The Race for the Áras (8 page)

It was a recognition of tensions that would emerge, but that never flared into public view, between Higgins's hand-picked team and Labour Party head office. On one occasion Higgins would flounce out of the office after a row.

Higgins's ambition for the Park was more than twenty years old, but the planning for the 2011 election began twenty months before the vote. In the summer of 2010 Kevin O'Driscoll, an old friend of Higgins and his former programme manager during Higgins's tenure as Minister for Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht, called to visit him in hospital as he recovered from an operation on his knees. Higgins had previously expressed an interest in running for President, but now he told O'Driscoll that he was going to run the following year and that he was going to retire from the Dáil.

Over the coming months they would discuss putting together a team and a policy platform. They were joined by the retired civil servant Chris O'Grady, who had worked in the film section of the Department of Arts when Higgins was minister and would be an important speech-writer. In May 2011 O'Driscoll, who would be his election agent, was on holiday in Antibes in the south of France, and he invited Higgins and O'Grady to join him in the Mediterranean sun, where they put the finishing touches to a shadow campaign.

Alice Mary Higgins, the candidate's daughter, was central to the management of the campaign as joint deputy director of elections with her colleague Councillor Brian McDowell, a member of the party staff.

The former Labour Party press officer Tony Heffernan would be coaxed out of retirement for the campaign. Greg Sparks (accountant), Morgan O'Sullivan, David Leach (national organiser), Ita McAuliffe (general secretary), Michael Treacy (parliamentary adviser) and Shauneen Armstrong completed the team. Mags Murphy looked after the tour logistics.

Constantly at his elbow during the campaign was Higgins's wife, Sabina Coyne, who supervised the Galway campaign with their son Daniel, which would deliver 60 per cent of the vote in the county. Another son, John, made a campaign video featuring his father through the decades. The core team met for the first time a fortnight after the selection convention and from then on once a week in the Mansion House.

A sliding scale of financial contributions was also drawn up by head office, requiring contributions to the campaign of €2,000 each from ministers and
MEP
s, €1,500 for ministers of state, €1,000 from Dáil deputies, €700 from each senator and €500 from party councillors. The Labour Party was to contribute approximately €320,000 to the campaign.

The Fine Gael aspirant Pat Cox was subsequently admitted to membership of the St Luke's Branch of the party in the Cork North-Central constituency, and two weeks later he confirmed at a press conference in Dublin that he had his nomination papers signed by twenty members of the Oireachtas, thirty of the party's county councillors and five of the National Executive for the convention planned for the following month.

The Fine Gael electoral college gives 70 per cent of the votes to
TD
s, senators and
MEP
s, 20 per cent to the councillors and 10 per cent to the Executive Council.

Cox's parachuting into the party, and his support from the party hierarchy, had raised tensions in the party. He was seen by some as an opportunist ‘blow-in', despite his valuable international reputation.

Mairead McGuinness, who had made it clear that she joined the party when it was ‘neither popular nor profitable', was still relatively new in the party, while Mitchell, despite his feisty image, had served the party long and loyally. Bruton had been the original favoured candidate, but now there would be a dog-fight for the nomination, with no overt guidance from the party leadership.

In the
Irish Times
, Stephen Collins in his Saturday column described the presidential election campaign as the strangest in the history of the country.

He added that some of Mitchell's strongest supporters came from the ranks of those who had tried to depose Kenny only a year earlier. He continued:

In the following day's
Sunday Independent
, John Drennan wrote how the election would reveal the true state of our politics.

Across the page, Eamon Delaney warned that allowing Cox to be considered for the race might prove a fatal move for Fine Gael. Bluntly he asked:

Delaney went some way towards answering his own question.

The
Sunday Times
published a substantial editorial that cautioned that, with Fine Gael scoring a poll rating of more than 40 per cent, the presidential election was theirs to lose.

