The Independents

Sean Gallagher
With a week to go before polling, the youngest candidate in the race, Sean Gallagher seems to have left the other independents trailing in his wake. His popularity has surprised many. It may be that he’s seen as the non-party person most likely to upset the apple cart. But in truth, his time on Dragon’s Den has given him a touch of celebrity that counts in the Ireland of 2011. He has made much of being the only entrepreneur in the race which allows him to talk about jobs and job creation, despite the fact that the President has no direct role whatsoever in this area.
Gallagher’s past in Fianna Fáil is both a help and a hindrance. On the one hand, that party’s core vote has added significantly to his own base. But it’s a weakness too: he was a member of the National Executive through the years of infamy and never demurred even to the faintest degree. When cross-examined by Miriam O’Callaghan on the second Prime Time debate, for the first time in the campaign, he looked hesitant and more than a wee bit rattled. The questions regarding the €20,000 he received from Louth County Enterprise Board, and the legal proceedings they had to threaten to recover the money after he had changed companies also looks bad.
Interestingly, recent polls showing Gallagher surge are almost certainly the result of previous ones that showed him surging. Why did the Red C pollsters, working for the Sunday Business Post, not wait until after the dust had settled on the Prime Time debate? The Sunday Independent poll, based on a smaller sample but carried out after Prime Time – and published on the same day that the SBP had Gallagher at 39%, and Michael D.Higgins at 27% – reversed those figures within the margin of statistical error, with Michael D at 36% and Sean G st 29%. Whatever way you look sat it, right now it seems that the polls are part of a self-fulfilling and self-reinforcing loop. Arguably, they now shape opinions more than they reflect them and may represent a genuine threat to the democratic process, potentially allowing faceless people to wield undue influence.
For now, we still don’t know for sure the impact of Gallagher’s fumbles on the Prime Time interview and how the Louth County Enterprise Board controversy will play out. Either way, he has left the other independents trailing.

Mary Davis
Mary Davis was at the helm of the outstanding organisation of the Special Olympics World Summer Game in Ireland in 2003. That triumph thrust her right into the spotlight and even then her name was murmured approvingly as a future Presidential candidate. But her campaign has not gone well. For a start, there were the Special K posters, which struck the wrong chord. And then, like Sean Gallagher, there were insinuations about links with Fianna Fáil. In truth, at heart she is probably apolitical. But, despite her persuasive manner, it has proven impossible to shrug off the suggestions that she was an ‘insider’ during the Celtic Tiger years. Especially damaging was the fact that she was a member of the board of both the Irish Civil Service Building Society and Bank of Ireland Mortgage Bank and that there was what looked like an attempt on the part of her handlers to airbrush the latter from memory. And then there was the revelation that in addition to her salary as the CEO of the Special Olympics of €156,000 in 2010, she earned another €400k or so over a 6 year period as a member of various boards. It might not have mattered five years ago, but in 2011 it didn’t play well. It ain’t over ‘til it’s over, and in the final analysis while she may be ahead of Scallon and possibly David Norris, it looks like Gallagher has her for pace and it’s her transfers that will count.

David Norris
You know, in the future David Norris may well be opening his speeches and after-dinner presentations with a quip borrowed from Al Gore, that he’s David Norris and he used to be the next president of Ireland. How did it all go so catastrophically wrong?
Maybe someday what happened will be revealed, but whatever it was and whoever done it, he was whacked. Certainly, there is reason to suspect that insiders in Israel were waiting in the long grass. But what’s done is done and at the time of writing his campaign seems doomed.
You have to hand it to him, following his earlier withdrawal, he bounced back and worked hard to regain relevance. But Sean Gallagher’s good showing in one poll was probably the final nail in Norris’s presidential coffin. The meeja anointed Gallagher as the coming man and that was it. Politics is a cruel business. It won’t be much of a consolation to him but at this stage it looks like Norris’ major contribution will be made in his transfers.

Dana Rosemary Scallon
What on earth is going on? Why did she decide to enter the race in the first place? Did she seriously think she had a chance? If so, what or who was guiding her? Or funding her? If not, what’s she trying to achieve? I know that reality teevee is a mad caper and I accept that a few weeks ago I said this election was shaping up to be a celebrity-get-me-out-of-here affair, but really the horrors which have engulfed Dana are worse than anyone might have predicted – apart, that is, from Dana’s own family…
There is considerable sympathy for anyone subjected to cyber-bullying and leakage of stories that might or might not be true. But sympathy for Dana is tempered by recollection of tactics used by some of her adherents in the past. Her own supporters include people who were not averse to noisy disruptions and intimidations.
Anyway, at this stage she is fighting to get enough votes to allow the State to pay half the cost of her campaign. All you can say is – good luck in that endeavour...