rotten at the heart of the last administration, and as far as I’m concerned Seán was part of that.
He waited for the applause to die down before announcing that a few hours before he arrived at RTE he was contacted by a man who had been one of a group of between thirty and thirty-five people who
turned up at short notice at Dundalk’s Crowne Plaza Hotel, each of them paying €5,000 to meet with the former Taoiseach Brian Cowen. This particular gentleman told me that not alone did Seán arrange it, Seán arranged for the photographs and brought the photographs to his house, and Seán also called around to his house to collect the cheque for €5,000.
Now that is indisputable. That’s an absolute disgrace and clearly shows the rottenness of the system that went before in terms of the cronyism, the developers, the speculators and those who effectively destroyed the economy of this country, and Seán is up to his neck in all of that, and he can’t deny it.
It was a bombshell, saying in effect that Gallagher was a senior member of the party he had distanced himself from as a junior member, and it associated him with the discredited culture of political donations that had marred political parties.
Kenny turned to Gallagher to allow him to respond, prompting: ‘You’re as thick as thieves with Fianna Fáil, and you’re trying to deny it?’
‘Can I tell you, Pat, that I’ve met you about as many times as I’ve met Brian Cowen,’ responded Gallagher. Kenny cut across him to say that was just twice, so.
Gallagher went on to say that he had served on the party’s Organisational Committee and went to two meetings in 2009 with the sole ambition of seeking to get support for business written into legislation.
Kenny referred to a story in that morning’s Irish Independent that cited Gallagher’s self-proclaimed association with the former Taoiseach Charlie Haughey and his experience of working in his campaign for election to the Fianna Fáil Ard-Chomhairle. Gallagher explained that he had met Haughey when he worked with Young Fianna Fáil in his early twenties, which prompted his decision to study in Maynooth to become a youth worker.
He explained that the fund-raising event in the summer of 2008 in Dundalk was set up by Fianna Fáil head office and that he had been asked, as a local businessman, to inform people about the event. ‘I invited perhaps three or four,’ he said.
But McGuinness repeated his charge about the fund-raising event and the cheque for €5,000.
Gallagher denied it. ‘Not true,’ he said.
McGuinness turned from facing front across his lectern directly to Gallagher on his left shoulder. ‘He says it’s not true. He’s begging for someone to come forward and say that it was not true. I would caution you, Seán, at this stage, that you’re in very murky waters.’
Gallagher rejected the cash-in-envelopes association. ‘I have never been involved in that culture.’ He then asked McGuinness to give the name and background of the man he had spoken to about the fund-raiser, before explaining:
I can tell you quite clearly I invited perhaps two to three people to that event. At the event people were asked if they’d like a photograph, as is normal at these functions, and I personally delivered—if that’s the case, and I don’t remember it—delivering a photograph, but I can tell you …
But McGuinness cut across him, saying he had called to the man’s house to collect a cheque for €5,000.
‘That’s not correct,’ said Gallagher.
‘I have to say you’re in deep, deep trouble,’ said McGuinness, with a wide smile.
Moving the debate on, Kenny put the same question to all the candidates: would you resign if anything was to come out subsequent to your election that was concealed and that would have affected the outcome of the election? One by one they all said they would resign rather than put the country through an impeachment process.
Higgins affirmed that, yes, he would, and then, looking a little bemused, added to laughter: ‘But it’s a hypothetical question.’
However, Norris drew the biggest laughs to the same question when he responded with a grin: ‘After exhaustive scrutiny by various sources, I’m sorry to disappoint the Irish nation, but the closet is absolutely empty.’
Norris had returned to form as a witty conversationalist a
nd a good debater, interjecting with telling comments. The defensive fixed grin that he wore previously as he was quizzed about the clemency letters had gone; the race had moved on and he was enjoying the theatre of the ‘Frontline’ programme, reminding observers of his jolly persona when he entered the race.
In the same programme, when McGuinness was asked about his suitability for the role of President he spoke about how Irish he was, saying that Derry was as Irish as Cork. He began to reel off his political achievements—Minister of Education, Deputy First Minister—before Norris interrupted to ask, to much audience merriment, would those roles contrarily affect his bid for the role?
The focus was to turn to Gallagher again when a woman in the front row of the audience asked about his suitability for the job, ‘given the trail of misunderstandings, accountancy errors and improper business practices that seem to have littered your career,’ and suggested that his refusal to answer questions ‘might bring the Presidency into disrepute at some point in the future?’
Gallagher was direct. All his business dealing were 100 per cent above board, he said.
The woman, Glenna Lynch, said that a cheque for €89,829 that had rested in his personal account should have been in a company account.
‘Not so,’ countered Gallagher.
‘How does someone mislay a cheque for €89,000?’ asked Kenny.
Lynch asked, ‘Who was the client? Where did it come from?’ As Gallagher tried to respond, she dismissed his explanations. ‘Seán, you know that makes absolutely no sense.’