The Race for the Áras (25 page)

‘What's the prognosis?' asked the eager reporters. Was the candidate able for the fray or already nobbled? ‘He has a bit of a limp, but he seems to have a good gait, and he has a nice cadence to his gait,' the surgeon replied.

The happy exhalation of pent-up breath by the Higgins campaign team could almost be heard on radios throughout the country, covering the unplanned but, as it turned out, fortunate encounter and endorsement.

No, it wasn't a set-up, members of the Higgins team would insist later: it was just fortuitous, another positive sign for the campaign.

Chapter
12
   
THE OFF

‘N
o speeches, no talking down the clock, no pork pies,' the chairperson, Vincent Browne, warned the seven presidential candidates lined up in front of him for his live television programme on Tuesday 4 October. Mary Davis had formally launched her campaign only hours earlier.

They stood behind white lecterns, their positions drawn randomly in front of the inquisitor: McGuinness to the far left, standing beside Davis, Higgins, Gallagher, Dana, Mitchell and Norris, on the far right of the screen.

‘I want a free-flowing debate,' said Browne before introducing each of the seven candidates.

‘Martin McGuinness, best friend of Nelson Mandela, and, according to himself, he's been in the Oval Office more times than Monica Lewinsky.'

In the
TV
3 canteen, where journalists and photographers were watching on two large screens, there were hoots of laughter. ‘This is going to be interesting,' one commented.

‘Mary Davis, who, according to herself, has performed on more boards than Michael Flatley … Michael D may not be the first poet in the Áras, but he's certainly the first to write a poem about his favourite donkey.'

Browne was enjoying himself, unsettling the candidates and setting the tone for an irreverent examination of the seven. He kept up the quick-fire commentary, which drew a few nervous smiles from the candidates but nothing like the belly laughs drawn from the media entourage in the canteen next door.

‘Dana is a celebrity bainisteoir, and she wants to prove that Ireland has talent … And David Norris was late coming to
US
this evening because he was writing more letters. I left out Gay Mitchell! Gay Mitchell is Gay Mitchell. I had something funny to say, but I don't want to make you smile.'

 

The
TV
3 studios are at the end of the Ballymount Industrial Estate, near the Red Cow, past numerous warehouses and recycling centres. Reporters who wanted to cover the debate had been assembling from seven o'clock on a cold and windy evening. A large tent, open on two sides, was the reception area for the media. Candidates would have to walk past them on their way from the car park into the building. The anonymous red-brick studio building could be mistaken for any industrial estate office and warehouse building, except for the fifteen-foot satellite dishes in their security pens. A lonely, single microphone on a stand stood in front of the tent, behind crash barriers to restrain the media and lit by four banks of floodlights. A small stage had been erected in front of it for photographers and cameramen.

As the candidates arrived, the
CEO
of
TV
3, David McRedmond, accompanied by the head of news, Andrew Hanlon, met and chatted to them, escorting them to the microphone to have a few words before the debate.

Mary Davis was the first to arrive. Gay Mitchell arrived next with his wife. An
Irish Times
photographer, Matt Kavanagh, asked Mitchell to give her a kiss. He duly obliged, and they posed hand in hand for photographs before being escorted inside to make-up and a warming cup of tea.

‘My hope is this will be positive,' said Seán Gallagher. ‘It's not about entertainment, it's about getting your message out.'

Martin McGuinness arrived with the largest entourage, in a jeep and a bmw. He spoke to reporters, again rehearsing his now familiar talking-points, which he had clearly prepared well. He talked about foreign investment, his visit to the New York Stock Exchange, and ‘positive and constructive work' he had done to achieve the Belfast and St Andrews Agreements.

With twenty minutes to go to air time at 9 p.m., all the candidates were made up and ready to go into the studio—except Davis Norris. McRedmond and Hanlon were increasingly nervous that the programme might be in jeopardy if Norris failed to show, and staff members were making hurried phone calls for an update.

Norris, who had been in Cork on a canvass, arrived with fifteen minutes to spare, just enough time to get into make-up and go straight to studio. ‘Lovely to see you. Thank you very much. See you later,' he called, waving with a big smile as he was hurried past the reporters and photographers.

Norris's adviser Paul Allen revealed after the campaign that they had stayed sitting in their car on the darkened estate until the last minute as they prepared for the debate. They wanted to avoid Norris losing focus, distracted either by reporters or by chat in the green room.

More than twenty journalists, from newspapers, radio and television, were brought into the
TV
3 canteen for the hotly anticipated debate. There was no room for them in the studio, and no audience; there would be a photo call with all seven candidates and the mediator in the lobby at the end of the debate. As the journalists munched on their sausages, chips and sandwiches, speculation mounted about whether Browne would show his usual dismissive impatience by skewering panellists who dodged or failed to answer questions, providing as much entertainment as information.

Browne warned the candidates that he would be as fair as possible in allocating time but advised them that they would have to fight their corner for coverage. The debate was significant, because it was the first of numerous debates and because the mercurial Browne was host.

Coverage included panning shots of the candidates' heads and shoulders. The remote control cameras didn't have to dip down to capture Higgins, as he stood on a black box behind the lectern so that all heads could be at the same approximate level. Pictures of the diminutive candidate were printed in some of the following day's papers with the box helpfully ringed.

