PRESIDENT OF IRELAND is truly such a limited role that we can afford to be quite specific when it comes to the qualities we’d like them to embody.

You don’t necessarily need to be an expert on policy. You don’t really need to be an expert on anything, actually. It might help, but ultimately we are aware that our president is, for the most part, a shaker of hands, a petter of dogs, and, if we’re lucky, an issuer of statements that bring us some comfort in the face of an otherwise unforgiving political, social and economic landscape.

In some ways, the process for picking someone to be the President of Ireland is not dissimilar to picking which of your mates would be the best one to bring on a double date. Sure, it’s impressive if they have some great command of geopolitics and international relations, but the primary consideration is how likely they are to embarrass you whenever they open their mouth. 

Jim Gavin may have some work to do on that front. In his bid to be president, I mean. Not because he’s going on a double-date with me and two — I’m sure we can all agree — very lucky ladies. 

The former Dublin football manager had his first taste of life as Fianna Fáil’s nominee for the Áras with a doorstep interview during which Taoiseach Micheál Martin tried to intercede on Gavin’s behalf when he was asked which way he voted in the 2015 Marriage Equality referendum. Gavin gave a good answer that time around, but it was clear from the word go that Fianna Fáil’s top brass were nervous about how this unseasoned operator would handle tough questions. 

It has not taken long for the cracks to appear, and Gavin twice gave a deeply strange answer this week when asked about Gaza.

“It’s unconscionable that the bombing is still taking place when I believe that the military objectives have probably been reached for that military campaign,” is what Gavin told reporters, before echoing the sentiment and the “military objectives” phrase later in the week. 

It is obvious that by leading with the word ‘unconscionable’ that Gavin is attempting to set out his stall as someone who empathises with those suffering in Palestine. But to pivot immediately to talk of military campaigns and military objectives is, to put it kindly, completely bizarre. Read our report here for Gavin’s comments in full. 

We are nearly two years into an unrelenting onslaught of visceral devastation visited upon hundreds of thousands of civilians by an army that has moved without remorse, bombed hospitals, killed hundreds of journalists, and maimed tens of thousands of children. A ‘military campaign’ that has culminated in the annexation of Gaza and the utter destruction of anything resembling Palestinian self-determination.

It’s hard to accept that anyone who has meaningfully engaged with this issue, who has seen the broken bodies of Palestinian men, women and children day after day, who has listened to their testimony, read their accounts, could possibly speak in such neutralised terms. 

It seems plausible that this ‘military objectives’ line was put forward to direct attention towards Gavin’s own background in the Defence Forces, but as we noted earlier, Gavin’s background in the Defence Forces doesn’t even remotely matter for the job he’s after. 

If, as a public figure, you lack the wherewithal to speak about Gaza for even a matter of seconds without making yourself sound like you’re from a different reality than the one the rest of us inhabit, then the chances are you are going to alienate people. During a week when even RTÉ, after putting it off for two years, finally found the guts to tell the EBU they’d be pulling out of the Eurovision if Israel continues to participate, it’s safe to say that there is unlikely to be much public sympathy for anyone who cannot acknowledge what is truly happening in Gaza. 

The Fianna Fáil nervousness about Jim is understandable. After all, at the behest of the Taoiseach they’ve gone with someone who has no experience in politics over a seasoned MEP and former TD, and they’re just sort of hoping that someone whose primary media experience is post-match press conferences — the most meaningless, meandering, hollow, pointless medium of communication ever devised — can win over the people with his public pronouncements. 

But if this president doesn’t work out, Micheál Martin has not been shy about cosying up to another. While we all still remember his laughter at the expense of our housing crisis in the Oval Office, Martin noted this week that Donald Trump told the press this week that ‘there’s no question that President Trump would be welcome to Ireland’ for next year’s Irish Open, which is being held at the US President’s golf resort in Doonbeg. 

It seems odd, even as Donald Trump sends in ICE agents to brutalise communities across the United States, as he deployed the National Guard as part of a fascistic display of force in the nation’s capital, that all Micheál Martin is able to speak about is the special relationship we supposedly have with this nation whose presence on the world stage has become so utterly toxic. 

In one of this week’s lesser scandals, a commemorative Westlife stamp issued by An Post omitted Brian McFadden. And I know what you’re thinking: ‘Carl, Brian left Westlife over 20 years ago, please move on with your life’. Well, first of all, no, I don’t think I will.

Secondly, while McFadden hasn’t been associated with Westlife in a long time, the whole point of a commemorative stamp (beyond being fodder for the sad and lonely sexual deviants who collect stamps) is to celebrate the memory of something — and you can’t remember Westlife’s glory days without remembering Brian McFadden.

No matter who you are, we should all be concerned about how easy it is to erase a man’s contribution to Irish life and culture. 

Leaving McFadden off the stamp cruelly overlooks how central he was to Westlife’s golden era (I am, of course, speaking about the Coast to Coast/World of our Own run at the start of the millennium). How can you ignore a man who sang the second verse of When You’re Looking Like That? Sure, in terms of historical revisionism, it’s not exactly Nikolai Yezhov being airbrushed out of that photo with Stalin. Yezhov, for example, could never have sung the bridge on Westlife’s cover of Mandy by Barry Manilow. 

McFadden left to pursue a solo career back in 2004. Originally, that meant music, though he did also briefly reposition himself as a one-man-army, Steven Seagal kind of figure when he went on Twitter and suggested that ISIS fight us, in his words, “man to man”.

Which is not exactly double date material, fair enough. But the man has earned his place on the stamp.