The Irish Presidency: Power, Ceremony and Politics

Edited by John Coakley and Kevin Rafter, eds.Irish Academic Press, 2014About three years ago, I became a little bit obsessed with Charles de Gaulle. Here was a genuinely messianic World War II figure, an embodiment of the spirit of France in exile. Once the war was over and he returned from Britain he sat fallow for a while, and then became president in what has got to be the strangest way imaginable. Looking back on it, I find it amazing that France survived the 1960s at all, and for a while I was convinced that this was purely the result of de Gaulle’s superhuman force of will. The Fifth Republic was basically created for him, and thus the shortcomings of contemporary French politics are unsurprising: nobody since has been able to rise to his example, so nobody since has been able to be the kind of president that the Fifth Republic’s constitution demands. I now realise the insanity of this view, and aside from a wartime press photo of General and Mrs. de Gaulle sitting in their English garden that hangs on my office wall, that phase in my life is pretty well over.In many ways, it’s Ireland that snapped me out of it, Ireland that reminded me that the presidency can be a place where eccentric, passionate and flawed people can be given the chance to do their best to embody a complicated country. The Irish presidency of the last twenty-five years or so has been a wonder to behold. It’s thus hard to believe that nobody had, before now, thought to offer a sustained historical treatment of its evolution. John Coakley and Kevin Rafter, two Dublin-based academics, have stepped into that breach with an anthology of essays, The Irish Presidency: Power, Ceremony and Politics, and it is a genuine pleasure to read.Just as France’s model of the presidency – one part elected monarch, one part political powerhouse – is the result of its, ahem, unique political culture, so the Irish presidency is defined by a paradoxical combination of semi-monarchical detachment and serious political possibilities. Being a parliamentary democracy means that the only people who actually vote for the prime minister (in Ireland called the Taoiseach) are the ones in his or her home constituency who actually elect him or her to parliament (the lower house in Ireland is called the Dáil; the upper house, the Senate or Seanad, is a hybrid of quasi-elections and appointments too complicated to get into here). The entire Republic of Ireland votes for the President, though, and so s/he is the only Irish politician who can genuinely claim an elected mandate from the population as a whole. Thus it’s a mistake to think that the only thing the Irish President does is cut ribbons and so forth; s/he has some limited constitutional powers of oversight, and while there is an expectation that those powers won’t be executed solely to benefit the President’s party, the office is not an entirely symbolic one. This book opens with an introduction by the current President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins, and he is generous and gregarious at the same time that he makes his substantive disagreements with the book clear; it’s both a highly unusual introduction and itself a perfect little embodiment of the paradoxes of this office. Taking issue with a piece by the head of Political Science at Trinity College Dublin, Higgins writes that “I would not readily subscribe to Michael Gallagher’s statement (in what is a fine essay) that ‘the President of Ireland cannot be identified as a significant political actor’ – unless of course the latter term is only to be understood in its partisan meaning.” The President of Ireland is by definition supposed to embody the whole country and thus is supposed to be non-partisan; it does not follow from this that s/he is always going to be apolitical.My fondness for the institution of the Irish presidency was confirmed by the Republic’s 2011 presidential election, which was won by Higgins, a beloved figure for most Irish and Hibernophile intellectuals. Before becoming a senator for Irish Labour in the 1980s, Higgins was a lecturer in sociology at University College Galway (now the National University of Ireland/Galway). His entry into politics sometimes seemed to be a new way for him to be a public intellectual; during his time in the Senate he even quote cultural theorist Raymond Williams during a debate. His early electoral record was spotty: he lost elections to the Dáil in 1969 and 73, was appointed to the Seanad in 1973, and then won a Dáil seat in 198 only to lose it in 1982. He went back into the Seanad and then won a Dáil seat in 1987, this time sticking around until 2011. Once securely ensconced in the Dáil he eventually became Minister of Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht (the Gaelic-speaking areas of the republic; he is also known as Micheál D. Ó hUiginn and is fluent in Gaelic). During this time he presided over the revitalisation of the Irish film industry and was a sympathetic ear for artists of many stripes. In 1995 his department published a Green Paper on Broadcasting that at one point laid out Jürgen Habermas’ sense of the public sphere (in the words of the Green Paper, this sphere was “fostered in literary and political clubs, readers’ societies established for the discussion of newspapers, journals and books, tea and coffee houses and the pamphlets that circulated there”) and tried to figure out if broadcast now played that role. The next year he presided over the establishment of Teilifís na Gaeilge, the country’s first all-Gaelic television service. Like a lot of people I spoke to, I initially found it astonishing that a guy with this kind of profile could become president of a country.The feeling was pleasantly fleeting: after shaking myself a little bit, I recalled that Higgins had succeeded two equally complicated figures. From 1990 to 1997, Mary Robinson served as Ireland’s first female president. She came from a background as an academic and a crusading lawyer (her 1988 essay “Women and the Law in Ireland” was included in Ailbhe Smyth’s path-breaking Irish Women’s Studies Reader), and in seven short years she presided over an unprecedented period of liberalization in Irish life. She actually resigned her presidency, so that she could become the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Her successor is often given short shrift as “the second Mary,” but for me Mary McAleese, who served as president from 1997-2011, is actually the more radical figure. Thus I strongly disagree with Eoin O’Malley’s assessment of the contrast between “the two Marys” that he offers in his essay on the 2011 election:

