Fine Gael pays a heavy price for wanting anyone but Cox

The Presidential election looks like taking the gloss off Enda Kenny’s heretofore shining record at the polls – but the painful reality for the Taoiseach is that it would never have come to this if he’d had his way.

Marking the man has been a recurring theme running through Mitchell’s campaign from the outset – more recently he’s been the Rottweiler snapping at Martin McGuinness’s ankles, but from the outset he was the choice of those within his party who were prepared to back anyone but Pat Cox.

So he garnered some of his support because he represented more of old Fine Gael – as opposed to a Fine Gael so new that the ink wasn’t dry on the membership papers – and with the guiding hand of John Bruton in the small of his back, he saw off Cox and Mairead McGuinness to secure the nomination.

There was a message in his proposers too – Frances Fitzgerald and Dan Neville – to show that he represented the Fine Gael establishment and they weren’t having any carpetbagger coming on board to capitalise on their rise in popularity.

But they overestimated Mitchell’s appeal and while Kenny has proven his electoral worth in local, European and finally a General Election, even a tidal wave cannot lift a sinking boat.

Mitchell has always been a street-fighter – and in fairness a party stalwart who has performed admirably in elections on his home ground – but the reality is that he has little or no traction outside of the Pale.

Ironically the biggest party in the land would have stood an infinitely better chance of success if they – like Sinn Féin – had opted for a McGuinness too.

She is sufficiently urban to draw a city vote, sufficiently rural to deliver a farmer’s vote – and a female to maintain our recent tradition in Presidential elections. Sadly for Enda Kenny, she never made it out of the starting blocks.

Last week’s Irish Times/Ipsos MRBI poll showed just how steep a cliff Fine Gael now has to climb, with Mitchell languishing in sixth place at nine per cent – down a massive twelve per cent on his last showing and with only Dana below him.

He’ll have taken no comfort in the even more spectacular implosion of David Norris who had fallen a full 14 points to eleven per cent, as the skeletons come tumbling out of his closet by the dozen.

His failure to deal with the issue of his legal advice for days – and then to apparently have no problem at all in identifying the source of that advice after all – smacked of the sort of ineptitude and indecision that has characterised his campaign for the start.

For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.