The Club picks a Banana

 Viewed in a certain light, Catherine Connolly may make a good president. She comes from an unprivileged background, has a sense of humour and lacks the pomposity we've come to expect from presidents. Unlike many of her lieutenants, she does not seem to be a genuine idealist. Which is good, I guess.

She is undoubtedly on the right side of the neutrality debate and will probably be allowed a victory on that issue, as Michael D. Higgins was, for the simple reason that it doesn't matter a damn. We don't have a military and we don't have resources. 

A president has one job, to prevent any government from pulling the wool over the people's eyes. If the coalition government had tried to stop her getting elected, then there would be reason to think she might deliver on this duty to the people. They didn't though.

The three branches of government in a Republic are the Legislative (politicians), the Judicial (judges) and the Executive (key politicians and bureaucrats). The power of each is separate from the others, otherwise there is no republic. Religious and corporate power must also be separate. 

The Legislative Branch does have a degree of independence, or would have if it wasn't for the ease with which political parties can be subverted to outside interests. The Judicial Branch has no independence in itself, as it is (where it matters) under the control of senior counsel. The Executive Branch is also, in practice, under the control of senior counsel - which is exercised through the office of the Attorney General. 

The President is an important figure in the protection of senior counsel power. She is expected to rubber stamp legislation the Attorney General has approved (ministers who insist on doing the right thing, such as Alan Shatter and Noel Browne, can be dealt with in other ways). Not doing so means referring the proposed legislation to the Supreme Court. That should not be a problem in theory - the Supreme Court is another collection of senior counsel - but it can be, as public debate on the issue becomes unavoidable and the President is likely to have a lot of support. 

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What Catherine Connolly calls 'The Club' (the barristers) has not lost a presidential contest since 1973, and that loss by Fine Gael's Tom O'Higgins SC to Erskine Childers came at a time when the vast majority voted strictly with party. The loss must have embarrassed the profession though, as Childers was the son of a guy whom the barristers went to great rounds to have executed in 1922, when they denied him the right to appeal his death sentence. 

They took no chances in 1974, following Childers' sudden death in office. The official story is that all the parties had agreed that his widow Rita Childers would be nominated to replace him. She was, like her husband, anti-corruption, anti-Haughey and anti-government overreach. But, not for the first nor last time, the public would end up wondering what happened while the presidency was handed to the ex-Attorney General Cearbhall O Dalaigh SC. All the parties (there were only three, two of them led by barristers) suddenly supported O Dalaigh, therefore there was no election.

O Dalaigh, like his predecessor, did not see eye to eye with the Fine Gael-Labour coalition. A somewhat odd but honest and well meaning man, his refusal to go along with the government's plans to grant itself emergency powers (following the IRA's murder/execution of the UK's Irish ambassador) led to him being called ''a thundering disgrace'' by a government minister. That slur is the accepted explanation for O Dalaigh's resignation, but it was more likely motivated by the Supreme Court's subsequent support for the government.

1976 saw another Fianna Fail selection being made president without being put to the people for approval. The refusal of Fine Gael and Labour to challenge Paddy Hillery's appointment led indirectly to the coming to power of Charles Haughey BL. Hillery was a natural leader of Fianna Fail, and a natural enemy of Haughey. But he had a big weakness and could never say no to a cushy job. Four years as a European commissioner was bad enough. But being in the park meant he could say nothing about the ethical destruction of his party (from which it has never recovered).

Haughey became leader and Taoiseach in 1979. Hillery was returned without a challenge for another seven sleepy years in 1983. And then came the most important election in our history. I've written before about why the election of Mary Robinson SC was so important, how the barristers pulled it off and how we fell for it ... allegedly.

It was a very different Ireland in 1997, when Belfast's Mary McAleese BL won the chance to represent Fianna Fail. The ex-Taoiseach Albert Reynolds was expected to win, but the vote was split by the participation of  Michael O'Kennedy SC and almost all of O'Kennedy's support went to McAleese. Reynolds had been the only non-barrister Taoiseach in the 32 years of the Troubles, apart from a bit of Bertie near the end. 

