Micheál, Gaybo, John: autumn schedule or presidential line-up?

ANOTHER broadcaster, Micheál Ó Muircheartaigh, has dropped out of a presidential race he was never in anyway. Which means it must be time for someone else to move up the list. Oh, I don’t know, let’s say Marty Whelan. He can be next in line to mull a bid for the Áras – and then, after a couple of RTÉ interviews and teasing public appearances, decide against it. Then maybe Derek Davis can talk it over with his family, and so on and so on and so on all the way through the list of mildly avuncular senior men until Gerald Fleming finally winks in confirmation that he’s seeking a candidacy.

(By the way, while dismissive of Whelan for comic effect, I actually think he'd be a pretty decent president. Years of practice at the Rose of Tralee and Fame and Fortunemean he is perhaps the country's greatest expert at Making Jovial Conversation with Mildly Bewildered Strangers. As far as I can tell, this is one of a key roles performed by presidents, another being Delaying the Irish Rugby Team from Starting Matches.)

This recent phase of the most tedious presidential race in, oh, 14 years has involved ticking off the list of broadcasters anyone who might make a half-decent fist of it. It has conformed to an avalanche principle whereby someone somewhere whispers a name and, before long, it is roaring its way through the media. The person whispering, according to the current narrative, is Micheál Martin, who seems to have spent a good deal of time sounding people out.

He’s a bit like those people from market-research companies who cold-call you, distract you with small talk and then, before you know it, have you answering deeply private questions about your hygiene habits.

Gay Byrne’s cameo was a particularly curious one in that the supposed clamour for him to join the presidential race seemed to be largely the sound of his voice rattling around an echo chamber specially constructed by the media. It originated, after all, from the flimsiest source possible for any political story: a phone-in poll on Classic Hits 4FM.

It was then appropriated by RTÉ radio, which, recognising that Gay Byrne’s voice appeals to the listener almost as much as it does to Gay Byrne, interviewed him a couple of times. After that, the Sunday newspapers picked it up, Byrne ruined Martin’s summer by mentioning their phone call, and the story gave everyone something to talk and write about for a week until Byrne announced, inevitably, that he wasn’t going to run.

The Byrne story seemed to have emerged from the need to fill a Norris-shaped hole in the race, the need for an older, sparky, popular and

populist candidate. For these vague reasons, Micheál Ó Muircheartaigh’s name was then thrown in as a back-up broadcasting elder. And now it turns out that each time you sat down to watch television over the past seven years, every afternoon you raised the wireless to your ears, you were actually tuning into Celebrity Candidate, a never-ending show aimed at picking the next person for the role of Going to Shake Down the Chinese for Business Every Now and Again.

You didn’t know it and the contestants didn’t know it, but each appearance, seemingly, was an audition in which men would be judged on their avuncularity. They were being eyed up to see if they would be able to perform the most vital role of a president: Not to Make an Idiot Out of Us.

You can now imagine some TV personalities calling their agents and asking, demanding, to get their name connected to the presidency. “Can’t you get me a call from Micheál Martin? What the hell am I paying you for? Martin King’s agent got him mentioned on a Radio Nova web poll, for Christ’s sake.”

There are actual confirmed candidates out there, actually running this race, each of them trying to look different while saying the same things about inclusivity and leadership and hope, and whatever other words will eventually cohere into the action of shaking a stranger’s hand and not blithering.

This will all be over in two months. In the meantime we’ll probably have to sit through a few more episodes of Celebrity Make Your Bloody Mind Up. Although perhaps we will finally realise that if you want someone who’s been on the telly, seems like a straight sort, has years of experience, and even knows his constitutional precedents, then we should have just asked John Bowman in the first place.

shegarty@irishtimes.com

Twitter: @shanehegarty