I confess that when I heard last week that 35-year-old pharma CEO Gareth Sheridan was entering Ireland’s Presidential election, I felt something approaching a frisson of hope.
This is the great advantage to being a relative unknown in a country with a great many people crying out for “something different”. When you are a blank slate, people can project their hopes and desires and grievances onto you. Even relative cynics like me can look at a person’s biography on paper and think “this guy could be good, now”.
The hope in my case was given a little bit of a boost by the revelation that Senator Sharon Keoghan, normally a woman with good instincts, was apparently backing him. That told me two things about him: First that he was not launching his campaign without having done some legwork and preparation. Second, that if he was going to somebody like the good Senator having done that homework, he might just be something different than the usual parade we get in Ireland of drippy, samey, RTE-friendly candidates.
I was not the only one in the media to have those instincts. Those of my colleagues at other publications who fundamentally object to people who are not drippy, samey, RTE-friendly candidates were quick out of the box with their stories, barely a single one of which was positive. Colm Keena was out in the Irish Times within days to tell us some kind of convoluted story about an ex-business partner of Sheridan’s once having done something vaguely shady that could – if the need arose – become the kind of thing a right-thinking establishmentarian could aver to disapprove of. Vaguely shady business practices aren’t the kind of thing we’d tolerate here, don’t you know.
Then there was a report that he had once been fined by the Securities and Exchange Commission over in ‘merica for making “misleading statements about his company”. Well, he wouldn’t be the first entrepreneur to get a little over-exuberant in talking up his ideas, I reasoned. And the fact that the media are rushing around like ferrets trying to unearth these little nuggets, while having the entire sum of feck-all interest in Catherine Connolly’s exotic political associations in the Middle East?
Evidence, I thought, that this Sheridan fella might be all right.
But then he went on Virgin Media. With Richard Chambers. And this happened:
Look we can stipulate a few things here: Chambers is a pro but there is no mistaking his politics or his agenda. He’s clearly trying to trip the candidate up. He is also unmistakably trying to “gatekeep” the Presidency, by implying that some ideas and arguments are outside the bounds of polite society – namely almost anything ever said by Senator Keoghan.
You can deride that as unfair if you want. But it was hardly challenging. A competent right-winger who knew what they were doing could have made Chambers look and sound entirely foolish and partisan with even a slight amount of firm pushback: “What do you mean, divisive? Can you explain to me what is divisive about the idea that there are only two genders, male and female?”
Instead, Sheridan retreated. At every opportunity to stand his ground, he ran backwards.
In the process, he threw his only publicly identified political supporter under the bus. So now we must wonder: Is he a coward who cannot defend his beliefs, or a cynic willing to accept support from people whose beliefs he finds beyond the pale?
It is not just that interview, by the by. Sheridan has been a candidate now for the guts of a week and – in the middle of a slow news week, to boot – has left me entirely confused about what if anything he actually stands for. Or what he wants to do with the Presidency.
Yesterday, he made another cardinal error: At a press conference to launch his campaign, he instead launched allegations that he is being smeared by people associated with former Presidential Candidate (and his own former associate) Sean Gallagher.
It matters not one jot whether this is true: It matters much more that it is politics of the most incompetent kind. Why should the average voter care about some candidate’s beef with a former candidate, when they do not even know who the candidate is or what they believe?
Winning the Irish Presidency as an outsider is an almost impossible task even with the perfect campaign. The perfect campaign would turn the establishment’s loathing into a virtue, challenge the media at every turn, and contrast Sheridan’s success in business with the repeated failures of the establishment to run a health service, a housing system, or a transport system competently.
This, with Sheridan, is not what we are getting.
It is arguably not too late for him to turn it around, but only arguably. First impressions can only be made once. This guy has not made a good one, and it was very important to his chances that he should do so.
I mean no particular disrespect to Richard Chambers, but honestly: If you cannot handle him throwing an obviously partisan interview at you, then maybe Presidential politics is the wrong career choice, sir.