Reynolds was a dodgy dealer, but he had done a lot of good practical work in Northern Ireland and, despite coming to power on the back of apparent loyalty to Haughey, did the state some service by knifing most of the Haughey mafia when he became Taoiseach. Reynolds was then brought down by The Club. The Attorney General Harry Whelehan SC was the bad boy, a Labour party led by Dick Spring BL pulled out of government, Mary Robinson SC cold shouldered Reynolds and John Bruton BL became Taoiseach (with Spring still Tanaiste). Incidentally or otherwise, Reynolds' business partner Patrick Russell BL remains the only barrister to be imprisoned for fraud in the South.

 Mary McAleese went on to win an election marked by the smearing (by association) and belittling of the expected winner Adi Roche. McAleese toughed out not dissimilar accusations and won easily. And she was returned without election for another seven years in 2004. An aversion to first class travel and five star hotels marked her out as someone with standards not common south of the border. She was followed by Michael D. Higgins, who lied about only wanting to serve one term and jumped to sign legislation which allowed the Health Minister to decide how far people could travel from their own homes. 

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Catherine Connolly is considered an illegitimate President by what Official Ireland calls 'the far right'. These are the disaffected working class and lower middle class who are left to deal with the destabilising effect of unregulated immigration, growing pressure on wages, housing and services, and a government increasingly contemptuous of monetary restraint and democratic principle. Many of the disaffected rallied behind the American idea that Conor McGregor would make a good president. When McGregor had to accept that the support of some of the world's most powerful men didn't butter any parsnips in Drumshanbo, most of his supporters switched their allegiance to Maria Steen BL, a very posh Catholic fundamentalist.

Steen had written cleverly about ''inward migration from societies that share few of our social and cultural expectations'', but she avoided criticising the barrister-driven IPAS system and the very lucrative asylum case industry. She has also avoided calling for the ending of the state-funded segregation of many primary school pupils on religious grounds in Dublin. This is something which will cause dangerous divisions between Christians and Moslems over the next decade. 

Steen's Iona Institute is a very competent pressure group. It made no sense that her presidential campaign would turn out to be a race against time, only starting on August 29th and thus giving her less than four weeks to get 20 signatures of support. She claimed this happened because she believed Michael McDowell SC was going to run and she wanted to support him. A huge deal was made of McDowell's subsequent refusal to become nominee number 19 (interesting body language in this video), on the grounds that he was a social liberal (so why was she going to support him?). The drama was great fun, but it probably caused other Oireachtas members thinking of giving Maria a spin on the dancefloor reason to sit it out. 

Tennessee Williams could have written a great play about the incestuous goings on in the Irish law library. The media were provided with records of plaintive texts and phone calls to McDowell from Steen and from her husband. If only she had done a Blanch DuBois and depended instead on the kindness of strangers. The likes of Boxer Moran and Sean Canney, hardly a hundred miles from Steen's world view, didn't get a buzz on their phones. She could have got stuck in a boat without a paddle at Coosan Point and emergency phone called the dynamic local minister, but no. She stood all night under a lamp post outside Michael's bedsit while he kept the shades down. It would be the second time that McDowell secured the Best Supporting Actor award in a presidential election, somewhat in the family tradition (his granddad had won Best Supporting Actor in the Easter Rising).

The martyrdom of Maria carried on into the election itself, when many voters wrote her name on the ballot. This was part of a 'Spoil the Vote' campaign which was either initiated by or hijacked by the Peter Thiel connected businessman Declan Ganly. Ganly is a close associate of the Steens who has been working the blind side of Irish democracy for a very long time. The campaign was supported by the likes of Gript and Una McGurk SC and can be judged both success and failure. A 13% rate of spoiling was impressive, but it helped to secure a respectable 45% turnout which took the heat off many of the main players. 

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Gareth Sheridan, a young guy with lots of money, came to a bridge game with a baseball bat. He made a big fuss about people connected to Sean Gallagher being out to get him. Nobody knew anything about that or anything about him, but he might have taken a lot of the young vote which ended up with Connolly if he had the smarts. He didn't have the smarts. 

