The Race for the Áras (15 page)

 

As Mitchell left
RTE
, Seán Gallagher was on a walkabout in Ennis as part of his public consultation ‘listening tour'. A 300-strong group of cyclists were taking a break while on their four-day charity Tour de Munster, a fund-raiser for Down Syndrome Ireland. Gallagher had spotted the international cyclist Seán Kelly and reacted like an old pro on the campaign trail, making a beeline for him and posing with him for the photographers who were accompanying him. Staying on-message, Gallagher wouldn't be drawn on Gay Byrne's possible entry into the field.

When asked how he would finance his campaign, he took a novel approach and offered an invitation to his competitors.

The cost of the campaign was an issue that he would address again in the campaign. The other issue that had trailed him through the print media and on the airwaves was brought up again. But Gallagher was taking a firm line.

Later that day the unrest in Fianna Fáil about the party leader's solo run in offering support for Gay Byrne was to surface as reporters spoke to some members of the parliamentary party. And the following day that bubbling unrest in Fianna Fáil, which had first surfaced in social media, had grown into a front-page story in the
Irish Times
.

Senator Ned O'Sullivan of Co. Kerry was the most outspoken. ‘I am unhappy that there seems to be an impression abroad that an outsider will have a better chance than one of our own. Are we a party or are we not?' He said the party needed to put up a candidate who would be proud to wear the party logo. It was interpreted as an implicit criticism of Micheál Martin's offer of support to Byrne as an independent. O'Sullivan said that if Byrne went before the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party, along with other aspiring candidates, and was selected, he would have his support. But, he said, Fianna Fáil needed to stop ‘shadow-boxing'.

Another Kerry senator, Mark Daly, said he was in favour of the party choosing its own candidate and professed his preference for Brian Crowley, to whom Daly had formerly been a political assistant.

A solicitor from Bantry, Co. Cork, Denis O'Donovan, had served as a
TD
for one term when he was chairperson of the prestigious Oireachtas Joint Committee on the Constitution. However, he lost his seat in 2007 and was now on his fourth term as a senator. Crowley, he said, should have been given first refusal.

Senator Mary White criticised the ‘spinning' of the Byrne candidacy by the party hierarchy as unfair and undemocratic. ‘Gay Byrne is an outstanding person. But I believe that no decision should take place outside the parliamentary party.'

None of the four senators had been on a list of ten preferred Fianna Fáil candidates circulated to Fianna Fáil councillors for consideration by Micheál Martin in the recent Senate elections.

John Browne, a Wexford
TD
and former minister of state, now chairperson of the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party, and Michael Moynihan, a Cork North-West
TD
, expressed similar opinions. However, the former minister Willie O'Dea was taking a typically robust attitude to the problem, promoting a strong line in defence of his party and of Martin. He confirmed that some time earlier he had received a letter from Brian Crowley seeking his support and that of his parliamentary party members for his candidacy.

The Fianna Fáil party was beginning to publicly splinter. Fault lines were now publicly showing over Martin's solo run with Byrne even before they knew what the broadcaster would decide. There was also deep dissatisfaction about the way in which Brian Crowley had been overlooked.

For Martin it was the first real test of his leadership and his ability to impose discipline. And it was about to get worse.

Chapter
8
   
THE PRESIDENTIAL ENDORSEMENT

T
he following day, Saturday 13 August, Gay Byrne was again to dominate the news. The initiative was his. He dialled the confidential number Micheál Martin had given him during their initial discussion a week earlier. Martin was still on holiday with his family in west Cork. Martin replied simply: ‘That's your decision, that's fine, and thank you very much.'

It was a very brief conversation, and Byrne couldn't tell whether Martin was annoyed or upset. Later asked to characterise the conversation, Byrne said he couldn't. ‘I told him, and I don't know whether the man was disappointed or not. I called him first out of manners and courtesy, because he was the one who obviously made the offer of backing me at the time.' Then Byrne made an announcement to the media: ‘I just decided not to run, period.'

It was a simple declaration that would end intense speculation and spark another furious round of commentary, not least on Byrne's motivation but also on what the decision would mean for Fianna Fáil, and for Martin's leadership in particular.

Byrne always gave good quotations and sound-bites to the media, and, as approachable as ever, he embarked on a round of interviews, anxious to state his case.

The
Sunday World,
the country's largest-selling Sunday newspaper, with a sale of almost 250,000, claimed that he broke the news to it first.

He had felt ‘under considerable pressure' to run, but now that he had made his decision he could draw a sigh of relief: the ‘clamour' was over.

While he had ‘no worries' about probes of his financial and business affairs, he was concerned about possible scrutiny of his family.

He paraphrased what he had already told the
Sunday World
to other media:

Age was not an issue for him, even at seventy-seven, but it might be for others, he said. Nor had it anything to do with his health. (A month earlier he had been rushed to hospital, fearing death, as he couldn't breathe.)

He reiterated his thanks for all the messages of support he had received as he deliberated. Commenting on the volume of phone calls and messages, he said, ‘I will never get around to thanking all the people who have contacted me offering support.'

The top columnist of the
Sunday World
, Des Ekin, reminded readers that some years previously the paper had asked a major polling company to find out the ten most loved and most hated public figures in Ireland. ‘Astonishingly, Gay Byrne emerged as a clear winner in both categories.' According to Ekin,

A competing tabloid, the
Irish Sunday Mirror
, was robust in its front-page coverage. ‘Gaybo chickens out' was its main headline, two others being ‘Millions let down as
RTE
legend bottles presidency battle' and ‘Runaway poll leader insists: I'm not what the Irish people want.' The first three sentences of the story summed it all up.

