Has the Irish presidential poll damaged Sinn Fein?

Had it not been for the beyond abysmal performance of Fine Gael's dreadful candidate for Ireland's Presidency, Gay Mitchell, who managed to amass a mere 6.4% of the votes in Thursday's election, and who couldn't be bothered to show up for the final declaration, there would be a lot more attention on the relatively poor performance of Sinn Fein's Martin McGuinness, and on the arrogant assumptions that lay behind his candidacy.

Before doing so, it is worth acknowleding that McGuinness's intervention in last Monday's TV debate certainly secured the presidency for Michael D Higgins, although I still think Gallagher's vote was pretty flaky even before it, as a cursory look at the raw polling data showed.

However, McGuinness was supposed to garner at least 20 per cent of first preferences and place Sinn Fein's vote at least on a par with the Labour Party. And while it is true that his 13.7% is up on Sinn Fein's 9.9% in the general election, such a marginal improvement hardly justifies endangering the entire Northern Ireland government and opening up the can of worms that is the IRA's not too distant past. Sinn Fein expected Irish voters to be grateful to them for standing McGuinness, and then were astonished at the extent of their ingratitude. The renewed focus on the IRA's unsavoury past may also have lasting consequences for Sinn Fein's vote in the Republic: if their leading celebrity candidate cannot advance further than this in such a volatile campaign, what hope is there for the less elevated retired gun-runners and gullible groupies that the party puts up in more prosaic circumstances?

McGuinness made an important contribution to the final result through his interventions in the final debate, but even he must be wondering whether the damage that the whole campaign has done to his and Sinn Fein's reputation was quite the masterstroke that Sinn Fein thought it to be six weeks ago.

Why Michael D Higgins is set to win the Irish Presidency

It can take an age for final results to come through in an Irish STV
election, but the country is blessed with some very skilled tallymen. And their tallies point to a clear victory for Michael D Higgins, the President of the Irish Labour Party, as the country's next president. To readers of some of the British media, particularly the Guardian which was practically wetting itself at the prospect (never a realistic one beyond the fantasies of the paper's resident Sinn Fein fan club) of Martin McGuinness finding himself in Áras an Uachtaráin after today, the new president is a virtual unknown. Readers were instead told more recently that if McGuinness didn't cut it, David Norris, an academic  and gay rights campaigner scrabbling for fourth place in the same tallies behind McGuinness, would do it.

To be fair, there have been several 'front-runners' in the campaign. And Norris was there once (though long before the Guardian piece), before he mishandled the release of letters he had written in defence of a friend convicted for underage sex. So, more significantly, was the Irish Dragon's Den entrepreneur Sean Gallagher, who led the weekend polls until McGuinness threw doubt on his integrity by highlighting some of his less savoury links with Fianna Fail. But all through this, Michael D was always likely to win through, as this blog has consistently argued. And that is because, as today's RTE/Red C exit polls confirm, people are more interested in electing someone to the Park who will represent Ireland with dignity abroad and who is of unimpeachable integrity. And Michael D not only scored on both counts, his "A President Who Will Do Us Proud" slogan exactly captured the mood of the electorate. Even if he hadn't topped the poll, he was always the most transfer-friendly.

Michael D is a long-time politician of the left, a poet and academic, and the finest culture minister that Ireland ever had. Each of the other candidates had different flaws exposed during the campaign; and each time Michael D was there rising above the fray. The only criticism made of him was his age, and that may have backfired as a younger but testier Sean Gallagher came unstuck. He fought a long game, fought it steadily with a brilliant Labour back up team. And he was there when the last of his rivals fell at the final hurdle. Since 1990, under both Mary Robinson and Mary McAleese, Ireland has benefited from two fine Presidents. Both in their different ways transformed what had been a tired sinecure for failed or retired politicians into a significant symbol of the new Ireland. That tradition will undoubtedly be upheld by Michael D.

Michael D can still win, but needs plenty of STV transfers

Three weekend opinion polls have now given solid leads to the 'independent' business candidate Sean Gallagher in the Irish presidential election. Gallagher has clearly been unaffected by revelations about his Fianna Fail background or his patchy business record as a Dragons Den presenter. His tactic of contrasting his relative youth with the age of 70-year old Labour veteran Michael D Higgins seems to have paid off and Higgins clearly faces an uphill battle winning this week's poll. Gallagher is running at around 39-40% to Higgins 25-26%. All the polls confirmed that Sinn Fein/Guardian candidate Martin McGuinness is a distant third, with Paddy Power shifting his odds to 50/1 as a result.

