That latest Presidential poll…

If there’s one thing I hate in political analysis it’s that sort of cod psychological approach pioneered by… well, you know who I mean. Certain columnists who argue that every sniff and snuffle of Brian Cowen during his period as Taoiseach was symbolic of his great ‘leadership’ skills and his ability to connect with the plain people of Ireland, or how no television current affairs program can ever be complete unless they’re on it to represent the most hackneyed defence of the status quo as something radical.

But you know, the rise and rise of Sean Gallagher seems for a grim moment almost inexplicable without recourse to such an approach. One wonders is this a sort of catharsis, that Gallagher becomes representative of all those who abandoned Fianna Fáil and now want in some way to find an expression of that. And Gallagher, who left rather later than most, but hardly as late as some – if the polls are to be judged, finally handing in his resignation at the turn of the year is as handy an example as any.

Yet there’s no need to go to those lengths. One can make a fairly straightforward case as to why Gallagher is doing so well and why the rest of the field looks like this:

Mr Gallagher leading for the first time. The poll shows support for the independent candidate rising 18 points to 39 per cent, 12 points ahead of Mr Higgins, who rose two points to 27 per cent.

Support for the remaining candidates has fallen away with all losing support, the poll shows. Martin McGuinness is down 3 per cent to 13 per cent while former favourite David Norris sees his support fall again to 7 per cent. Support for Mary Davis has slipped to 4 per cent while Dana Rosemary Scallon has just 2 per cent support.

Firstly let’s look at those figures. There’s Michael D. Higgins, sitting more or less where he always was. Perhaps his detached, almost aloof, manner isn’t playing quite as well this far into the campaign. Or perhaps he seems less dynamic in contrast with others in the field. Whatever the reason his stock while not falling hasn’t risen much either.

Ironically the assaults by Mitchell have worked, to a degree, but in doing so diminished Mitchell more than McGuinness. McGuinness has seen his support fall. And yet, I can’t help but feel that SF will still be pleased if he comes in on 13 per cent, a good four per cent above their election rating in the face of arguably the most ferocious rhetorical assaults any candidate to any office in this state has ever experienced. Moreover, I’m intrigued to see if that previously higher rating he got in other polls will transfer into…well… transfers. Those who were willing to give him a first preference may be willing to offer him an high transfer. And if so then it remains a win win for Sinn Féin. Has it been difficult for them [and him]? Surely. And the prospect of a win, always unfeasible, now seems utterly remote. But, I still wonder if this is a case of two steps forward one step back for SF. They’ve made their point, they’re a player in a way that they weren’t even a few months back.

For Mitchell, Dana, Davis, et al this is abysmal. There’s little to say about Dana’s most recent woes other than that with what is clearly a split of monumental proportions in her own extended family it might have been sensible to stay out of the fray – particularly given the sensitivities that the glum progress and otherwise of the David Norris campaign demonstrated were extant. I’m fascinated by how Davis’s star crashed and burned. I thought she was much better placed to do well. David Norris must wonder what happened to those halcyon days where he was in high percentages, though as defeat beckons he has seemed to relax. It strikes me that his candidacy though nowhere near as effective as it once might have seemed still represents something of a step forward too.

And Gallagher? Perhaps his relative youth in this field is one factor. Perhaps his bland but consistent rhetoric [actually some of the stuff that he’s coming out with is simply appalling – his comment at a youth forum where he “…described creating an Ireland where every young person could “sing your song””… is he channeling Bono?]. Perhaps as Pat Leahy noted in the Sunday Business Post, the fact that he’s an Independent in a time when Independents are flavour of the year, but better still and Independent who has had links to FF, and his ‘optimism’ – again perhaps not unrelated to his age. And perhaps his rhetoric does strike a chord with a population being told consistently now that a further four years of austerity stretch ahead. Perhaps this is a sort of General Election redux where just as FG and the LP gained from presenting a sunny face of ‘not being the other guys’ so Gallagher is locking into a similar dynamic.

But it’s what’s not said that’s so telling.

Economic matters have, in real terms, been almost entirely ignored in the debates, and unsurprisingly so given the limited powers of the Presidency – and Gay Mitchell yesterday made yet another curious intervention on precisely that issue. But paradoxically because the President does so little in real terms the space has opened up for almost baroque critiques of issues that in general terms are minor. Is Mary Davis really a ‘quango queen’, does the issue of Gallagher’s financial affairs really have the traction they think and so on [though already he’s now firmly in the line of fire of his rivals]. And even where questions remain, those actually asked – as exemplified by Miriam O’Callaghan’s bathetic [and I mean bathetic, not pathetic, though she didn’t cover herself in glory in asking it] question to McGuinness over squaring his religion with murders or knowing ‘every Republican’ [and how telling an insight into how small the world can appear from Donnybrook] – are coat trailing and designed to provoke rather than enlighten.

There’s lots of serious questions one could ask McGuinness; for example, at what point did he believe that armed struggle had lost its efficacy and how did he communicate this to his colleagues in SF, and even if the answers to that are unlikely to be forthcoming at least they’d raise the level of the discourse somewhere above the ‘how dare you you stand here before us?’ and might get us an insight into how he moved from one position to another rather than pretending that there was no move and that his current position is indistinguishable from his original one. But then there’s lots of questions one could ask of all the candidates. What of the seeming radicalism of Higgins as against his loyalty to his party? What of Sean Gallagher’s late, so very late, apostasy as regards Fianna Fáil? And so on and so forth.

What is true is that, even factoring in the particular hostility against McGuinness, we’ve seen a process whereby almost each candidate [bar curiously Higgins – at least to date] has been battered down by a media all too obviously eager to scent blood. I think, to be honest, that it’s gone well beyond what might be called reasonable criticism into a sort of bloodsport.

In the end this is an election which reflects well on almost no-one involved. And while some might see that as the point and of course previous campaigns were dirty, from Eoghan Harris talking about a ’tribal time-bomb’ in relation to the then candidate and now incumbent to P. Flynn’s derision over Mary Robinson. And of course there’s that infamous ‘tape’ from the Robinson campaign. But perhaps what marks this campaign apart is that the media has now stepped up as self-appointed arbiter. But to what end? What precisely do the people in this state want in and as their President? Weeks and months into a campaign that has seemed interminably long I’m still no closer to figuring that out.

And as for winning? I think with two weeks, just about, left there’s plenty of scope for more knocking material to be fed into the public sphere. It’s simply too early to count either Higgins or Gallagher in or out. Or as Richard Cowell puts it in the SBP, ‘the very large shifts in support seen so far mean that nothing is certain until election day, with two weeks of twists and turns still to come’.

Those shifts in support are significant beyond the Presidential Election.

Neither Labour nor Fine Gael, nor indeed any other party – bar perhaps SF whose core support is solid [though they themselves are small enough to have less to lose], can take any great comfort from the churn of votes. There is no clear FG vote in the way there once was. Nor a Labour Party one, nor – obviously in this contest, an FF one. Small wonder that Independents continue to be an attractive proposition. Something unremarked upon in the coverage is that the total Independent vote in the election is now 52% [let’s ignore McGuinness’ non party status]. That’s pretty remarkable given previous Presidential elections, that’s pretty remarkable given the history and nature of the polity.

The electorate, even all these months after the general election, still hasn’t found a home yet and that spells bad news for the Government in particular because it suggests a significant breach of trust with the previous [and current] establishment – even more so if we consider that part of the 48% party directed vote includes Sinn Féin!

And it spells opportunity too.

I won’t have been the only one in recent days to have been getting the totals for those figures on my calculator.