The Irish Presidential Race

On Thursday October 27 voters in Ireland--the Republic of Ireland--go to the polls to elect a new president. The presidency in Ireland is largely a ceremonial office devoid of any powers except for deciding on which party to turn to in order to form a government following an election. The presidency was created by the 1937 constitution written by Eamon de Valera. Until 1990 it was largely the property of Fianna Fail to hand out to worthy cultural figures and former senior party politicians. In 1990 Mary Robinson, a human rights lawyer running as an independent with the backing of both the Irish Labour Party and the Workers' Party, took the presidency away from Fianna Fail. Fianna Fail won it back in 1997 but ran Mary McAleese, a Northern nationalist and law professor at Queen's University of Belfast. She is now retiring.

In this election the main candidates have been four: Michael D. Higgins, a poet backed by the Labour Party; Sean Gallagher, a reality show star and former Fianna Fail member running as an independent; Martin McGuinness, the Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland and number two in Sinn Fein; and David Norris, a former senator and gay rights activist. Norris has been badly damaged by the revelation that he wrote a letter on behalf of a former lover, an Israeli wanted for statutory rape of a Palestinian. He hasn't recovered. Martin McGuinness was off to a strong start but has faltered as victims of the IRA have stalked him and the Irish Independent and the Irish Times newspapers as well as TV questioners have openly challenged his version of his past. A poll from the Irish Times has Gallagher at 40%, Higgins at 25%, and McGuinness at 15%, with the other four candidates making up the remaining 20 percent.

It is doubtful is McGuinness either expected to win when he became a candidate or even wants to win. After all, I think that McGuinness probably relishes the challenge of replacing Peter Robinson as First Minister if Sinn Fein can replace the DUP as the largest party in the North. The candidacy was really about raising Sinn Fein's profile in the Republic and outperforming Fianna Fail.

Sinn Fein has two natural constituencies in the Republic. First, are traditional republicans who were always Fianna Fail supporters and now feel abandoned after Fianna Fail ditched most of its traditional rhetoric about Irish unity as well as Ireland's constitutional claim to the Six Counties of the North during the peace process in the 1990s. They may have stayed with FF during the 2000s, but when the party suddenly imploded as a result of the Irish economic collapse last year they felt free to find a new home. They are particularly prevalent in rural areas and in the border counties along the border with Northern Ireland. The second group are the urban poor who felt left out by the Irish economic boom of the 1990s. They have traditionally voted for the Workers' Party starting in the mid-1980s then most transferred to the Democratic Left when that party split off from the Workers' Party in 1992 and then began to vote for Sinn Fein once the Democratic Left merged with the Labour Party in 1998. Sinn Fein was still under ten seats in the Dail until the 2010 election. Now the question is whether McGuinness has raised the profile of Sinn Fein enough to allow it to surpass Fianna Fail in the next general election.

In American terms Fianna Fail is comparable to the Republicans, Fine Gael (now the party in power) to the right wing of the Democrats and the Labour Party to the left wing of the Democrats. The Labour Party has flirted with Marxism in the past before settling on social democracy of the Western European variety while Fine Gael flirted with social democracy in the 1970s and 1980s before returning to free market principles in the 1990s. Fianna Fail in the past had hegemonic status within the Irish party system based on a unique blend of nationalist rhetoric, free market rhetoric, and cronyism. It remains to be seen whether Sinn Fein can do a comparable job of mixing socialist and nationalist rhetoric (that some have claimed is reminiscent of the parties of the Radical Right in Europe during the 1930s).

Martin McGuinness, candidate for Irish presidency

Last week Sinn Fein (SF), the all-Ireland party and political half of the Republican Movement, announced that Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness is its candidate for the Irish presidency.  SF's thinking is that with Fianna Fail not running, the party now has the opportunity to by-pass the once dominant Irish political party. McGuinness could conceivably come in as runner up in the election, thereby further mainstreaming SF within the Republic of Ireland. The election is to be held on October 27, 2011. McGuinness will have to take a leave of absence from his job as deputy first minister in Northern Ireland during the campaign. In Ireland the presidency is a largely ceremonial position.

During the peace process, SF's leadership spun a scenario to the Republican Movement's rank and file of a united Ireland coming about peacefully because the party would use its influence both within the Northern Ireland Assembly and Executive and the Irish government in the Republic to bring this about. The projected date of unification was sometime in 2016, the centennial anniversary of the declaration of the Irish republic on the steps of the General Post Office in Dublin in 1916 at the start of the Easter Rising. Until recently this was a fantasy because SF was a marginal party within the Republic and shunned by the other parties as a coalition partner. Hypocritically Fianna Fail and Fine Gael would urge Northern unionists to share power with Sinn Fein while the IRA still had its guns, while excluding it from power in the South for the same reason. Then last year the collapse of the Irish economy and of Fianna Fail's dominant status within the Irish party system seemed to make this dream feasible. But ironically, the same collapse made a majority of Northern nationalists opposed to unity with the Republic in the forseeable future.

McGuinness's nomination is also another sign of the eclipse of Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams. It was speculated after the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 that Adams remained outside of the Executive because he was being groomed for the bigger prize of the Irish presidency. Throughout the peace process Adams was the most popular politician in the Republic in public opinion surveys because of his role. But three things changed. First, the robbery of the Northern Bank in Dublin on December 20, 2004 exposed Adams to the scrutiny of the Irish press and his credibility was tarnished. He claimed not to have known any details of the robbery while he had been negotiating with the Democratic Unionists and British government on a power-sharing deal. Second, Ed Moloney's Secrets From the Grave tied Adams to the disappearance of Jean McConville, a young Belfast mother of ten, in the early 1970s when Adams was reputed to be a senior figure in the Belfast Brigade of the IRA. Moloney interviewed a number of senior republican and loyalist figures for Boston College's Troubles project with the stipulation that the interviews would only be made public upon the death of the subjects. When this occurred with Brendan Hughes, Moloney published. Third, in 2010 it was revealed that Gerry Adams was lying about his patronage of his younger brother, Liam, a suspected child abuser, within SF. Adams had kept his knowledge of Liam's sexual problems to himself allowing Liam to find work with young people. The press then exposed these lies. 

Adams was elected a TD (deputy in Irish Dail) last year from the border county of Louth. So he is still a marketable commodity. But if McGuinness someday ends up as Irish president, it will be like the guy who saves himself for his one true love only to have his best friend wind up with his girl. 

McGuinness was a 20 or 21-year old butcher's apprentice in Derry when he joined the IRA in 1971. Ironically, he originally joined the Official IRA but left it for the Provisional IRA after a few months because he was not interested in politics but in action. By the time of the Bloody Sunday massacre in January 1972 he was second in command of the Derry IRA. The Official IRA went on a permanent ceasefire in May 1972--22 years before the Provisionals did. After 1976 he and Adams wrested control of Northern Command from more moderate figures and made it the dominant force in the IRA. In the latter half of the 1980s he was IRA chief of staff and remained in that position well into the 1990s guiding the organization through the peace process. He also became Gerry Adams's deputy within SF and its chief negotiator during the Good Friday and subsequent negotiations. He also became education minister during the period of the First Assembly from December 1999 to October 2002. In the spring of 2007 when the peace process was resurrected it was McGuinness who became the partner of the Rev. Ian Paisley, leader of the DUP--the infamous Dr. No of Ulster politics. The two were dubbed the "chuckle brothers" by the media for their public shows of affection. McGuinness has always been more open about his past IRA background than Adams who to this day denies every having been a member of the IRA.