But a closer look at the data behind the Red C poll suggests that it will be a lot closer between Higgins and Gallagher than the 14-point gap would suggest. For a start, if one includes only those who will definitely vote (a particularly important indicator if turnout is low), the gap falls to eight points. And then, so long as McGuinness stays in third position (as his transfers will mainly go to Gallagher), Higgins should benefit from most transfers from the other candidates, in the STV election. So there is a lot to play for in these closing days. But Ireland has a pretty clear choice: a vote for the politics that sent it into the abyss, in the form of ex-Fianna Fail member Gallagher, or a vote for a broader more outward-looking culturally astute Ireland as represented by the best culture minister Ireland has had in Higgins. It may not be as defining an election as the 1990 election that saw Mary Robinson win, but it is a pretty defining choice all the same.

Two candidates now vie for Irish president (memo to Guardian: neither is called Martin McGuinness)

As the Irish Presidential election enters its final ten days, there are just two candidates left standing. Michael D Higgins, the Labour veteran and former culture minister (left), is in what seems like a fairly straight fight with the former Fianna Fail member turned Independent business candidate Sean Gallagher. Two polls appeared yesterday, with each candidate leading one of them. In the Sunday Business Post, Gallagher led Higgins 39-27 while in the Sunday Independent, conducted a little later, Higgins led Gallagher 36-29. Both polls placed Martin McGuinness on around 13%. Yet, to a reader of the British media, especially the Guardian until today, all this would be a great surprise. Surely, they might innocently wonder, this is the race where Martin McGuinness is set to take the prize?

What has happened to McGuinness during the course of the campaign is fascinating. He started the campaign dubbing his opponents 'West Brits', an offensive term of abuse used by Sinn Fein in the past to suggest its opponents were not true Irish people. McGuinness has been forced to confront his paramilitary past in ways that he cannot wholly have expected. The son of an Irish army private murdered by the IRA confronted him, and he was unable to give a satisfactory answer. RTE's Miriam O'Callaghan dared to challenge that past on a TV debate last week, questioning how he squared murder with his religious beliefs, and despite bitter complaints from Sinn Fein, who like to praise their own role in the peace process without acknowledging their role in what went before, 62% of Irish people backed the feisty broadcaster over the petulant candidate.

It is true that Sinn Fein has probably gained a bit of extra support on the 10% it won in the general election earlier this year as a result of the campaign. But by being forced to confront its past in ways that had been largely ignored since the power sharing agreement in Northern Ireland, it has also limited its potential for expansion. And the foolhardy decision to allow McGuinness to leave his day job as deputy first minister will have done few favours to the strength of Northern Ireland governance. Sinn Fein deserve credit for accepting power sharing with the DUP but that neither wipes out their past murderous campaign nor does it give them a god-given right to the Irish presidency.

Even though Gallagher has momentum, Michael D still probably has the better chance of winning. The election is being fought under the single transferable vote system, and he should be he most transfer-friendly of the candidates. Gallagher has been running as an Independent and enjoys fame from Ireland's Dragons Den, but his past membership of a still deeply unpopular Fianna Fail is becoming an issue as his surge brings scrutiny. But after weeks of soap opera - with a saga involving Dana's brother and a family feud providing the latest instalment - there is now a straight fight between left and right in the campaign. I trust the Guardian can now get its reporters to cover the reality of politics in the Republic rather than the wishful thinking of some of its contributors.

Why Michael D is more likely than Martin McG to become Irish president

When the deputy first minister of Northern Ireland, Martin McGuinness, announced yesterday that he would take a few weeks off helping to run the North to run for the Irish Presidency, the media became rather excited. But it is unlikely that the Sinn Fein politician and former IRA commander will reach Aras an Uachtarain, the seat of the Irish president. Indeed, the real contest in Ireland is between two equally fascinating figures, whose prominence tells us more about the Republic today than Sinn Fein's canny bid to shore up its support south of the border.
For weeks, the Irish presidential contest has been taking the form of a national soap opera. First, there was the withdrawal of Senator David Norris, the Joycean scholar and gay rights campaigner, who was leading the race. He left after it emerged that he had defended a former partner in Israel who had been convicted of sex with a 15 year-old boy. What really killed his campaign was less the allegation than the resignation of campaign team members who felt betrayed as they hadn't been told about the story in advance. Norris is back in the running after popular feeling called for his return: hence an appearance on the Late Late Show, Ireland's long-running chat show, om Friday night. One Sunday paper has a straw poll this morning suggesting his lead has been regained.

