Read Online The Race for the Áras by Tom Reddy - Free Book Online

‘If Mr Norris’s derailed attempts to secure a nomination result in these political flaws being addressed and repaired, he will have done democracy some service.’
    The following day the Irish Independent revealed that Nawi had fought a five-year legal battle, involving two appeals, to avoid being jailed for the statutory rape of a boy. He was sentenced to six months in prison after a plea bargain was accepted by the Jerusalem High Court. He was jailed in November 1997 but released three months later.
    Dearbhail McDonald in the Irish Independent repeated Israeli media reports that Nawi also had convictions for the illegal use of a weapon, for possession of drugs for personal use, for entering a closed military area and for threatening behaviour.
    McCabe wrote of his experience for the Sunday Independent , saying that fifteen months earlier he had met Norris for coffee in Leinster House and told him he needed to build a ‘national support structure’ and could not be a ‘marginal or issues based’ candidate.
    He wrote that they established twenty teams across the country, with two hundred volunteers, and at close of business had thirty thousand fans on Facebook, twenty thousand followers on Twitter, and Norris had personally addressed sixteen county and city councils. And Norris’s exit? ‘In my view his exit was the correct decision and was handled in a professional and dignified manner.’

Chapter 4    
THE RINGER?
    G
overnment TD s and senators had been reading the opinion polls with increasing trepidation. There was no doubt that they were going to take a beating from the electorate. As time progressed, the question became not how many seats they would lose but how many seats could be saved. Fear stalked the offices of the Green Party and Fianna Fáil in Leinster House.
    Fine Gael seemed unassailable—and the party leader, Enda Kenny, a racing certainty to be the next Taoiseach—and the Labour Party unbeatable in Dublin. Sinn Féin was showing well and might even beat Fianna Fáil into fourth place. Seats were going to be lost, dynasties destroyed and history changed. The question was: just how bad would it be, and how accurate were the opinion polls?
    â€˜It was like a delayed funeral,’ wrote Olivia O’Leary, political analyst with ‘Drivetime’, assessing the election for the RTE publication The Week in Politics: Election 2011 and the 31st Dáil . ‘The government had died a long time ago, but it still had to be buried. Ultimately, most people just wanted the government out. The cold certainty with which they delivered the verdict was breathtaking.’
    On Friday 25 February the country voted.
    Fine Gael won an unprecedented 76 seats, an increase of 25 seats on the 2007 election. The Labour Party increased its total to 37, up 17. Sinn Féin won 14, an increase of 10. The Socialist Party won 2, having none in the previous Dáil. Similarly the People Before Profit Alliance won 2, having had no previous representation. The number of independent TD s increased from 9 to 15.
    The Green Party was wiped out. Fianna Fáil was devastated, losing 58 seats, reducing its representation to 20—a historic hammering for any party and a humiliating result for Fianna Fáil.
    The changed demographics in the Oireachtas would concentrate the minds of potential presidential candidates as they weighed up seeking support from the newly constituted political parties and from a range of independents and smaller parties.
    Fine Gael and the Labour Party would look to the huge public endorsement they had received and would seek to transfer that to their candidate. For Fine Gael it could be the first time to elect a party nominee to the Áras, topping its successes in the local elections and the general election; for the Labour Party it was a chance to follow on the Robinson Presidency. For Fianna Fáil it posed a hard question: would there be