In the aftermath of the 1997 presidential election some car stickers were seen to show “Pro Life 1, Abortionists 0.” This suggests that if liberal Ireland had won in 1990 with the election of an unashamedly liberal anti-nationalist in Mary Robinson, the other side won in 1997 with the election of Mary McAleese, a committed Catholic and a traditional Northern Irish nationalist.

Yes indeed, in addition to being the second female president, McAleese was the first president to be born in Northern Ireland. And she did come from the northern nationalist community, whose rough-edged grubbiness scares the living daylights out of most Dublin liberals. And unlike a lot of northern nationalists, she always took her religious commitments very seriously. As it turned out, though, it was precisely this background that has made her a particularly troublesome and effective critic of the Catholic Church. Although she took controversial, deeply considered positions on abortion, divorce (against both) and gay rights (in favor), her most radical gesture was a purely sacramental one. A few days before Christmas in 1997 she took communion at the Anglican Christchurch Cathedral in Dublin. At the only state dinner I’ve ever attended I met McAleese briefly and told her that I thought that historians of 20th century would look back on that and see it as a big day for Ireland, a Belfast-born President reaching across the religious aisle in the heart of the nation’s capital. She chuckled warmly and recalled that this wasn’t the consensus position at the time.Since leaving the Presidency McAleese has been especially impatient with the Church’s obsession with hierarchical deference, penning articles in the Irish Times such as “The Opaque Incoherence of a Church in Crisis”. She’s also been doing post-grad work in Canon Law at Rome’s Gregorian University; in 2012 she published Quo Vadis? Collegiality in the Code of Canon Law, a revision of the thesis she wrote while studying Canon Law at Dublin’s Milltown Institute. It was a book that I desperately wanted to like, but its bone-dry academic quality led me to conclude that it truthfully was, in the way that the Irish use the word, desperate. Still, though, it’s hard to imagine criticising any former US president, or for that matter any former president of France, for spending retirement being too serious and ploddingly detailed and only occasionally being a viscerally brilliant critic of the Catholic Church.One crucial historical fact about the Irish presidency that Coakley and Rafter’s book reminded me of (and which again deflated my de Gaulle-inspired messianic sense of such offices) is that Ireland has only had a president since 1938, fully sixteen years after its independence from Britain, and for quite a while nobody had a very clear what s/he was supposed to do. One of the most interesting essays in the book is thus Coakley’s piece on “The Prehistory of the Presidency,” which explains how the role evolved from the crazy grab-bag of state-level governance that defines the end of Ireland’s Free State period. The other astonishing aspect of the Irish presidency that this book brings to our attention is that for a country whose politics are (sometimes literally) a blood-sport, there have been a freakish number of uncontested elections. In total there have been thirteen Irish presidential elections; six of those have been contested by only one candidate. Most of these were incumbent presidents running for re-election, so I suppose that’s a little less strange.That’s not true of all of them, though, and the most memorable section of this book is definitely the one devoted to Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh in Kevin Rafter’s essay “The Politics of a ‘Non-Political’ Office, 1973-1990.” Ó Dálaigh, who served as the country’s fifth president from 1974-1976, was himself an “agreed candidate,” which is to say that nobody opposed him because of agreements between the main political parties; he himself came from the centre-right party Fianna Fáil. Rafter explains how this came about after the death of fellow Fianna Fáil President Erskine Childers in office partially as an attempt to defuse the presidential aspirations of his widow, Rita. Although all of Ireland’s presidents could speak Gaelic (some more fluently than others), Ó Dálaigh was the first for whom it was a genuine mother tongue; he also had particularly international background, coming to the job having been a judge on the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg. His presidential address opened in Gaelic; nothing unusual about that, although he went on in the language a lot longer than most of the inaugurates. But when he finally switched languages, it wasn’t to English. He told the crowd in Dublin that day:

Et comment pouvons-nous, ma femme et moi, remercier notre petit cousin européen Luxembourg qui a fait de notre séjour chez lui une véritable deuxième « voyage de noces », et qui malgré tout, a su maintenir son individualité linguistique, tout en parlant deux autres langues européennes ?