Tony Heffernan, Higgins's media adviser, would normally check the arrangements for any studio interviews or photo calls in advance during his twenty-nine years' service as a political press officer. He had been enjoying his retirement and was reluctant to engage in the hurly-burly of a 24-hour-a-day campaign but relented in the face of constant pressure from Eamon Gilmore and the director of elections, Joe Costello.

To tempt him into taking on the role he was asked to go and see Higgins on a visit to emigrant centres in London in the second week of February. Heffernan was convinced that he had to take up the role as they met other travellers in Dublin airport. ‘I'd never seen anything like it: people were coming over to him all the time, wishing him well. I was really struck by the reception he was given and later continued to receive.'

Like the photographers, however, Heffernan wasn't allowed into the studio, and as
TV
3 had provided the box, Higgins just stepped up onto it. There were no requests from the Labour Party team for a box for future television appearances after the media poked fun at his
TV
3 box. ‘Look, everyone knows Michael D is small—so?' asked a team member, wondering what the fuss was all about.

The acerbic and witty television reviewer Pat Stacey in the
Evening Herald
summed up viewers' expectations of the ninety-minute programme.

Stacey went on to give the programme a rarely dispensed award of four out of five stars.

The debate got off to a slow start as Mary Davis repeated the claim made at her launch earlier in the day that Fine Gael had been paying a polling company to road-test negative messages about her. Gay Mitchell denied any knowledge of such polling. ‘I know of no such thing … I've been the subject of negative campaigning myself; I took it on the chin.' The word was picked up by Norris, who said he would never campaign negatively; it then moved on to Dana, who talked about people watching the programme who were in negative equity. She later went on to talk about the bank guarantee scheme, until Higgins cut her off, saying, ‘The President can do nothing about that now.'

Mitchell took the lead in the debate, launching an attack on McGuinness, querying him about his past as a member of the
IRA
and ‘pretending' that he drew the average industrial wage, and claiming that he was not the Sinn Féin candidate. He said McGuinness was being disingenuous: he took a full salary, retained an industrial wage but gave the rest of the money to his party's ‘propaganda machine'. ‘Martin goes on with this propaganda [about his income]. Do you know how much money I gave to Trócaire last year, Martin? Why didn't you give it to Trócaire? You gave it to your propaganda machine.'

As the tensions between the candidates became more heated, Mitchell called on McGuinness to be open about his claims about where his wage was directed and said that truth was central to restoring confidence in the institutions of the state. And, he added, the voting public needed to have confidence in a candidate. McGuinness replied: ‘I have made available my bank account to the media so they can look at it and see what money has been put into it by Sinn Féin. Gay will get a big shock when he sees it.'

McGuinness showed his media skills and resilience in the face of criticism. ‘For some reason the people behind Gay have decided that in order to make him relevant to the campaign he has to attack me,' he said. He also claimed that ‘nobody in the street' was exercised about his former membership of the
IRA
.

Browne now took over and asked McGuinness about his salary, about not being the Sinn Féin candidate in the election and about his membership, or not, of the
IRA
since 1974. Referring to his third question, Browne said, ‘People have the right to know what your role was in the republican movement as [if elected] you'll be the personification of this state.' McGuinness responded that he had not been a member of the
IRA
since 1974 but that he had never distanced himself from the
IRA
and had always engaged with the
IRA
, which had resulted in the ceasefire.

Browne countered that everyone had heard about how Garda commissioners, the British intelligence service and ministers for justice all believed he was a member of the
IRA
after 1974—but, of course, McGuinness might not see them as sympathetic. He reached down below his desk and theatrically brandished a copy of
The Provisional
IRA
by Patrick Bishop and Eamonn Mallie, which Browne said was sympathetic to McGuinness but whose text asserted that he was a member of the
IRA
after 1974.

Then he reached down again and produced another book,
Bandit Country: The
IRA
and South Armagh
by Toby Harnden. Then, to snorts of laughter from the media pack in the adjoining canteen, he produced book after book, like a magician pulling rabbits out of a hat, all asserting McGuinness's recent membership of the
IRA
. They were, in order of appearance:
Martin McGuinness: From Guns to Government
by Liam Clarke and Kathryn Johnston,
The Trouble with Guns: Republican Strategy and the Provisional
IRA
by Malachi O'Doherty,
Sinn Féin: A Hundred Turbulent Years
by Brian Feeney,
The Informer
by Seán O'Callaghan,
The Long War: The
IRA
and Sinn Féin
by Brendan O'Brien, and finally
A Secret History of the
IRA
by Ed Moloney, who had extensive contacts in the
IRA
.

 

Vincent Browne has been a journalist since 1968. He was Northern news editor of the Irish Press group from 1970 to 1973 and with Independent Newspapers from 1974 to 1979 and founded the investigative magazine
Magill
in 1977. He was editor of the
Sunday Tribune
from 1983 to 1994 and a broadcaster with
RTE
from 1996 to 2007, and while presenting ‘Tonight with Vincent Browne' on
TV
3 was also writing columns for the
Irish Times
and the
Sunday Business Post
.

A senior and experienced journalist with substantial credentials, Browne stated that, aside from the books, which some might think were biased, ‘I have reported from Northern Ireland during my time as a journalist; justice ministers have said it, authors have said it, gardaí have said it: I know you were a member of the
IRA
, Martin. How come that we are all so wrong?'

‘Because some people jump to conclusions,' said McGuinness, who criticised some of the authors as hostile to Sinn Féin and its participation in the peace process. He singled out Liam Clarke and Kathryn Johnston's book for two factual errors about other people called McGuinness who were not even relatives.