Miriam & Martin

By AM Tuesday, October 18, 2011

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The past week has not been a good one for Martin McGuinness in his bid to become President of Ireland. Dropping points in the latest Red C poll while two of his rivals made gains was hardly the news he wanted to wake up to on Sunday morning.  At the beginning of the week he had been challenged in Athlone by the son of an Irish soldier killed during an IRA operation in 1983. His frosty response risked polluting the public mood. Then during a televised presidential candidates debate on Prime Time, which pulled 700, 000 viewers at its peak, he seemed to wince as Miriam O’Callaghan held his feet to the fire. The deficiency in his performance was only slightly masked by a bizarre intervention towards the end by his fellow Derry citizen, Dana. To boot, the seriousness to be attached to his bid for the Aras was called into question by none other than his party colleague, Martin Ferris, who informed the Dail that McGuinness was ‘only journeying down for a number of weeks.’ This added ballast to the suspicions of those already predisposed to the notion that seizing the Aras was not after all the strategic logic behind Sinn Fein’s decision to run McGuinness; it was more about colonising the Fianna Fail vote.

It has been claimed that during the Prime Time discussion O’Callaghan ‘took McGuinness down.’ That may be less accurate than the alternative view that he simply ran out of dummying tactics and dropped the ball. According to the political consultant Johnny Fallon, who in a not unsympathetic appraisal stated that Martin McGuinness:

was clearly annoyed at the questions and came across as angry and upset. Talking over others and even taking issue with those who said something nice, he just wasn’t in control in the manner he has been before. I think his voters will understand his frustration but it all got a little too aggressive and unpresidential.

This rather than allegations of his IRA past may turn out to be the biggest negative for McGuinness.

Already on some of the websites we can see the standard Sinn Fein response. RTE has been urged to ‘sack the bitch’ while her ‘knockers’ seem to have had a titillating effect on others. None of which detracts from the fact that Miriam O’Callaghan is a robust and experienced interviewer. I have watched her over the years apply her technique to a range of characters and have rarely found her less than thorough.

It is not that Martin McGuinness cannot perform, he can. He has handled interviewers as formidable as Jeremy Paxman and held his own. He can wax eloquent on the current politics of the North. But as has been witnessed so often in the North, defending ‘legal fictions’ can lead to ridicule and a press posse in hot pursuit.  

What made matters even more difficult is the McGuinness decision to tackle O’Callaghan in private after the televised exchange. One witness to the confrontation was reported in the press as saying ‘there's no doubt that he tried to intimidate her. She looked quite shaken after it ...’ The Herald claimed to have been told by RTE sources that O’Callaghan found the exchange with McGuinness threatening and intimidating. ‘He was extremely angry and intimidating and Miriam was left very shaken.’ Martin McGuinness disputed that he behaved in a threatening or aggressive manner, claiming that ‘it was a very low key encounter in terms of no raised voices ... I expressed my disappointment at the way the debate was handled.’

Whatever the truth, and O’Callaghan appears not to have made any allegations, McGuinness would have been better advised to let it go. Even had he won any argument in a closed room he stood to gain little from it and was only ever likely to arouse suspicions that he had sought to intimidate her in a ‘don’t get smart Sharon’ moment taken from his party leader’s repertoire. It had the effect of making political commentators sound more plausible when they referred to the thuggish tendencies of Sinn Fein. Ultimately, it increases the likelihood of a public wondering on the future of intellectual and cultural pluralism if the would-be president of the country indicates he favours stamping out freedom of inquiry.

Were I a supporter of Martin McGuinness’s Aras bid I would not have liked the rigorous line of questioning. Yet I could not claim with any degree of conviction that such questioning should be ruled out of order. The issues in a candidate’s past are bound to emerge over the course of a campaign. If the candidate fails to deal with them convincingly they are certain to come up again. McGuinness claimed ‘I was accused of being a murderer ... the focus was on the past and not on me as President and what I would do in the future and I think that was a great disservice to the viewers.’ But things are never so simple. McGuinness at an earlier date had introduced the term ‘murder’ into the discourse by referring to some IRA operations as murder. As he is widely believed, in spite of his denials, to have been at the heart of the IRA when many of these ‘murderous’ operations were carried out, he allowed himself to be hoist on his own petard. 

Moreover, on the past, reflect on this: Bishop John Magee runs for the Irish Presidency. He gets grilled about a history of child sexual abuse within the Catholic Church and then insists that the past is the past, he made mistakes but adequate child safety measures are now in place; he was in the Church but had left in 1974; his role in the priest process must be acknowledged. How far would he get? The comparison is facetious and hardly a carbon copy but the point remains that it is not a hostile media, fuelled by its own resentment, keeping the past alive. What keeps this going is the deficit between the demand for credible answers and the supply of them. 

The biggest criticism that can be made of RTE is not that it put questions to Martin McGuinness in front of a national audience but that it deprived the national audience of a chance to have those questions put to him and his republican colleagues for over two decades and allow him to make a case for militant republicanism while the armed conflict was in progress. It opted for censorship and denied the public an understanding of an issue about which more rather than less knowledge was needed. To whatever extent this helped prolong the politically violent conflict, institutions like RTE must bear some responsibility.