Breaking Male Hold on Irish Politics

Twenty years ago, because her fiance was still in college, Adi Roche bought her own $40 engagement ring for “about a week’s pay.” She dreamed classic dreams of young Irish women then: “A house with an indoor toilet, then a car, then a family.”

Today, at 42, Roche is running for president of Ireland, a powerful symbol of a new era in a nation at once proud and flustered by breakneck change.

“Irish women have certainly come out of the kitchen, haven’t we now,” Roche said in an interview. “This is not just an election but a celebration.”

Four of five candidates to become the not-quite-figurehead president of Ireland in elections Oct. 30 are women--including an emigrant singer come home from Alabama. Presidential authority is mostly moral in Ireland’s prime ministerial system of government, but their race is more than a contest to become National Mom.

Articulate and committed, the women are icons of rapid modernization and harbingers of more to come in one of Europe’s most historically conservative lands. And they play to a global audience. Ireland is smaller than Maine and its population, 3.5 million, is the same as the city of Los Angeles’. But it casts a giant shadow: As Dubliners never tire of noting, 40 million Americans claim Irish roots.

This year’s presidential lineup, four women competing to succeed Ireland’s first female president, remarkable in a patriarchal society where politics has always been the preserve of slick-talking, hard-dealing pols whose offshore cousins became, amid hurly-burly, so familiar at U.S. city halls this century.

“I don’t want gender to be an issue in this election, but it certainly is a factor. I’m not the prettiest of the five. They’re bound to call me the man in the gray suit,” said Derek Nally, 61, a retired police sergeant and civic organizer who became a token male dark-horse candidate Oct. 1.

Like Nally, who founded support groups for crime victims, three of the four female candidates are political newcomers.

Newcomers Challenge Experienced Politician

Front-runner Mary McAleese, 46, is a law professor and vice chancellor of Queen’s University in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Roche is an internationally known antinuclear campaigner who heads the Chernobyl Children’s Project. Longshot candidate Rosemary Scallon, 45, better known as a singer with the stage name Dana, is host of a conservative Roman Catholic television show broadcast from Birmingham, Ala.

That leaves Mary Banotti, 58, a member of the European Parliament who is running second in the polls, as the only experienced politician among the five would-be heirs to Mary Robinson, who left the presidency to become United Nations high commissioner for human rights.

A former nurse who is the grandniece of arch-republican rebel Michael Collins, the liberal Banotti is the feminist favorite among the candidates. She is also, matter-of-factly, a divorced single mother.

That alone would have blighted any woman’s career in the yesterday Ireland in which all of the candidates grew up. Banotti is the first divorced person to hold elective office in Ireland, but all of the candidates are pioneers.

“In 1969, when I decided that I wanted to be a lawyer, everybody said I was crazy, beginning with the parish priest,” McAleese said in an interview. “Girls were supposed to be nurses or teachers.”

That poor, proud, provincial Ireland of yore is fast disappearing. Among the candidates, only Scallon speaks for what Dublin wags call the “country and western” vote of stern Catholic traditionalism. That constituency is in eclipse but still potent outside the big cities. In 1995, all political parties supported a referendum to allow divorce: It passed, barely--50.3% to 49.7%.

“I resent being labeled an extremist. I believe in God and respect people’s right to say that without provoking ridicule or derision,” said Scallon in an interview in which she trod firmly on her main campaign plank: “People everywhere realize that a strong country rests on strong families.”

The other candidates carefully acknowledge tradition but focus more on the national need to accommodate change.

“I don’t think you can turn the clock back, but we must come to grips with changes that are seriously damaging new Ireland’s fabric. Poverty is going, but Ireland is home to a major drug culture for the first time,” said Nally, who hails from County Tipperary and whose country accent immediately marks him as a political outsider.

McAleese, for her part, personifies vexing crosscurrents flowing through the shifting national psyche. A flinty, activist lawyer, McAleese opposes divorce and abortion but has lobbied for gay rights and quarrels publicly with her church: She favors female priests.

When McAleese was starting law school and Scallon was winning the 1970 Eurovision song competition with “All Kinds of Everything”--Julio Iglesias was second--Ireland was still poor, and Irish workers routinely emigrated from their emerald isle to greener economic pastures abroad.

But joining the Common Market, now the European Union, in 1973 marked a social and economic watershed in Irish history, paving the way for astonishing growth through expanded trade, community aid and waves of foreign investment. By 1987, Irish workers’ salaries were 63% of their British counterparts’. Today, per capita income is as high in Ireland as in Britain, and historic economic migration has reversed. Young Irish men and women still venture abroad, only now it is learning and adventure that drive them, not economic need. One among them, Banotti’s daughter, Tania, is a U.N. observer in the Gaza Strip.

Eternal World Television Network star Dana is among emigrants who have returned. “My coming home says to other Irish everywhere: ‘You can come home too,’ ” Scallon said in an interview.

Candidate Roche recalls that when she got married in 1977, “under Irish law, as a married woman, I had to quit my state job. But Common Market legislation, which Ireland had to agree to, changed all that.” The changes came slowly at first, Roche said. “Even 15 years ago, if you walked into a greengrocer’s and asked for broccoli,” there was none. But today there are bean sprouts, designer pasta and olive oil to drizzle in an explosion of ethnic foods and outlander ideas that have swept Ireland and are especially remarkable in the new, can-do, go-go Dublin.