 Micheal Martin was reported as having met with Bob Geldof, a man who understands power but has never been sure if he wants to fight it or embrace it. Martin confirmed that they had discussed the prospect of Geldof running for Fianna Fail. Geldof later said that there was no meeting, just a very short phone call. This was said in an article which appeared across a number of media in almost identical form (something, coincidentally or not, which frequently happens in the reporting of court cases whose narratives the barristers want to keep tight). It is difficult to dispute Geldof's claim that he was never seriously interested in the presidency. Which raises the obvious question of why he got drawn into talking about it.

The article was oddly revealing. Geldof said that ''people who are fairly high-powered in Ireland'' rang him and encouraged him to speak to Martin. This suggests more than one phone call from different (non-political) people, for something which appears frivolous but was evidently anything but. Geldof admits, without explanation, to putting the question of his running to Martin, before Martin ended the matter by saying that he had ''already chosen someone''. This left Martin free to say that he had spoken to Geldof about running and to imply that he thought Gavin was the better option. I suspect that finding out the identities of those ''fairly high-powered'' people will be the key to understanding how and why Connolly won the election.

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A lot of play was made by the frustrated that we were being denied a proper choice. But it was ever thus. The notion that the public should be offered any option which was not approved by the FF/FG duopoly only really gained traction in order to get Mary Robinson into the Aras in 1990. 

There were many echoes of 1990 election in the 2025 version. Like Robinson, Connolly was campaigning months before the rest. Fine Gael ran a second or third choice candidate with a very limited voter base. And Fianna Fail entertained the nation with a comical blooper show, starting when they forgot to have their candidate become a member of the party before he was announced to the nation (Fine Gael considered Gavin one of their own and had asked him previously to run for a seat in Europe).

The 2025 version of 1990's Jim Duffy, the conscience driven whistle-blowing journalist, was Niall Donald, the deputy editor of the Sunday World. The scandal of his having been done out of E3,300 by Gavin had apparently been known for years in that paper's newsroom, and presumably also in the Independent newsroom which adjoins it. Every dog and divil must have known about it. But we have been asked to believe that it escaped Fianna Fail intelligence before September of last year.

 The party's peculiar internal review never bothered to establish primary evidence on the scandal, and didn't interview either Gavin or Donald (or even Martin). As a result, there is no hard evidence out there that the matter happened at all, at least not in how it was reported to us. All of it could have happened as reported; the first part (accidental overpayment) could have happened without the second (refusal to pay back); or the dispute could have been over a smaller amount of money. We haven't seen any of Donald's texts or emails to Gavin, his February 2010 solicitor's letter threatening legal proceedings against Gavin, nor records of his contacting the defence forces or the Private Residential Residencies Board. 

The Ireland Independent Editor Fionnan Sheahan states that all kinds of documents were trawled thoroughly for anomalies and no anomalies were found. Which is good to hear but it is also good to share. As Sheahan memorably put it himself, ''If the Pope tells me he's a Catholic, I still want to see his baptism cert.'' There is a mention of ''the facts'' in the Fianna Fail review, but it is not clear what evidence was available to the review committee to support these (I haven't been able to find a copy of the actual review and can see no mention of it on the party's website). Donald and Sheahan seem trustworthy, but an unfortunate side effect of the 'pandemic' is that it is no longer possible to simply trust a journalist.

A Fianna Fail statement said that Gavin ''does not have any recollection or records of any such dispute.'' This reminded those old enough to remember Brian Lenihan BL's infamous ''On mature recollection''. And the unofficial Fianna Fail candidate Sean Gallagher used the magic word in the last debate of the 2011 campaign, saying that he had ''no recollection'' whether or not the convicted fuel smuggler Hugh Morgan ''gave (him) an envelope''.                                                                                     

