The Race for the Áras (26 page)

But Browne continued, saying that he had a lot of regard for his work, his political substance and contribution to the peace process, which was a ‘substantial achievement', but, he asserted, he had spoken to his contacts in the
IRA
and people very close to him. ‘I know you were in the
IRA
up to three, four, five years ago,' he said. ‘If people believe you are lying about this, how do they know you won't lie about lots of other things when you are elected President?'

Unlike Browne, who was passionate in delivering his argument, McGuinness's face remained unresponsive, his demeanour impassive.

He cited his role in the peace process and more recently as Northern Ireland Minister for Education and Deputy First Minister. ‘I have risked my life,' he asserted, in becoming involved in the peace process. ‘That's how people will judge me.'

Mitchell weighed in again. ‘I also accept that Martin McGuinness contributed to the peace process—listen, we wouldn't have had the problem without them.'

The debate moved on, with regular squabbling, interruptions and cross-talking as the candidates jostled to be heard.

Browne—who is also a practising barrister—singled out Norris for a forensic examination after he spoke of the pride he would have, if elected, in reading out the Proclamation of the Irish Republic outside the
GPO
in 2016. ‘Talking about cherishing the children …' said Browne, seizing his cue. He said that Norris was ‘equivocal' and ‘ambiguous' about sex between an older man and a boy. ‘You have opposed the idea of an age of consent,' he accused.

‘That's not true,' said Norris, warning Browne not to repeat untruths about him.

‘People are really apprehensive that you are ambiguous on this issue,' Browne continued.

Not so, asserted Norris. ‘I stand totally behind the law. I have said repeatedly, time after time, that I abhor with every fibre of my being the abuse of children—sexual, emotional and psychological.'

But Browne was relentless. ‘People are further apprehensive that you refuse to release the letters—on grounds that most of us think are highly suspicious.'

‘You have a suspicious nature, Vincent. I think the viewing public know that. As Martin said about another issue, the people have moved on: there is no traction out there. I challenge you to come with me to Limerick, Kilkenny. In Galway, today in Cork …'

‘You're talking down the clock,' Browne interrupted. ‘You said a few days ago that you had got legal advice that it would be improper or illegal to disclose the letters you have written. From whom did you get legal advice?'

‘That is an extraordinary question for you to ask me, in my opinion,' said Norris, appearing to be taken aback. As Browne continued asking the question, he responded: ‘Can I just say again, this is all bar-stool stuff, resurrected up from the past.'

‘David, please answer the question. From whom did you get legal advice?'

‘Is that one of these questions that you regularly produce that make very good television but seem to fly out of the top of your head?'

‘From whom did you get that advice?'

Norris said he had answered the question, but no, he hadn't, Browne insisted, and he repeated it again and again as Norris stonewalled.

‘I think, Vincent, that I've answered all the questions on that, and we've moved on.'

‘Some people think you've made that up,' claimed Browne.

‘I haven't made that up. Are you accusing me of lying?' said Norris, his voice rising.

‘I wrote to people in the law faculty at Tel Aviv University, and I asked was there a plausible reason, was there a legal obstacle to your disclosing these letters, and only if you named the person who was the victim or if you revealed what happened in in-camera proceedings, there was no such disqualification or obstacle,' said Browne, pulling another rabbit out of the hat that had previously held the McGuinness library.

They continued to talk across each other, with Norris responding: ‘I am not a lawyer. You have some legal training, I gather; I was an academic; but I do find it unusual that you were able to get a considered view in the space of a few hours. We all know lawyers, we all know academics. When doctors differ, patients die, when lawyers differ you're in a real quandary … You claim to have got advice in a matter of hours.'

‘That's right, I did, yes,' said Browne, unflinching.

‘Let's leave it there and move on and talk about my record. My record stands …'

‘Is there some howler in these letters that discloses further ambiguity on your part about sex between adult males and minors?' asked Browne.

‘That is quite untrue. My conscience is clear. I've been an open book all my life,' replied Norris, who again invited Browne to join him on a canvass and see at first hand what issues were important to the people he was meeting.

‘And may I finally thank you. You were one of the many thousands of people who signed the petition to bring me back into the race, so thank you very much for that,' said Norris, adding that it emphasised Browne's impartiality.