McGuinness had been busy canvassing the electoral college and made a virtue of her Fine Gael credentials when questioned about how her campaign was progressing. She had been meeting party members since she announced her campaign, but it was too soon to identify the leader in the three-horse race. Savvy politicians will never hex their own campaign by saying they are leading, or annoy an electorate into either complacency or anger at a show of confidence or arrogance. Taking a swipe at Cox, McGuinness said that

Liam Twomey, a Wexford
TD
, referred to the resentment against Cox when he confirmed to the
Sunday Business Post
that the former
MEP
and minister of state Avril Doyle would announce in a couple of days that she would seek the party's nomination. According to Twomey—like John the Baptist, heralding his candidate—after listening to ‘some hard-hitting' comments about Cox's entry into the race, Doyle believed that she offered ‘the same ability, appeal and experience' but that she

The Fine Gael stage was becoming crowded. Doyle's candidacy would reignite the fierce rivalry between McGuinness and Doyle that had characterised a previous election in Leinster for a seat in the European Parliament. In the event they both won seats in the Leinster constituency, as their campaigns and public skirmishing kept them in the headlines throughout the campaign. However, three of the candidates were now from the east, a consideration that might give Cox, from Cork, an edge.

Formally announcing that she would be running, Doyle emphasised her Fine Gael credentials and her service to the party and said she was unique in being born and raised in Dublin but having been living and working in Wexford for thirty years.

On Thursday 30 June the
Irish Independent
published a survey of the four Fine Gael candidates as they prepared to address the parliamentary party at a special meeting convened in their new party rooms in Leinster House. They were given eight minutes each to make a pitch for the vote of their parliamentary colleagues.

The large room on the top floor of the block is reached from a lift beside the Dáil canteen or from the floor above outside the chief whip's office. It was a trophy room in the Oireachtas complex, as it had been the Fianna Fáil meetin-groom before its numbers were reduced by three-quarters and it reluctantly had to hand over the keys. Party representatives had produced tape measures as they argued about representation and heads per square metre in an attempt to decide who should retain or move into the most prestigious rooms.

It was all to play for in the battle for the Fine Gael ticket, said the
Independent
on its front page. However, the paper found that Mairead McGuinness was leading her rivals, as ten members of the parliamentary party declared for her, although many
TD
s and senators did not respond to the request to declare for their preferred candidate. ‘There are twelve to fifteen turnips in the party waiting for a sign from the leadership,' said one anonymous
TD
. ‘I don't see Pat Cox getting going unless the leadership comes out and backs him.' The term ‘turnip' was being used by parliamentary party members to describe backbenchers who went along with the dictates of the hierarchy, while those who resisted were termed ‘parsnips'. Neither was complimentary, but they pointed up some internal division or, at a minimum, dissatisfaction.

A senior party
TD
was quoted as saying: ‘Mairead thinks Kenny is backing her; Gay thinks he's backing him; Cox is the anointed one; and Avril wouldn't be in it if she didn't think she had his blessing.'

The political editor, Fionnan Sheahan, summed up the phone survey, saying that each candidate faced their own obstacles in the battle to win support. He said that McGuinness was not universally popular within the party, that Mitchell was not strong in rural areas, that Doyle had left it too late to enter the campaign and that Cox was an outsider.

 

Only hours after Michael D. Higgins became the first political-party nominee for the Áras, the publisher Niall O'Dowd flew into Dublin from the United States to formally announce his interest in seeking a nomination for the Presidency from both Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin. O'Dowd (58) was born in Thurles, Co. Tipperary, was raised in Drogheda and studied at
UCD
. His older brother Fergus is Minister of State at the Department of Communications, Energy and Natural Resources and at the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government, with responsibility for the ‘New Era Project'; he also held a number of senior positions on the Fine Gael front bench and was formerly a senator and Mayor of Drogheda.

Over the coming days Niall O'Dowd would run a storming campaign, meeting the media and potential political sponsors—the opposite to his experience in the United States, where he had been centrally involved in the Democratic Party's campaign for the Clintons. He founded a newspaper, the
Irishman
, in California before moving to New York, where he would establish an Irish-themed magazine and the newspaper
Irish Voice
and the hub site
Irishcentral.com
.