At the other end of the Sunday newspaper market, the
Sunday Times
published an analysis of the Byrne debacle. It reported that
TD
s and senators had received calls from councillors and grass-roots members expressing disappointment that an independent had been given the nod ahead of a party member. One bitter quotation reflected the deep level of dismay felt by some party members: ‘One said to me, “I'd vote for Gay Mitchell before I'd vote for Gay Byrne.”'

However, an official party spokesperson was quoted after the Byrne decision was made known saying they would be meeting in September to discuss their strategy. ‘They'll decide whether they want to run an internal candidate, support an independent candidate or not run a candidate at all. No decision on any of that has yet been made.'

The official response suggested a process of consultation, part of the process of rebuilding the party with a national tour by Martin that would end in September with a visit to each constituency to meet party members. By omission, however, it admitted that the sub-committee established to consider the decision about running candidates had not met and that the offer, now a political mess, had not embraced, or been informed by, consultation.

Under an entertaining headline that echoed the catchphrase of ‘The Late Late Show', ‘To whom it concerns—I'm out,' the
Sunday Times
reported the thinking of strategists in Martin's office, who insisted that Fianna Fáil's best strategy was to support a candidate outside the fold who wasn't tainted by the Cowen era, and ideally to back a winning candidate who would also be supported by the independent
TD
s and senators who had previously offered their support to Norris.

The independent
TD
Finian McGrath had worked to achieve a cohesion between the diverse independents elected to the Dáil only a few months earlier. Under his leadership they had drawn up a list of ten names that they would consider supporting for the Presidency. According to McGrath,

Had Byrne taken up Martin's offer he might have also secured the support of the independents. That would have had two benefits: giving Martin political cover and, for Byrne, broadening his base of political loyalty, allowing him to maintain his credentials as an independent candidate.

Now, with Byrne out, McGrath was looking for a candidate to support and was hardly effusive about the other nominees on his list. He told the
Sunday Times
that, ‘at this stage, the other people on the list aren't exactly banging down my door. Unless some other super-duper candidate comes on the pitch, I'll have to move on to the next-best thing.'

 

The Andrews family had dominated public life for three generations and were viewed as Fianna Fáil blue-bloods. C. S. ‘Todd' Andrews had been an active member of the
IRA
during the War of Independence, in which he had been an internee and a hunger-striker, and took part on the Republican side in the Civil War. His son Niall was a
TD
, minister of state and
MEP
for Dublin, and his son David was a long-term
TD
for Dún Laoghaire and served in different departments, including Foreign Affairs. Niall's son Chris became a Dublin
TD
in the previous Dáil, and David's son Barry was Minister of State for Children from 2008. Both lost their seats in the 2011 general election.

In an uncharacteristic outburst, the mild-mannered Chris responded to the
Sunday Independent
, labelling the Byrne approach that ‘poisonous short-termism, the very thing that had brought the party to a historical low.' He went on the record to say that the decision to back Byrne was yet another example of the attitude of seeking ‘shortcuts to success that dishonour the party's origins and demean the profession of politics.'

The comments were a reflection of some of the debate that was going on within the party and among its grass roots. Other senior party members were to be quoted in the coming days but remained anonymous. These sources described the Byrne approach as damaging to the party, and Martin said it was ‘profoundly embarrassing.'

However, Timmy Dooley, who had made the initial approach to Crona Byrne, countered these comments in the
Sunday Independent
, saying that the party would have been forced ‘to do even more side-stepping if it had refused to back “Gay, the people's choice” when he emerged into the frame.'

The Laois
TD
Seán Fleming told of a recent meeting of party activists in his own constituency attended by Martin as part of his national consultation tour. Two-thirds of those present were against running a candidate, saying that they weren't going to win and that it would be better to concentrate efforts and funding on building the party for the next local elections. Fleming, an accountant who could do his sums, said, ‘We're not going to win it. We're not going to be second, we're fighting for third or fourth.'

‘The last thing we want,' said Dooley, emphasising the point, ‘the last thing we want is to end up fighting it out with Dana.'

 

Frank McNamara was a precociously talented musician from Thurles, Co. Tipperary, who at the tender age of nineteen shot to national fame when he was appointed studio pianist for ‘The Late Late Show'. He went on to become a composer and musical director for the programme in 1979, and most recently he presented ‘Weekend Classics' on Lyric
FM
, the station on which Gay Byrne hosted a Sunday jazz programme. With a number of strings to his bow, McNamara was an apt choice to write a full-page tribute to his friend and boss for decades.

McNamara had been a familiar figure on
TV
in living-rooms around the country. The Progressive Democrats, led by Mary Harney, were identifying celebrity candidates to run in the 2007 general election and recruited him to run in Dublin South-Central, the former political home of Gay Mitchell.

Politics was new to him, and sixteen candidates from all and no parties sought the votes of the people in that very diverse constituency, which includes Terenure, Crumlin, Kimmage, Inchicore, Kilmainham, Walkinstown and Ballyfermot. It was a bruising experience. With a quota of 7,992 votes, Fianna Fáil took two seats, and the Labour Party, Fine Gael and Sinn Féin one each. McNamara came fourth-last, with 474 votes.

With the insight of a former candidate, he concluded his tribute, borrowing a key word from Gaybo:

Ever on the ball, the bookies Paddy Power, who offered sports odds but also regularly offered odds on politics or anything that captured public attention, now placed Michael D. Higgins as favourite, at 8:11. Gay Mitchell was in second place at 7:2, Seán Gallagher was popular at 10:1, Brian Crowley at 14:1, Mary Davis at 16:1 and Éamon Ó Cuív at 20:1. Three other names—Dana, Martin McAleese (husband of Mary McAleese) and Martin McGuinness, who had been nominated by Sinn Féin—were each quoted at 25:1.