 [Sinn Fein's setting up of Gallagher just three days before an election he was certain to win may have been motivated by the settling of old scores in Louth politics, but Michael D. Higgins was the main beneficiary. It is strange that these things are never properly investigated, though they directly affect our democracy. Two days before the election, Professor Niamh Brennan (aka Mrs. McDowell) described the accounts of Gallagher's consultancy firm as having a ''bad vibe''. Higgins went on to win easily. Gallagher later sued RTE and accused the station of malicious editing, presenting and directing. He was reportedly paid E130,000 in a settlement. It was not reported how much his counsel Jim O'Callaghan SC was paid]

Fianna Fail, or those who controlled its process of selection, had chosen Gavin as its candidate months before he was announced to the public. The likes of Bertie Ahern were either strung along or just went along with the notion that the position was up for grabs. The review, which was chaired by Ciaran O'Loughlin SC, appears to give the impression that Micheal Martin was solely responsible for choosing Gavin, while absolving him of serious blame. One thing I know from experience is that such decisions are always made by small groups of men (sorry girls, someone has to make the tea), never by one man. I would be amazed if there was no senior counsel involvement in choosing Gavin. 

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Heather Humphreys, a not uninteresting personality, was provided with a campaign strategy that was relentlessly beige. Her posters assumed we were all on first name terms with her, but people who weren't into politics probably didn't know her from Eve. And those who listened to podcasts never got to hear what she had to say, as she was ridiculously advised not to do them.

Fine Gael allowed the one big thing she had going for her - her family's journey from insecure unionism to her becoming a minister in this state - to somehow be turned into a negative. An atavistic and ugly sectarian streak surfaced in the media's coverage of this, sending a horrible message to Northern Presbyterians. Attempts to smear Humphreys ranged from her attendance at a fundraiser for a charity where fraud occurred (are there charities where fraud doesn't occur?) to, bizarrely, her not taking a stand against blood sports. 

When her party belatedly began to fight back, by targeting Catherine Connolly's gross hypocrisy in claiming to be angry at the behaviour of the banks in repossessing homes, it was her own campaign that was shamed by the media for attempting to smear Connolly. This disingenuous twist on what the word 'smear' actually meant was added to a cynical attempt to link her to the ex-Fine Gael Minister Ivan Yates' unasked-for advice to ''smear the bejaysus out of her''. Everybody either didn't know or pretended not to know that Yates was working for Fianna Fail, not Fine Gael. Connolly said that Yates ''has done me a favour, he's done the people of Ireland a favour and he's certainly done my team a favour, in that he's absolutely exposed without hesitation what Sinn ... what Fine Gael are up to.''

Humphreys was coached by Q4PR, a communications firm founded by two big nobs in Fianna Fail. She was also coached by Chris Donoghue, who used to co-host the breakfast show on Newstalk with Yates. It's a very, very small country.

A God-given opportunity arose for Humphreys on October 21st, the day of the last debate. A Daily Mail article finally confirmed what Connolly, bogusly citing confidentiality, had refused to acknowledge: that she had represented banks in repossession cases, and that she was ruthless about it. It was an open goal for Humphreys, but the debate came around and she chose not to shoot. Her last words on Connolly's actions were jaw dropping: ''And everybody respects the work of a barrister. And Catherine chose to be a barrister and Catherine, I'm sure, was an excellent barrister, I've no doubt about it, because she was employed to do this work.''

The Club is always keen to have the public believe that it is guided by principle, not opportunity. The Bar Council and the Justice Minister had been a little too quick out of the traps to defend Connolly's courtroom history, on the basis that a 'cab rank' rule applied and barristers were obliged to take on whatever work they were offered. The system, even at its most honest, doesn't work like that. 

A solicitor is employed by a litigant and that solicitor then employs a barrister suited to the task - sometimes an attack dog, occasionally (as with a bank which doesn't want to be seen as a bully) a soft spoken socialist. Barristers are in competition with other barristers for work, therefore they seldom turn it down. But if it happens to offend them, then like anyone else they have a thousand ways to get out of it. Connolly would not have lost anything, apart from money, by telling the solicitor she had to paint the spare room that day. A non-socialist barrister could then have taken her place.

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Something very strange, something outrageous, happened on October 15th. A defamation lawsuit against Humphreys was filed in the High Court on behalf of Paul Murphy TD. The matter concerned comments made by Humphreys in a debate three days earlier, relating to something she said about Murphy's behaviour at the Jobstown water charges protest in 2014. 

