What's Up With Ireland?

Michael Brendan Dougherty looks at the Irish candidates for their Presidency:

After Ireland’s incredible economic fall, the country has lost faith that politics can solve their problems. Hope has migrated to the possibility that Facebook, Google, and other tech companies will soon move their server farms from Asia to Eire. Until then, however, Ireland has the comfort of an Oct. 27 presidential election that contains all the intrigue of a referendum on the nation’s identity.
Consider some of the late drama. Sinn Fein’s candidate, Martin McGuinness, stepped down as first deputy minister of Northern Ireland to run for the Republic’s presidency. McGuinness is a former commander of the IRA, yet his popularity in the North has risen as quickly as it has everywhere else. But the man who held a Thompson machine gun on Bloody Sunday was recently confronted over his role in “the troubles” by David Kelly, the son of a soldier who was killed in 1983 while trying to rescue two businessmen who were kidnapped by the IRA. He accused McGuinness of knowing the names of the killers and having been on the IRA’s army council. McGuinness’s candidacy recalls the divisions and aspirations of one generation past.
Then there is the candidate of a more distant past, of a religious and emigrant Ireland. Independent candidate Dana Rosemary Scallon, who first came to prominence in her country 1970 by winning the Eurovision Song Contest. Scallon is a devout Catholic who moved with her family to Birmingham, Alabama in the 1980s and hosted religious programs on the Eternal Word Television Network before returning to Ireland and becoming a socially conservative member of the European Parliament. She has made Irish sovereignty her major campaign issue, brandishing the recently rejected European Constitution in her hands as if it were shrapnel from a distant war Ireland ought to avoid.
Some members of her family, feeling economic pressure, have recently emigrated back to America, eliciting questions about her commitment to the nation. She has offered to renounce her U.S. citizenship. In the first candidates’ debate she decried questions that painted her as a “mouthpiece for the Church”—a surprise to many viewers who believe that she rather obviously volunteered for that role.
And then there is modern Ireland represented by David Norris, the country’s first openly gay politician and campaigner for gay rights. He overturned the laws that condemned Oscar Wilde. Norris has given voice to Ireland’s frustration with the clerical abuse scandal, but he dropped out of the race when it was revealed he had defended a former boyfriend, an Israeli activist, who was on trial for statutory rape of a 15-year old Palestinian boy. Norris had also spoken previously in praise of “Classical pedophilia as practiced by the Greeks” and said he “would have greatly relished the prospect of an older, attractive, mature man taking me under his wing, [and] lovingly introducing me to sexual realities.”

These candidates make the Republican primary look less crazy, but there is a hell of a difference between the Irish Presidency and the U.S. Presidency.  Whomever wins the Irish Presidency is a governmental figurehead with about 0.0001% chance of blowing up the world.  The same cannot be said for the U.S. Presidency.