OPINION:AFTER ALL the twists and turns of the presidential election campaign over the past few months it looks as if the voters will have seven candidates to chose from after nominations close on Wednesday, writes STEPHEN COLLINS
With the entry of Martin McGuinness into the contest, the outcome of the election on October 27th has assumed profound implications for the people of the country and for all of the political parties in the Dáil.
The election of a man who personifies the Provisional IRA, both in terms of its ruthless terror campaign and its subsequent engagement in the peace process, would say an awful lot about how this country perceives itself.
The last Irish Times/Ipsos MRBI opinion poll in July found that when it comes to making a decision about who to vote for in the presidential election choosing someone who would best represent Ireland was by far the most important issue in the minds of voters.
Of all the republican leaders McGuinness is the one who has always done least to downplay his IRA past and, while he is now refusing to discuss the details of what he did or did not do during the “war”, nobody is under any illusions about the central nature of his role. Apart from the symbolic importance of a McGuinness victory in terms of how the country sees itself, it would represent a massive breakthrough for Sinn Féin as a political force in the Republic and would be a severe blow to the three major parties in the Dáil.
For Fianna Fáil a Sinn Féin win could be terminal. The party’s bungled handling of the presidential election issue from start to finish has raised questions about its capacity to survive. Micheál Martin finally imposed some discipline on the parliamentary party last Tuesday, but it may have been too late.
In hindsight there is a strong argument why Fianna Fáil should have contested the election. While Brian Crowley or Éamon Ó Cuív would almost certainly have done poorly, the presence of a Fianna Fáil candidate would not have left the door open so wide for McGuinness.
Fine Gael, coming from a position of strength, has also made a mess of its campaign. Back in July the parliamentary party stuck its fingers in the eye of the leadership and opted for Gay Mitchell ahead of Pat Cox and Mairéad McGuinness.
Key party strategists never had much faith in Mitchell’s ability to win but, to compound his problems, once he was selected much of the parliamentary party seemed to walk away from him. While the candidate has travelled a lot of miles up and down the country over the past couple of months there is no buzz around his campaign and it has sunk below the radar.
Mitchell is a feisty performer but the anxiety to present him as suitably presidential has drained that very quality from his performances and made him appear dull. The entry of McGuinness into the race should prompt a tactical rethink. Mitchell is the one candidate with the capacity to take McGuinness head on and force the electorate to confront the unvarnished reality of what the Sinn Féin candidate represents.
The entire Fine Gael party, from Enda Kenny down, also needs to wake up and put a decent campaign behind Mitchell involving money, energy and flair. Otherwise, the great breakthrough victory of February 2011 could soon look very hollow.
Labour Party candidate Michael D Higgins has been coasting along as the favourite for the past month or more and hasn’t put a foot wrong. It will take some time to assess the impact on his campaign of the arrival of McGuinness and the return of David Norris. For the moment, however, there is no reason for him to change tack.
Norris’s return to the fray has added another unexpected ingredient into the mix. The departure of the Trinity Senator in July facilitated Higgins’s rise to front-runner status but the Norris return, and McGuinness entry, are bound to change things. Norris’s flamboyant style will attract a lot of attention, and if he can manage to claw his way back to contender status and present himself as the main rival to McGuinness, he could even end up winning the office on transfers.
Questions about the appropriateness of the letters he wrote to the Israeli authorities on behalf of his former partner pale into insignificance when compared to McGuinness’s IRA record, and they are unlikely to resurface during the final month of the campaign.
Almost equally surprising as Norris’s return has been the belated entry of Dana Rosemary Scallon. She arrived on the political scene in the last contested presidential election in 1997 and her surprisingly good performance then propelled her into the European Parliament two years later on a conservative Eurosceptic platform.
She is unlikely to have the same impact this time around as there are already two Independents, Seán Gallagher and Mary Davis, who have established themselves as serious candidates in the process of trawling the local authorities for support. Both have harnessed a public willingness to look outside the mainstream parties but they now risk being swallowed up in the bigger field.
With seven candidates in the race, the outcome is impossible to predict this early on. Polls at this stage in the 1997 presidential election proved an inaccurate guide to the final result as things changed once the hard campaigning got under way.
This time around the result will be decided on transfers and a lot will depend on the order of elimination. It could well boil down to a battle between McGuinness and the person most likely to stop him. Who that will be is a wide open question.