Even on the policy-light terrain of a presidential campaign trail, the business of government is never far away.
Fine Gael’s candidate Heather Humphreys found that out last weekend, when a simmering controversy over her handling of a constituent’s alleged animal cruelty case resurfaced.
But on a blitz of local radio interviews during the week, the former minister for rural and community affairs was leaning hard into her old brief, which majored on sprinkling small amounts of money to large numbers of projects around the country.
Calling into Ocean FM from Leitrim, Humphreys was swift to remind listeners that she would be visiting the market yard in Carrick-on-Shannon, not to mention a number of projects in Drumshanbo which “I supported while I was a minister”.
READ MORE
She recalled opening a surf school in Strandhill and the Yeats Trail in Sligo, and announcing funding for community centres in Ballymote and Kilglass.
On Radio Kerry the previous day she remembered visiting the cable station in Valentia Island, turning the sod on a digital hub in Ballinskelligs, and how she expanded the fuel allowance and funded the new universal companion pass for the over-70s as minister for social protection.
Based on current polling, Humphreys and her Fianna Fáil rival for the presidency, Jim Gavin, are closely matched as the campaign gets into gear.
The race for the Áras has endless subplots but among them will be how the two Coalition parties compete with each other, and whether the business of government can be kept separate from the tensions of the campaign trail.
Sources in both Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil insist that the potential for the presidential race to undermine cohesion in the Coalition is limited to negligible. Neither Gavin nor Humphreys is likely to “go negative” on the other; partially by temperament, partially because the politics of personalised attacks may not play well with the public.
However, campaigns are febrile things, and the cold reality is that if both are in the final shake-up as polling day approaches, both Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil know their candidate must stay ahead of their rival to be in with a chance of claiming the prize.
Both parties certainly closely monitored the other’s selection processes, aware of how each other’s choices would affect their own race.
There is an acknowledgment among Government sources that if one of their candidates comes out on top, it is almost certain that they will do so firstly by staying ahead of their rival from the other Coalition party and then by benefiting from their transfers.
“One will elect the other,” says one Fianna Fáil insider.
This may increase the pressure as the days tick down.
“If there’s a poll and they’re within the margin of error [of each other], then I reckon the gloves could come off and it could become somewhat more divisive and bitter,” the source adds, but cautioning that this is unlikely to come from the candidates themselves.
[ Threats to Simon Harris are a red alert for Irish societyOpens in new window ]
Should that come to pass, campaign handlers insist they won’t panic and instead will double down on their core messaging, but the potential always exists for someone to step out of line – perhaps a backbencher or minister.
A stray criticism could spark something wider, and if that happens, both Civil War parties have a deep seam of tribal enmity to mine.
This has raised its head over the past six years – during elections, most notably the general election, the Coalition parties were unmoored from the programme for government (which tends to keep them in line) and they went for each other in the opening forays.
In 2023, when three Fine Gael junior ministers published an article calling for tax cuts ahead of the budget, it led to a bitter round of infighting.
It is, says former Fianna Fáil TD and senator Lisa Chambers, “hard to account for what individuals will do in the midst of a campaign because that level of pressure makes you do things that you might not otherwise do”.
Chambers, now director of public affairs with consultancy firm Consello, is nonetheless sceptical that the presidential campaign could morph into a battle that undermines the Government, with ministers attacking the other party’s candidate.
Coalition leaders, she believes, will “be aware of the bigger picture”.
“That’s not to say in the cut and thrust of the campaign you won’t have the odd bump,” she adds, outlining her belief that the budget, due on October 7th, will to some extent become inflected with the energy of the campaign – and vice versa.
“Delivering that in the middle of a campaign where candidates are going head-to-head looking for that centre left/centre right vote – that complicates things,” she says.
It may be that the risk for a truly problematic clash between Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil is small, but both parties have delicate paths to tread.
The role played by their respective leaders – Simon Harris and Micheál Martin – will be closely watched. Both are invested in their candidates, naturally, but the preamble to Gavin’s selection and the sniping at Martin from backbenchers over his backing of the former Dublin GAA manager over party stalwart Billy Kelleher has added an unanticipated layer of complexity for the Taoiseach.
His aggressive defence of Gavin’s clumsy comments on Israel’s achievement of its “military objectives” in Gaza this week suggests the Taoiseach will not be slow in coming on to the pitch.
Allies of Harris, who has endured a rough few months personally and politically, argue that Mairead McGuinness as an early front-runner backed by the leadership would have invited more pressure than the Humphreys candidacy.
Simon Harris has spoken out about intimidation including bomb threats
The extent of Harris’s presence in the campaign remains to be seen; he is a politician who by instinct likes to be involved and prominent. Whether he would be a help or a hindrance to Humphreys is another thing.
For both men, there is a considerable amount at stake. Success would diminish internal and external criticism, but the contrary is also true.
Policy issues the Government is grappling with may attach themselves to their respective candidates. For Fine Gael, the prospect of disability issues, particularly around the treatment of scoliosis and spina bifida, and the scrapped disabilities white paper, becoming a live issue has already arisen, although party sources insist that Humphreys and Harris are comfortable fighting on their record here.
The matter of the triple lock, which requires Ireland to have the approval of the Government, the Dáil and the United Nations if it is to send Defence Forces personnel abroad as peacekeepers, and neutrality has already come up for Gavin, the retired Defence Forces officer who backed the Government’s intention to scrap the triple lock, but this is likely to form a key pillar of Independent Catherine Connolly’s campaign.
Government sources privately acknowledge that on this, on Gaza, and on other issues, Connolly can be very effective.
With 40 days to go, recent experience suggests that presidential campaigns intensify and become more volatile as they go on; early leaders in polling in three of the last four campaigns have faded away, while the fortunes of Independent Peter Casey (going from 2 per cent in the closing polls to 23 per cent of the vote in 2018) shows that the electorate can pivot rapidly and unpredictably as late-breaking voters tune in.
On the threshold of the campaign proper, much is on the line for the Government parties – and little is easy to predict.