That’s a fairly small part of what he said in French; when he was finished he switched again…. back to Gaelic:

Voilà: má labhraim Fraincis – dá bhacaí féin í – biodh a fhios againn go mba shuaitheantas linn ar ár idirnáisiúnachas an teanga chéanna álainn sin ag an gcéad suí de Dháil Éireann i mbliain 1919.

The book’s appendix where all of the presidential addresses are reprinted provides a helpful translations of both quotations: “And how may we, my wife and I, thank our small European cousin Luxembourg, which has made our stay there a veritable second honeymoon, and which in spite of all has been able to maintain its linguistic identity, while still speaking two European languages…. So then: if I speak French – imperfect though it may be – we should know that that same beautiful language was a distinguishing mark of our internationalism at the first sitting of Dáil Éireann in 1919.” Ó Dálaigh was, for sure, an Irish nationalist, invoking the memory of the sitting of Ireland’s then-illegal independent parliament at the beginning of the War of Independence. But to do that via a reference to the importance of French and of recognizing European cousins in the form of a small, multi-lingual and culturally distinctive Duchy, was a signal that this would be a different kind of Irish nationalism.Ó Dálaigh’s presidency turned out to be one of Ireland’s most troubled. He never got along with Taoiseach Liam Cosgrave, from the rival party Fine Gael. Rafter describes Ó Dálaigh’s sense that Cosgrave was marginalising him to the point of violating the constitution. Things came to a head when Ó Dálaigh refused to immediately sign the Emergency Powers Bill and the Criminal Law Bill, both of which were basically designed to crack down on the IRA, newly insurgent Taoiseach and worryingly active in the Republic (Rafter recalls that they had set off a bomb that killed the British ambassador to Ireland in Dublin as well as a member of his staff; Rafter also recalls that Loyalist paramilitaries were also setting off bombs in Dublin during this period). Fine Gael is, of course, descended from those who won the Irish Civil War and immediately accepted the legitimacy of the Irish Free State. Fianna Fáil is descended from those who rejected the Free State because it fell short of being a true republic and then lost the Civil War; many people who left Sinn Féin to form Fianna Fáil had fought with the IRA first against the British and then against the Free State. By 1973 Fianna Fáil (whose official name is still “Fianna Fáil: The Republican Party”) had long since broken with the IRA and it was a Fianna Fáil government that presided over the mass detention of IRA members in the Free State during WWII.But nevertheless, a Fine Gael move to crack down hard on Republicans was obviously going to get a Fianna Fáil politician’s back up, especially in the 1970s. Ó Dálaigh agreed to sign the Criminal Law Bill after consulting with his Council of State, an advisory body made up of the former and current Taoisigh (Prime Ministers) and their deputies, former presidents, key members of the court and legislature, and seven appointees. But on the Emergency Powers Bill, which would have allowed detention without charge for up to a week, he decided to assert his presidential prerogative to refer it to the Supreme Court. This infuriated the government, even though the Court eventually found that it was constitutional. Rafter recalls how two days after the court’s decision, Paddy Donegan, Fine Gael’s Minister for Defence, let it all hang out during a speech to the troops:

Speaking before a military audience at Columb Barracks in Mullingar, Donegan reportedly described Ó Dálaigh as a ‘thundering disgrace’ for delaying the legislation, though it is widely acknowledged that the actual words took on a cruder form.

Ó Dálaigh was furious and Donegan apologised, but Cosgrave famously refused to fire his errant minister. Drawing on Ó Dálaigh’s papers, Rafter shows just how dismissive Cosgrave was towards his president, avoiding a face-to-face meeting on the matter and taking only two phone calls with him. Four days after the speech, Ó Dálaigh resigned in anger, saying that he wanted “to protect the dignity and independence of the presidency as an institution.” He was cutting to the heart of what the president was supposed to be under the Irish constitution: a non-partisan figure who like the monarch s/he replaced had the prerogative to advise and to be advised, but who unlike a monarch had the status as the only politician elected by the whole country and thus the moral authority to hold that government to account.For a country whose president isn’t invested with very many specific powers, then, the Irish presidency has produced more than its fair share of transformative figures and moments of clarifying crisis. Ireland’s presidents are worth paying attention to because of the unique way in which they have remained studiously non-partisan without necessarily remaining apolitical. Once you understand that delicious little paradox, you’ll start to understand why Irish politics remain the most fascinating in Europe.____Jerry White is Canada Research Chair in European Studies at Dalhousie University, and the former editor of the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies. He is currently at work on an edition of the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage’s writings for the Boulder literary magazine Rolling Stock.