The Race for the Áras (14 page)

In the same day's
Irish Independent
, Sam Smyth continued his articles about Gay Byrne, noting that ‘others who have reversed their position from curious interviewer to reluctant interviewee have had serious regrets—and not just his colleague, George Lee.'

Lee, a former economics editor with
RTE
, was unveiled two years earlier as Fine Gael's by-election parachute candidate for Dublin South after the death in July 2008 of the Fianna Fáil minister Séamus Brennan, who had held six ministerial and three minister of state positions since 1987. Lee was an opinionated commentator who had previously worked in the Central Bank as an economist and had won popular approval as he cautioned against Government fiscal policies before the crash. On the campaign trail he was met with excited crowds, glad-handed and kissed by enthusiastic voters. They were looking for change and hope, and they channelled that demand into Lee. As expected, he easily topped the poll, sweeping into office on the first count. It was a harbinger for Fine Gael and an accurate reflection of the public mood and support for the party for the 2011 general election result.

Lee, however, who had enjoyed the limelight in
RTE
and on the campaign trail, was relegated to the backbenches. He felt that his input and undoubted professional expertise were not being utilised by the party in the formulation of Fine Gael's economic policy for the looming general election. Disillusioned, in a bolt out of the blue he resigned not just from Fine Gael but from Dáil Éireann. Fortunately for him he was able to return to
RTE
as a business reporter, as he had made his decision within the twelve-month window provided for his leave arrangement. Any later and he would have had to resign from
RTE
. The importance of ‘minding the talent' had been lost by Fine Gael in Lee's case.

Ironically, the man Lee had replaced in Dublin South, Séamus Brennan, was Government chief whip in the previous Fianna Fáil-
PD
Government, which had to rely on a three-line whip and on the crucial make-or-break votes of four independent candidates. Brennan made sure they were given access to ministers and were minded and mentored to ensure that they supported the Government in what was to become a full five-year term.

Across the Liffey, in the plush new
Irish Times
building, the columnist Fintan O'Toole also offered his analysis of where Byrne's campaign would have to go—and what it would have to avoid. He argued that there were two Byrnes: Gaybo the television host, which was a carefully crafted persona, and the intensely private Gay Byrne.

O'Toole, who was firmly on the left of political opinion, said that Byrne could never be considered as a neutral and would have to address his status as an independent, as in his autobiography he revealed that he voted Fianna Fáil. O'Toole also believed that it would be impossible for Gaybo to clock up thousands of hours behind an on-air microphone without his views emerging occasionally. ‘And what has emerged is a bog-standard, unreflective and instinctive right-winger,' he said in a scathing judgement.

The opinion page article on Friday 12 August was illustrated by Martyn Turner, with a cartoon of Byrne in front of a full-length mirror clutching the results of the opinion poll. The cartoon was titled ‘The style icon President', and its speech bubble said, ‘Once more, I find myself in the presence of greatness.' This was a reference to his voice-over radio advertisement for Newbridge Silverware's Museum of Style Icons, which included the film stars Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe, among others.

 

Further south of the city, in Donnybrook, all the daily papers were strewn on a square coffee table and on the two leather sofas in the reception areas on the ground floor of the
RTE
radio centre. There had been nominal coverage of any candidate other than Byrne in the print media, such was the megawatt bulb that bathed his ‘will he, won't he' game of speculation.

The
Irish Examiner
published a report that the independent candidate Seán Gallagher had moved to sever his links with Fianna Fáil, saying he didn't want to be ‘demonised' because of his past links and that it was ‘nonsense' that he had any links at present. According to Gallagher, ‘I was a member of the party and I think it's really dangerous and disappointing that the media and others might now try to demonise people who were voluntary members of a political organisation.' Gallagher confirmed that he was involved in Ógra Fianna Fáil in the 1980s but said he had no links with the party between 1993 and 2007. He had directed the re-election campaign of Séamus Kirk in Co. Louth, chairperson of the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party, and attended two Fianna Fáil Ard-Chomhairle meetings in 2009.

He was non-committal about the party's former Taoisigh. On Bertie Ahern he said: ‘I'm sure he has done some good, and he has done some things that are not so good.' On Ahern's successor, Brian Cowen, he said: ‘I guess what Brian Cowen was doing and his Cabinet were doing was based on what was in front of them; they were making the best decisions they felt at the time. Maybe in hindsight, there were decisions that could have been made differently.' The headline over the comments was balder: ‘Gallagher anxious to sever his links with
FF
.'

Gallagher hit out at Pat Kenny's series of interviews of candidates, criticising the phone calls he had received about his links with Fianna Fáil.