 

Browne and McGuinness chatted as they left the studio to attend the photo call in the foyer. Norris left directly, and for the first time many journalists could remember on the campaign trail, or in life, he avoided the media. All the other candidates stopped for a few words with the journalists, huddled under the tent canopy after the debate, but they had nothing new to add, except to embellish their messages. The one thing they all agreed on was that the format, with seven voices competing for space, was difficult, suggesting that none were as pleased with their performance as they'd hoped.

The following morning the political media rated the performance of each of the candidates. Opinion was divided. Miriam Lord in the
Irish Times
:

The
Irish Daily Star
put Browne on page 1: ‘Vincent is real debate winner.'

The
Herald
differed with its score card, rating Mitchell as the night's winner.

Pat Stacey's score card rated McGuinness, Davis and Gallagher at only 1 out of 10. Norris scored 2 out of 10 and Higgins 8 out of 10. Dana trailed again with nil. ‘Sage political analysts always claim that television debates don't decide the outcome of elections. But after Vincent Browne's cracking Big Presidential Debate on
TV
3 last night, the “experts” may have to rewrite the rule book.'

Another
Herald
writer commented that Dana had failed to connect with anyone and had a poor outing.

The online
Independent
(
www.independent.ie
) rated Higgins the winner, with a rating of 7 out of 10.

McGuinness, Davis and Norris scored 6 each, Gallagher and Mitchell 5 each, and Dana trailed at 4 out of 10.

Gallagher's main point was an appeal to the other candidates to have all candidate promotion letters paid for by the state and sent to each voter put into one envelope rather than have seven separate mailings. He said that Dana had responded to him, and then he challenged the other candidates to show leadership and go along with his plan. Davis said she would, but Mitchell said he wouldn't. It would save €10 million, claimed Gallagher.

But two weeks later Gallagher's individual
litir um thoghchán
began dropping through letterboxes around the country. ‘Strong. Modern. Energetic. Positive. Let's put our strengths to work,' it said on the front page. His signed message on the other side read:

Across the top of page 1 the
Irish Daily Mail
wrote: ‘Vincent threw the book at McGuinness, and Michael D stood on a box …' The paper's political editor, Senan Molony, delivered his verdict: ‘Mr McGuinness spoke of respecting people's traditions, and said he wanted a decade of reconciliation from 1912. Some seemed by the end to be reconciled to him. Winner: Martin McGuinness.'

Inside, the paper editorialised: ‘Uninspiring debate.'

On the
TV
3 web site people were asked to vote for their favourite candidate, and 205,000 responded. McGuinness topped the poll, at 34 per cent, Norris came in second, with 19 per cent. Gallagher scored 15 per cent, Higgins 13 per cent, Mitchell 8 per cent, Dana 6 per cent and Davis 5 per cent.

Columnist James Downey, writing in the
Irish Independent
, would say that Fianna Fáil ‘has effectively ceded its own position—humble enough, but enough of a base to offer some possibility of rebuilding—to Sinn Féin. And Sinn Féin is bent on completing the destruction of the party that dominated politics for so long and, ultimately, so disastrously.'

Chapter
13
   
FRONT RUNNER

‘W
hat a journey this has been so far!' said a hugely enthusiastic David Norris, waving his arms for emphasis and grinning at the relaunch of his campaign on Wednesday 5 October. ‘There is another journey that begins today. The last part of the journey has twenty days to go. It will be the best part of all. Come along with me. It will be worth it. Let's change Ireland for the better.'

The relaunch was a tense affair in the Dublin Writers' Museum in Parnell Square, a short distance from Norris's home. ‘Put the Message in the Bottle' by Brian Kennedy and ‘Ain't No Stopping Us Now' pumped out over the
PA
before Norris came out to read his speech and answer questions.

The main policies enunciated by Norris for his campaign manifesto were that electing an independent would wrest the Presidency from the grip of the political establishment; that this was a referendum about change; that it was an opportunity to tear down the ‘monstrous inequalities' in Irish society; and that he wanted to give priority to human rights and the inclusion of marginalised people and build a new society based on others rather than on self-interest.

