Any hope that Irish politics had retired for its quiet “silly” season in August became a fallacy on Thursday afternoon.
The sudden departure of Fine Gael grandee Mairead McGuinness from this year’s presidential election left her party colleagues in shock.
[ Mairead McGuinness drops out of presidential race due to health reasons ]
Although she had been just one of two confirmed candidates so far, the former European Commissioner and MEP had been marked out early as a likely president-in-waiting whom many believed would have relished and risen to the challenge of a robust campaign.
But she announced on Thursday she was leaving the race on health grounds.
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At the heart of this national political story is a woman who surely expected to have written a very different final chapter to her more-than-20 years in politics and even longer in public life.
It is no secret McGuinness had been nurturing a long-held ambition to make it to Áras an Uachtaráin.
Having come undone in 2011, losing out on the Fine Gael candidacy to Gay Mitchell’s doomed campaign, McGuinness’ supporters were pushing the narrative that the 2025 contest would be a vindication for the popular party figure.
McGuinness, who just left hospital last week, was instead forced to concede in a huge political upset that her health meant she now did “not believe that I have the strength to give the campaign my all”. This is fundamentally a sad and very human story, before it is a political one.
While trying to be as sensitive as Fine Gael can to a colleague’s health concerns, the party is aware it will now have to move fast to find a new candidate for a contest that has now been blown wide open.
The party’s executive council is expected to meet soon to work out what it will do next.
Although Fine Gael was perceptibly shaken on Thursday, the colder and more rational side of the party will know it still has time on its side.
Although Fine Gael has suffered the loss of a good candidate and possibly its best chance at the Áras in many years, it now just finds itself in the same net position as Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin. Mere weeks out, all three of the main political parties do not know who they will put forward to be the next president of Ireland.
The other leveller in Fine Gael will be that it, unlike other political parties, has known options.
Nobody will be saying much publicly for now, out of respect for McGuinness. But private, primal political ambitions are something else entirely.
Party stalwarts such as Seán Kelly and Frances Fitzgerald were always understood to be interested in contesting the presidential election.
For Kelly to run, he would have to suffer the slight inelegance of walking back his comments earlier this summer about how the presidency was a “largely ceremonial role and you don’t have that much power and influence”.
For Fitzgerald, the presidency might seem a tempting redemptive narrative arc for a woman who always made it plain she felt she had been forced off the political stage early and unfairly.
Some well-placed figures in Fine Gael had a grá for a Heather Humphreys candidacy, even after the popular and charismatic former minister ruled herself out in May.
This hairpin-style turn in events has fundamentally changed the complexion of this year’s presidential election. The winner of the major political prize of the next Irish presidency has never seemed less certain or the election more contestable.
This will not have escaped the notice of the more competitive elements in Sinn Féin and Fianna Fáil or of maybe even some ambitious independents.
The 2025 presidential contest is now a race to be witnessed, rather than predicted. Who knows what will happen next?