Old Political Ties Break Amid Changes

Ireland has quickly absorbed revolutionary transformation in almost every aspect of life, notes Michael Laver, a professor of politics at Trinity College here. The facts of Irish life now include rapid urbanization, foreign travel that almost everybody can afford, cheap telephone service and satellite television across the country, general prosperity and the spread of higher education.

“Amid the great social change and sudden mobility, political ties have been breaking down and there has been a sharp decline in church influence. At the same time, there has been an invasion of women in professional life. They are powerful in the media, for example, and more than half of new lawyers are women,” Laver said.

If that is the social context in which it is suddenly possible for Ireland-of-all-places to have four female candidates to be its next head of state, the proximate cause was Robinson, an independent, 100-to-1 shot elected to a seven-year term in 1990.

All six presidents of the Irish Republic before Robinson were Pleistocene pols who retreated to a big white official mansion, smiled, shook hands and collected a handsome pension. The official chores of an Irish chief of state are more challenging to the waistline than to the intellect.

An Irish president must, by definition, be above politics. That accounts for the lack of specifics in the campaign. The contenders let their pre-candidate achievements and positions speak for them now. All presidential speeches must have government imprimatur before delivery. Thus, a president may highlight problems but cannot propose solutions.

Specific powers do allow a president to refer legislation to the Supreme Court for constitutional review and to dissolve Parliament with government consent.

Even with such constraints, Robinson’s election shook political Ireland to its roots. “I want women who have felt themselves outside history to be written back into history, finding a voice where they have found a vision,” she said on taking office.

As president, Robinson, a law professor and former senator, proved to be a crusading moralist, demanding rational government and rational relations among communities on an island where north and south are divided and battle-scarred by sectarian bitterness. She traveled the world to promote and eventually institutionalize the image of a new Ireland.

Laver, the political scientist, predicts that successors could ride her coattails in advancing issues like the environment. “There seems to be a willingness among voters to push the envelope further,” he said.

To be sure, Irish women still have a long way to go for political equality: They sit in only 20 of the 166 seats in the House of Representatives, the lower house of Parliament. They are also scarce in the Senate, the Cabinet, among regional and city council members and in the ranks of corporate executives.

Moreover, with the exception of Scallon, the female presidential candidates were selected by the male leaders of mainline Irish political parties. Still, they were nominated in a society that not too long ago demanded that women who got pregnant out of wedlock silently surrender their babies for adoption in atonement. Even a decade ago, Irish analysts agree, it would have been unthinkable to have four female candidates for any major political post.

Banner for People to Rally Around

The party-backed candidates with the most realistic chances of winning--McAleese, Banotti, Roche--believe that the presidency as a symbol of community carries a weight that transcends both politics and empty ceremony.

“We are dismantling old values and looking for change. For some, clearly, the pace of change is too rapid. The president’s job is to be the banner behind which all the people can assemble,” said McAleese.

Roche observed: “I wouldn’t have to talk about causes as president; everybody already knows where I stand. The job is like a mirror, to listen and reflect the concerns of people. I want the mother getting her children off to school to be able to say about the president of Ireland, ‘She is like me.’ ”

As icons of a transforming nation, Ireland’s presidential candidates have felt the lash of change. Women who achieved prominence through their wits and convictions are now the prey of harping image makers: hair, makeup, clothes, posture, accent, diction.

When a visitor pointed out to the poised and feisty McAleese that she did not look much like old news pictures of her, or even recent campaign posters, she grinned: “You should have seen me three weeks ago. My own grandmother wouldn’t recognize me today.”

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Ireland’s Changing Politics

Four of five candidates in the Oct. 30 presidential race are women, and they are competing to succeed Ireland’s first woman president, Mary Robinson, who resigned to become United Nations high commissioner for human rights. The four are icons of rapid modernization in one of Europe’s historically most conservative lands. The fifth candidate is Derek Nally, 61, a retired police sergeant and civic organizer who on Oct. 1 became the token male dark-horse candidate.

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Mary McAleese: The race’s front runner is a law professor and vice chancellor of Queen’s University in Belfast, Northern Ireland. An activist lawyer, McAleese, 46, opposes divorce and abortion but has lobbied for gay rights and quarrels publicly with her church: She favors women priests.

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Mary Banotti: She is running second in the polls and is the only experienced politician among the five contenders. Banotti, a member of the European Parliament and feminist favorite, is the first divorced person to hold elective office in Ireland. The 58-year-old Banotti is a former nurse who is the grandniece of arch-republican rebel Michael Collins.

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Adi Roche: The internationally known antinuclear campaigner heads the Chernobyl Children’s Project. Roche, 42, says the president’s job “is like a mirror, to listen and reflect the concerns of people. I want the mother getting her children off to school to be able to say about the president of Ireland, ‘She is like me.’ ”

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Rosemary Scallon: The longshot candidate is better known as a singer with the stage name Dana and is host of a conservative Roman Catholic TV show broadcast from Birmingham, Ala. Scallon, 45, won the 1970 Eurovision song competition with “All Kinds of Everything.” Her main campaign plank: “People everywhere realize that a strong country rests on strong families.”