Kenneth Egan in a long line of ‘celebrity candidates’

Sports, especially GAA, a fertile hunting ground for parties seeking election nominees

In 2009  RTE’s George Lee was chosen as a Fine Gael  candidate for the Dáil and won the contest by a landslide.  Photograph: Niall Carson/PA Wire


Mon, Feb 10, 2014, 15:01

For a political party, a celebrity candidate is to an upcoming election, what a flake is to a ‘99 ice cream. You don’t really really need it but, boy, if it’s there it looks a whole lot better.

What ensures election to a representative position? Is it the party? Is the its ideas? Is it the candidate? Well, it’s a combination of all three and where the balance lies will often depend on the election.

In general elections, the power of the party and its policies will predominate. In other elections, where comparably less is at stake, the candidate will matter more. This is especially true of European and presidential elections where name recognition is key and there are no credibility issues surrounding the candidate.

In the course of the presidential elections, the master of the bon mot, RTÉ’s David Davin-Power, put it perfectly when describing why Sean Gallagher of Dragons’ Den fame was performing so well in the polls. “People,” he said, “liked the cut of his jib”. On such superficial instincts can some things turn. But of course that was not the whole story, as the infamous Frontline debate later showed.

The announcement that boxer Kenneth Egan will be standing for Fine Gael in the local elections in Clondalkin is confirmation of a political phenomenon long know to parties. A person with a national profile - even better instantly recognisable from television - may be arriving onto the scene by parachute rather than by shank’s mare. But if one thing is for certain, they will get noticed.

All of the major political parties have resorted to plucking a ‘celebrity’ candidate for a specific election in the past. Now, when it comes to the notion of ‘celebrity’, it is something that has a wide enough definition. It can be a bona fide national star of stage or screen, or (more likely in the Irish context) somebody who has become a household name through sporting endeavour.

Jack Lynch, one of the great Fianna Fáil leader and taoisigh, came in through that very route. When he became a TD in Cork in the 1940s, his claim to fame wasn’t really his political track record, rather the fact that he was a leading player on, and captain if, of the famous Cork hurling team which dominated that era.

In recent years, Fine Gael have been the masters of it and have benefitted electorally from hard-nosed (and cynical) decisions to run people with name recognition (with no real background in the party). It worked wonders for the party in 2004 when it ran Mairéad McGuinness, a RTE TV presenter, in East. The party repeated the trick in the Dublin South by-election in 2009 when RTE’s George Lee was chosen at its candidate and won the contest by a landslide.

There can be nasty side-effects associated with such remedies. Within a year George had exited complaining that the party had done little to use his economic skills, but had been content to push him out around the country like a performing “show pony”.