A legal letter had been sent by Prospect Law solicitors a day or two earlier, threatening Humphreys with legal proceedings ''next week'' if she did not apologise, hand over ''compensation'' to Murphy and pay his legal costs. In a statement which at least won my vote for Humphreys, she said, ''Paul Murphy will not bully me'' and ''This is the tactic of the hard left and Sinn Fein. When they don't like what you say, they take you to the courts.'' The principal solicitor in Prospect Law is Ruadhan MacAodhain, a barrister who stood for Sinn Fein in the 2011 general election. 

Instead of ''next week'', the suit was filed before the crucial last debate. I'm not saying that it was used to leverage what was said in that debate, but it could have been. The slightest possibility of such interference is not acceptable in a democracy. No affidavits have been filed more than two months later, nothing apart from the original plenary summons. It will be interesting to observe how the case plays out. And it will be interesting to learn if Murphy was really prepared to sue an elected president for money. I suspect we will observe and learn nothing.

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Micheal Martin said he would vote for Humphreys (well, kinda sorta) but refused to ask the party to vote for her because ''I just know from political experience it doesn't work''. Just standing behind Humphreys for a photo or going out to canvass for her might have worked. Instead he chose to do nothing while Jim O'Callaghan SC barely tried to hide his support for Connolly. And Fianna Fail continues to lead the government with no sign of tension from Fine Gael over the betrayal. It is worth recalling that Fine Gael has on five occasions effectively supported the Fianna Fail candidate in a presidential election but Fianna Fail has never supported a Fine Gael candidate. 

In the end, there is little reason to believe that the controlling interests in every party bar Aontu, even Fine Gael, did not want Connolly to win the election. Why? 

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Our worst ever Taoiseach was the fascist sympathiser John A. Costello, the only senior counsel to hold the position. His outrageous solo declaration of what he called 'a republic' (adding 'banana' would have helped) and a withdrawal from the Commonwealth was a private arrangement between three senior counsel - Costello, Sean MacBride and Cecil Lavery - which was news even to senior cabinet ministers. The removal of British oversight was an invitation to corruption for a power structure which basically amounted to an unholy alliance of bishops and senior counsel. Half a century of systemic abuse of poor children followed, much of it sexually depraved and all of it protected by courts and media, and almost all protected by police. Stagnation and emigration followed. Partition was hardened and the conditions that created the Troubles set in stone.

As that cheery experience drifts into the mists of time, we are now faced with the prospect of a second senior counsel Taoiseach. Jim O'Callaghan SC is a political novice, but he fits an old mould. Martin has often been described as the last man standing from the Ahern regime. But O'Callaghan represented Ahern in a 2001 defamation case in the Dublin Circuit Civil Court, where he was junior counsel to Rory Brady SC (Ahern's right hand man and Attorney General) and Paul Gallagher SC (Attorney General for both Ahern and Martin). 

With Fine Gael ministers talking up all kinds of dystopian cack - digital ID, hate speech legislation, facial recognition technology, making selected truths illegal (Minister Patrick O'Donovan calls it 'malinformation') - the last thing needed by those who enjoy having basic human rights is to take a chance on a senior counsel Taoiseach with a junior counsel President. As Connolly herself said (referencing 'Hotel California'), ''you can never leave The Club''.

She may be about to be tested on where her priorities lie. O'Callaghan introduced The Garda Siochana (Powers) Bill at a very strange time, four days ago. There has been a bit of a check on it, on the basis that it allows journalists' devices to be seized by the Gardai and their sources revealed. But it seems to me (though I am open to correction) that it allows anyone's devices to be seized, without the person needing to be linked in any way to actual criminal activity (as opposed to the Pythonesque/Stalinesque 'possession of malinformation' or some such). Talk of 'legal professional privilege' being ''protected as absolute'' while 'other forms of privilege' are managed through a ''structured process'' should ring alarm bells. Will Connolly refer the bill to the Supreme Court, or will she bend the knee as junior counsel habitually do?