As you get closer to the poster, things get weird. It’s the only one in the Burren village of Ballyvaughan. Catherine Connolly smiles down serenely from the lamp-post at the old pier, admiring the limestone hills that fringe Galway Bay.
But up close you can see that someone has taken a thick black marker and drawn shaggy eyebrows, a moustache and a goatee beard on her face. It’s what a bold child would have done – except that the height of the poster suggests otherwise. Someone had to go to the bother of getting a ladder or at least a chair and driving to the pier to deface the incoming president of Ireland.
The image thus created is infantile – but also symbolic. It is emblematic not just of the grim unravelling of what was supposed to be our opportunity to talk about collective values. It also encapsulates the decline of the State’s governing parties.
Fianna Fáil made itself irrelevant to this election – its best hope of salvaging a smidgen of respectability on Friday is for Jim Gavin to function as an empty cipher for the protest vote. This is at least vaguely amusing: Fianna Fáil going into its centenary year as the middle finger for middle Ireland.
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But when it comes to embarrassing oneself, Fine Gael is giving its historic rival a run for its money. It has taken out its big black marker and scrawled all over Connolly’s image. But all it’s really managing to achieve is to make itself look juvenile.
In the Sunday Independent, Heather Humphreys unveiled her theme for the last week of the campaign: “Before Catherine got into politics and before I got into politics, she was working for UK banks to repossess Irish homes. I was working as a credit union manager and I was trying to help people with huge financial difficulties that they face and I was trying to keep them in their homes. I have always tried to help people. I’ve never tried to capitalise on somebody’s misfortune and to make money out of it. And that’s the difference...”
This is feckless populism. Connolly has many questions to answer and she dodges most of them. But trying to make her guilty by association with the clients she represented when she was working as a barrister is cheap, cynical and corrosive of trust in the justice system.
Fine Gael has form in this regard. During the general election of February 2020 the party sent out Regina Doherty to allege that Fianna Fáil was preparing to enter government with Sinn Féin. Her evidence? That Jim O’Callaghan had once acted as a barrister for Gerry Adams in a defamation case against a national newspaper. He had, she alleged in relation to Sinn Féin, “taken their coin”.
In itself, this is absurd – by the same contorted logic, a former Fine Gael taoiseach John A Costello was a traitor to Ireland when he was retained to act for Winston Churchill in a libel case.
But it also raises an obvious question for Fine Gael now: if Connolly is unfit to be president because she took payment from banks to represent them in court, surely the party should refuse to serve in Cabinet with O’Callaghan, who took the Sinn Féin shilling?
Humphreys might also have stopped to wonder about Tom O’Higgins, her party’s candidate for president in both 1966 and 1973. In all his years as a senior counsel did he never represent a murderer or a rapist or a bank seeking to repossess some unfortunate person’s home or business? Presuming he did, Fine Gael must be relieved he lost both of those elections. How could they have borne the shame otherwise?
Vandalism
As well as being idiotic, however, the decision to scrawl all over Connolly because of who she represented in some court cases is a larger act of vandalism. Democracy and its institutions are under attack across the world – and one of those institutions is a legal system in which everyone has the right to representation in court.
That system only works if lawyers separate their personal from their professional instincts. No decent human being would not be revolted by, for example, a man who has admitted to multiple sexual offences against children. But no professional barrister should deny that man the opportunity to plead his case.
Humphreys surely knows that this crucial principle is currently being assaulted by Donald Trump in the US. He has gone after one law firm for “representing failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton”, another for assisting special counsel Jack Smith in his investigations of Trump’s attempted coup, two others for their association with Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 campaign and a fourth for representing the voting machines company Dominion in its successful law suit against Fox News.
Equally, one of the nastiest aspects of the immigration debate in Britain is the vilification of lawyers for representing migrants and asylum seekers. The Conservatives, while in government, spread hysteria about “an activist blob of left-wing lawyers” as the villains of the “small boats” scare. Unsurprisingly, this rhetoric has fuelled physical attacks, including fire-bombings of law offices.
In this atmosphere, Humphreys surely knows that her cheap shot at Connolly comes with a very heavy price tag – it destroys Fine Gael’s historic claim to be the party of law and order. There can be neither law nor order if solicitors and barristers decide only to work for good people and nice companies. Fine Gael, a lawyer-saturated party, understands this perfectly well, yet can’t resist the infantile urge to take its big black marker to the face of the justice system.
Connolly is going to be our next president and it is in the interests of all citizens that she be allowed to ascend into that office with grace and dignity. The governing parties need to reflect long and hard on why they have been unable to ever look like winning this election. Humphreys should start that process by not being such a bad loser.