 

It took Gay Mitchell just fifteen minutes to get to
RTE
from his home in Rathmines. He passed the television building on the right-hand side of the entrance road and wound round the administration building to the radio centre. He was familiar with both buildings: the
TV
centre which housed the newsroom and where ‘Morning Ireland' and the ‘News at One' were broadcast from in cramped studios, and the radio centre.

The radio producer arrived in reception to escort him through the sliding doors and down the staircase into the underground suite of studios that flanked the central courtyard. He was ushered through the heavy, sound-proof door into the producer's room, which looked through a large window into the studio, where the presenter Myles Dungan was filling in for the holidaying Kenny.

The Pat Kenny show had opened a weekly Friday morning debate about the Presidency by inviting each of the candidates into the studio to talk about their campaign. As this was a heavyweight news programme, no candidate could afford to pass up the opportunity to set out their stall for the listening political correspondents and opinion-formers on one of the top ten radio programmes in the country, attracting audiences of more than 300,000.

Mitchell had already prompted considerable media interest. He had bucked the Fine Gael leader's preference for Pat Cox to secure the party's nomination. A formidable vote-catcher, he was also on the right wing of his party, firmly anti-abortion, with strong views on marriage and homosexuality. He was also, unfortunately, a cousin of a well-known Dublin criminal. These had all prompted a media trawl of the archives and a rehash of the past. Despite Fine Gael's dominance in opinion polls, the last
REDC
poll put him in third place, with only 13 per cent of the vote.

In the studio, Mitchell was to face down those issues in the first substantial radio interview of his campaign. Defending his ratings, he said that

He also urged caution in taking comfort in high opinion poll figures in the early stages of the campaign, before the electorate engaged with and analysed the candidates on offer. Fourteen years earlier the Labour Party presidential candidate Adi Roche, the charity organiser of the Chernobyl Children's Project and a popular media figure, polled 38 per cent in the earlier stages of the campaign, but on election day she took only 7 per cent of the vote. It was a mantra he would repeat again and again.

A confirmed Europhile, Mitchell, not surprisingly, dismissed Byrne's ‘mad people in Brussels' comment.

The interview continued:

Dungan
: In relation not specifically to Alveda King [who has extreme views on homosexuality and religion], you've quite emphatically said that you do not agree with anybody who says God hates homosexuals; but people are asking, Would you be prepared to go a step further? And what is your attitude towards gay marriage?

Mitchell
: Well, first of all, I don't want to do anything that weakens marriage. Secondly, I supported partnership for gay people—no problem with that. And, thirdly, let the hare sit—let's see if there's any problems with this, how this works out … Let's not caricature gay people as being different than the rest of us. They're not different than the rest of us. Gay people have different views about this.

Dungan
: But they have different rights; this is what they say.

Mitchell
: No, no, some of them …

Dungan
[interrupting]: Lesser rights.

Mitchell
: No, no, let's … We—we shouldn't be saying—we would never say, for example, heterosexual people say this, or heterosexual people say that. There are people in the gay community that are quite happy that they've got—that this has been achieved. Now let's—let the hare sit on this, let's see how this works out, what problems there are with it, and let's be reasonable and open-minded about it … But I do not want to do anything that will weaken marriage. Incidentally, because I support different forms of relationships, people who are single parents, people who are … people who are living in, in, in relations that they're not married. But I think marriage is the ideal, and I think there's something very supportive of my view that people think marriage is so worth while that they want to have it. I'm open-minded on the idea, in time—not now. I want to see how this—

Dungan
[interrupting]: How does increasing the rights of people who are involved in civil partnership in relation to adoption, in relation to children—how does that weaken marriage?

Mitchell
: I don't know. And I'm not saying it weakens marriage. I don't want to do anything that weakens marriage. I want to take our time about this. I supported gay partnership—

Dungan
[correcting him]: Civil partnership.

Mitchell
: Civil partnership, rather, on the basis that this was going to solve a problem. People asked for it, and I supported it, and I have no misgivings about supporting it. Let's just see how this works out, and we'll talk about where we go from here; but let's do it calmly, let's do it respectfully, let's do it by discussion.

The interview moved on, taking a question, phoned in to the studio, asking Mitchell to confirm whether or not he was the first cousin of George Mitchell, ‘the Penguin'.

But Dungan wouldn't leave it there. ‘But I mean, is it—are you or are you not?'

For Mitchell, though clearly annoyed about the questions he had to face, it was better to deal with these issues early in the campaign and before a public still arguably in a holiday frame of mind, with schools closed and August threatening to become warm and summery, engaged with the campaign, as at the end of the campaign voters' minds focused.