The questions inevitably were about media reports about his disability pension, for hepatitis, and the legal advice he had received about why he could not release the Nawi letters. Norris said that his hepatitis had been diagnosed in 1994. It was not hepatitis
A
,
B
or
C
. The following year Trinity College required him to give up his job as a lecturer on the grounds of disability, and he received a disability payment, which was not funded by the exchequer. He retired from the college in 1999. In the sixteen years during which he received the payment he was a member of Seanad Éireann. He told the press conference that he was fit for the rigours of the Presidential campaign. ‘Yes, I am, absolutely,' he confirmed.

Keeping a sense of proportion on the campaign, Miriam Lord in the
Irish Times
said there was a bizarre series of questions from the media about the
A
,
B
,
C
,
D
or e versions of hepatitis, and it got personal on both sides. ‘One wondered if he was going to be asked to produce his liver and slap it up on the platform for general inspection.'

Norris also read out a legal statement that gave the reasons for not releasing further letters appealing for clemency for Ezra Nawi. ‘Under Israeli law nothing may be published about proceedings in a closed trial without the approval of the court,' the statement from the Israeli legal firm Avitan Koronel said. This applied to letters Norris had written to lawyers acting for Nawi; and if other letters to public representatives were disclosed he could face the prospect of ‘expensive litigation'.

 

On Thursday the 6th a
REDC
-Paddy Power opinion poll showed Higgins picking up seven points to top the poll at 25 per cent, Gallagher up ten points to 21 per cent, McGuinness holding at 16 per cent, Norris dropping back to 14 per cent, Mitchell losing three points to 10 per cent, Davis dropping three points to 9 per cent, and Dana losing one point to drop to 5 per cent.

In the cattle mart in Raphoe, Co. Donegal, Mitchell picked up the results of the poll on his iPhone as the constituency
TD
and minister of state Dinny McGinley introduced him to local farmers. Outside, the rain lashed down, reflecting the Mitchell camp's political mood. ‘I think as the campaign goes on the Fine Gael vote will turn out,' said Mitchell in the canteen as he sipped vegetable soup. ‘The highest rating anyone is getting is in the low 20s, so the Fine Gael vote alone, if it turns out, would change that. People will stop looking at this as a beauty contest and start looking at people's credentials.'

The
Irish Independent
reported the following day as it assessed the
REDC
poll:

The
Independent
's editorial-writer was not impressed and described Mitchell's campaign the following day as ‘rapidly coming to resemble the political equivalent of a train wreck.'

The director of elections, Charlie Flanagan, would rebut the ‘doomed' label applied by the
Independent
, saying that every member of Fine Gael had been ‘working around the clock' for Mitchell. But the same afternoon he sent a letter to members of his parliamentary party. ‘I asked earlier in the week that you would let me have details of your Facebook/Twitter operator in your office to assist in Gay's campaign. I received a mere 33 replies! This is just 30 per cent!!' Also belying the party hierarchy's confident public statements about the campaign, he added: ‘I have been in contact with the
FG
regional organisers and I've received mixed reports on the posters, literature and canvass. In some constituencies there is little or no activity.'

Yet another opinion poll on the same day, Thursday the 6th, showed voters' intentions bunching around the three leading candidates, with Higgins at 23 per cent, Gallagher 20 per cent and McGuinness 19 per cent.

‘For Mitchell and Norris the poll is little short of a disaster,' the
Independent
said, with the two candidates scoring 9 and 11 per cent, respectively. ‘The big surprise of the poll is the performance of Gallagher, who is now in with a realistic chance of winning the office if he can maintain the momentum he has generated in the past few weeks.'

The magazine
Dubliner
that was inserted in that Thursday's
Evening Herald
carried a three-page polemic by Eoghan Harris that set out ‘ten compelling reasons that make Martin McGuinness an unfit person to be President of Ireland.' The
Sunday Independent
columnist had moved his political affiliations across the political spectrum over the years and now offered personal reasons why he rejected McGuinness as President, ‘a role that would retrospectively justify
IRA
murders and act as a recruiter for a new generation of gormless gunmen.' The cartoon of McGuinness with an automatic rifle and a devil's tail would be reprinted later as part of a full-page editorial in the
Herald
as the country was about to vote.

Reason number 1 was that even the remotest chance of Ireland becoming a ‘Provo Cuba', with McGuinness as President, would freeze foreign investment. McGuinness's Presidency, said Harris, would be a Trojan horse. McGuinness did not understand the political culture of the Republic: he was delusional in comparing himself to Mandela—who had accepted twenty-six years of imprisonment rather than engage in reprisal murders—and his ‘fight for freedom' was a futile waste.

