No: 22 David Norris' Presidential Bid 2011 | Pocketmags.com

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No: 22 David Norris' Presidential Bid 2011

Apart from Mickey D and the two Marys, how many Uachtaráin na hEireann can you name? Until they came along, it was a procession of grey old men who seemed to have little to do apart from attend Civil War funerals or pin rosettes on things. It’s different now and since Mary Robinson, we have grown to love our presidents and all their symbolic figurehead quirks.

In 2011, it looked likely that the quirk would be the first gay president, elected a full six years before the Leo V coronation. Senator David Norris, already a secular saint for most gay people, led the polls for much of the summer and autumn ahead of the November poll. After three years of recession, it seemed many Irish people liked the idea of a theatrical Joycean hero of the gay revolution to represent them and an evolving sense of Irishness on the world stage. The 20 members of the Oireachtas the Senator needed to make the poll were largely fellow Independents, drawn to a candidate without party associations.

So liked was the bould Senator, in fact, that the unearthing of an old interview which said he was soft on pederasty was decried as a scurrilous and homophobic attempt at sabotage. He remained in the race: had the oldest play in the big book of bigotry - the conflation of homosexuality and paedophilia – lost its power to scare the decent folk of Ireland?

However, he couldn’t survive the more damaging spin on the letters he wrote to Israeli politicians asking for clemency in the sentencing of his former partner, the Palestinian activist, Ezra Nawi, who had been convicted of statutory rape of a 15-year-old. Tabloids scented blood and the Senator was accused of all sorts of misconduct, none with anything as inconvenient as evidence, but as supporters dropped away, he felt compelled to give up the race.

It seems that as much as we like our quirky presidency, we like a mud-slinging dirty race to get there even more. Our David has won ten libel cases against Irish media outlets in the years since.

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