While Norris was out of the running, the top spot was occupied by no less remarkable a figure, the Labour candidate, Michael D Higgins (pictured), a former culture minister, a poet and a prominent left-winger in the party, who in many ways projects as professorial a persona as Norris. Higgins was the minister who made Ireland safe and attractive for international film crews. Today's Sunday Independent poll, the scientific part conducted before the weekend announcements and Norris's reappearance, still has him as the clear frontrunner.

All this has left the two other main parties, Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, in the part of also-rans. Fine Gael, at least, has a candidate in Gay Mitchell, a popular Dublin Dail deputy, but he has been running a distant second to Higgins until this weekend. Fianna Fail, the once-mighty party of DeValera, was humiliated in the general election earlier this year, and now has just 10pc of the vote. The party leader, Michael Martin, already facing humiliation in a by-election for what was the party's only Dublin seat, has wanted to sit the presidential poll out but has been defied by some in his surviving rump of a parliamentary party. Now there are suggestions that Fianna Fail parliamentarians should nominate Norris - he needs such nominations to stand - which would at least give the fairly traditionalist party a wholly different outlook. The social entrepreneur and head of the Irish special olympics, Mary Davis, an independent who has gained enough support to run, is the only woman definitely running this time.

In the past weeks, there have also been walk-on parts from Gay Byrne, the hugely self-regarding father of Irish television, who decided against running after a gratifyingly self-indulgent few days of speculation, and the right-wing Christian activist and Eurovision star, Dana Rosemary Scallon. There was a time when the Irish presidency was a retirement number for politicians, including DeValera, but more typically supremely boring figures like the late Patrick Hillery or Cearbhall O'Dalaigh. Mary Robinson's election in 1990 on a liberal feminist ticket changed all that, and her successor Mary McAleese helped solidify the sense of an office that was of national importance, albeit without much real power. McAleese's welcome for the Queen this year illustrated the proud dignity that she and Robinson brought to the office.

It is into this that Sinn Fein has sought to thrust Martin McGuinness, a man whose party officially boycotted the royal visit (aside from a brave mayor in Cashel), though he now generously tells us he would meet anyone if he were President. Few expect McGuinness to win, although the contest is, as we have seen, hugely volatile. But what it could achieve is a record Sinn Fein vote in the Republic, building on the 9.9% of the vote won in February. So, of course, Sinn Fein could take 15% with a McGuinness candidacy in a contest that is far more about personalities than it is about politics. However, support seems unlikely to go beyond that. Voters in the Republic are not always convinced of the credentials of their Northern brothers and sisters: when Fine Gael ran Austin Currie, a respected SDLP civil rights campaigner, in 1990, he was humiliated. And while Sinn Fein voters happily support IRA figures with strong Northern constituencies, especially in border areas, much of the party's support in cities like Dublin has owed more to their candidates' pavement politics than their Provo paramilitary past. The latter is also a turn-off to many middle ground voters, who may be happy to see McGuinness playing a prominent role in Stormont as the price for an end to the Troubles, but have no wish to see him having equal prominence in the south.

So, Sinn Fein may successfully shore up its vote and get a bit of extra publicity. But, at what price? To McGuinesss's credit, he has established an excellent working relationship with Peter Robinson, the DUP first minister at Stormont. While a caretaker Sinn Fein minister can act as locum as McGuinness canvasses in the South, the ripples from any controversies in that campaign can only destabilise their working partnership, and that is not good for the Northern power-sharing executive. It is inconceivable that there will not be considerable attention paid to McGuinness's IRA role and to any deaths associated with his time in its leadership. With sectarian tensions rising again over the summer, the last thing Northern Ireland needs is another opportunity to rake over the past in this way.

In the end, Higgins or Norris looks likely to become president. And their ability to do so will tell us as much about Ireland today as the decision of McGuinness to run for the Aras.

This post has been highlighted by Slugger O'Toole and Alex Massie on his Spectator blog.