His other reasons were that McGuinness should not be given the use of Áras an Uachtaráin as a safe house; his
IRA
killed seven members of the Garda Síochána and six Irish soldiers; his
IRA
waged war on children and on writers; his
CV
was a tissue of lies; and his presidential campaign was a personal therapy so that he could enjoy a sulphurous fame by presenting past criminal acts as a fight for freedom and could also be rewarded for calling off the campaign when he ran out of road.

The following Saturday afternoon a phone-caller to the
Sunday Independent
offices threatened to kill Harris. The caller said, ‘Eoghan Harris should be shot for what he is writing about Martin McGuinness—and I think I am the man to do it.' The Gardaí were alerted and called to Harris's home to speak to him about the threat.

A letter-writer in the
Irish Times
, John McDwyer of Carrick-on-Shannon, asked:

By coincidence, Dana was about to take centre stage as information emerged about a court case in the United States in 2008 over the ownership of some of Dana's religious recordings. The court papers provided an insight into Dana's business dealings and a bitter family row. The
Irish Times
on its front page seized on the revelation that Dana became a
US
citizen before putting her name forward for the 1997 presidential election. Dana's estranged sister, Susan Stein, a nurse who had moved to the United States and married a dentist, told the court that a decision was taken not to inform the Irish electorate.

Stein now barely spoke to her sister, she told the
Irish Independent
.

Dana dismissed the issue, saying she hadn't sought to keep it a secret: ‘Why would I? Wasn't de Valera [an American citizen]?' As she went through the citizenship process she claimed she had been assured that she could retain her Irish citizenship and that if she couldn't she wouldn't have taken up
US
citizenship. She added that the sides in the family dispute had reached agreement two years earlier and that part of the settlement was that they would not comment further.

The
Irish Times
described the bitter family dispute. Heartbeat was a music company established in the United States by Dana and members of her family to promote her music, and it also employed members of her family. The bulk of the company's turnover of $7.6 million between 1996 and 2005 was used to promote Dana and her music. She could earn $5,000 for a personal appearance, according to her sister. There was no written agreement over copyright. Heartbeat got into debt, Dana and her husband fell out with the company, and litigation ensued over the alleged underpayment and non-payment of royalties to Dana. The court papers included increasingly bitter correspondence between the two sisters, who had originally sung together and had won a contract with Decca Records.

Dana cut her first record in 1967, when she was a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl, Rosemary Brown. The song, appropriately called ‘Sixteen', was written by her school principal and music teacher, Tony Johnston, who recognised and nurtured her talent and guided her through her school exams. Rosemary was one of seven children. Her father, Robert, played the trumpet; her mother, Sheila, played the piano. Musically gifted, she also spent time living with Johnston's family in Tamnaherin, Co. Derry, a few miles from her home but a world away from the Troubles.

In 1969 Dana entered the Irish national song contest and came second. The following year she entered and went on to win the Eurovision Song Contest and to sell two million copies of her winning song, ‘All Kinds of Everything', throughout the world.

It was not until 1980 that she had another number 1 hit with ‘Totus Tuus' (Latin for ‘Totally yours'), a song she had jointly written with her husband and manager, Damien Scallon, in tribute to Pope John Paul ii, whose motto it was. (Earlier in October 2011, Dana and Damien marked their thirty-third wedding anniversary. They had written the song on their honeymoon.) She subsequently signed a contract with World Records at the National Religious Broadcasters' Conference in Washington, and when the Pope visited New Orleans in 1987 he asked Dana to perform the song in front of an audience of 85,000 people. Four years later she moved to Birmingham, Alabama, with her husband and four children and began a career on Christian television and radio.

In Co. Kerry on Friday the 7th Dana said she had taken
US
citizenship because her husband went to work there and she wanted the family to remain there legally. She also said her family had no memory of comments reported in an American court that Irish voters should not be informed of her dual citizenship.

Hurt by the coverage of the divisions in her family, Dana hit out at the media, saying that every family had its disputes but that the media had ‘reached a new low' and a ‘very low ebb.' She said that, ‘at the bottom of it all, I love my family, and we have reached agreement.'