Tomás Ó Flatharta

Irish Presidential Elections – Dirty Personalised Attacks

Irish presidential elections have a history of dirty personalised attacks.

The 2025 campaign will feature similar personalised attacks. The Fine Gael candidate Heather Humphreys was a right-wing minister in recent governments. Her family background includes relatives who were members of a reactionary far-right organisation, the Orange Order. The problem here is that nobody can control their family origins. Every living Irish person can go back a few decades and discover nasty skeletons in the cupboard. Humphreys, who favours ending the partition of Ireland, is no exception.

Sometimes the personalised attacks work, on other occasions they backfired.

During the 1990 campaign Fianna Fáil discovered to their horror that their candidate Brian Lenihan was likely to lose the contest to Mary Robinson, a candidate nominated by the Labour party. Government minister Padraig Flynn stated that Robinson had “a new-found interest in her family”. It went down very badly. Robinson, a lawyer who had a civil rights and feminist background, became the Irish state’s first female president, and the first candidate who defeated a Fianna Fáil candidate in the race to live for 7 years in the luxurious Áras an Úachtaráin in the Phoenix Park.

In 1997 the canny Fianna Fáil party nominated a female lawyer and journalist, Mary MacAleese, who was born in the six-county bit of Ireland. The new FF candidate was anti-abortion and had a human rights record on other issues. This prompted an anonymous campaign claiming that MacAleese was a closet supporter of the IRA’s armed campaign during “The Troubles”. A separate campaign was launched against the Labour Party’s candidate Adi Roche claiming, amongst other things, that her brother was thrown out of the Irish state’s army in the early 1970’s for supporting armed defence of the nationalist minority in the six counties. The anti-Roche smear worked, but MacAleese stormed to victory. The Fine Gael party is the number one suspect for originating these personalised attacks, but this was never proved.

In 2011 an independent candidate Seán Gallagher seemed certain of victory until devastating evidence entered the public arena via a six-county businessperson, Mr Morgan from Armagh. Gallagher was a bagman for the Fianna Fáil party, and had relieved Mr Morgan of a substantial amount of money without returning a favour. Mr Morgan was wealthy, deeply involved in the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), and was a sponsor of his county team, Armagh. In Mr Gallagher’s trade you don’t mess with wealthy men, a lesson the candidate learned to his cost.