The Norris Affair has shone the spotlight on a lot of nastiness, whether you’re thinking of candidate’s personalities or behaviour or that of their supporters.  Someone brought to my attention that Gay Mitchell sought clemency for a man on death row in Florida for…murdering a doctor and his assitant.  The doctor provided abortions, legally.

This, to me, is a far worse matter than that which Norris pulled out of the race over.

It also makes me really want anyone other than Gay Mitchell to win.  I feel bad enough for ‘liberal Ireland’ over the loss of Norris’ candidature, but I’d hate to see conservative Christian Ireland win this.  I think I heard somewhere that he’s very unpopular with FG supporters outside Dublin, so hopefully they’ll go back to their old shoot-themselves-in-the-foot ways and lose to Michael D Higgins or something.  Anyone but Mitchell.  Or Dana.

And yet.

It frustrated me greatly that he was finding it so difficult to get nominated.  The FG types cutting him off at the council level seemed petty – I don’t actually like the idea of parties ‘owning’ a candidate and trying to secure the Presidency for themselves when the post is supposed to be above party squabbling.  It annoyed me that people were reluctant to help the public opinion-poll front-runner get a nomination, epsecially when they were doing it because of who he is (I imagine helping him might lose a TD a few votes among the plain Catholic people of Ireland).  I wanted him to get the nomination, and win the election, to show those people who were afraid of his homosexuality, or who frowned upon it from their position of religious righteousness, that they are no longer in the majority in this country.  (I do not think that the reluctant TDs and Senators were simply having doubts over his judgement before the rest of us.)

And now…he may not get the nomination, and the closed-minded will have won.  If he gets it and loses, then the people of Ireland will have gone from endorsing him to rejecting him, and that can rather happily be put down to questions over his judgement and we will have been rather mature about it.  If he gets it and wins, then we’re putting his considerable admirable qualities above his not inconsiderable flaws.

So, the only option I don’t favour – the one which may reinforce the mindset of the right-wingers, the conservatives, the religious nuts, the homophobes (many of these terms may be used to describe US political groups, but that’s not what I’m going for here) – is the one which seems most likely, and I think we will be the worse off as a country for it.

If he goes, then…anyone but Gay Mitchell. Please.  He’s the only one with nothing more to offer than a life of politics-by-numbers, and we don’t need a President like that.