Gavin will need a new persona for president

One of the hardest beats for a Mayo sports reporter is going down to the dressing rooms and press conference area under the Hogan Stand in Croke Park after an All-Ireland final defeat.

I have made that journey from the press box in Level 7 in the Upper Hogan on no fewer than eight occasions after Mayo have fallen short of their holy grail. It is obviously not a patch on what the Mayo players feel but it’s definitely a sense of duty rather than any wish to be there that brings you down.

I recall doing interviews in the Kerry dressing room in 2004 as the Sam Maguire sat on a table beside water bottles, no one appearing overly bothered about cradling it. I wondered what the contrast would be like if it ended up in the other dressing room.

Two years later we were there to hear Jack O’Connor tell us quite patronisingly that Kerry were able to summon more hunger after one year without Sam than Mayo could after 55 years. Clearly, it must have had little to do with a gulf in quality... 

In 2012, we had a front row seat as Jim McGuinness came into the press conference room after leading his county to the Promised Land. On what should have been his day of days, he chose to be vindictive, ordering that the press conference would not go ahead if Declan Bogue, an excellent journalist who wrote a book McGuinness took exception to, was allowed to remain in the room.

In 2020, the interviews were in the Lower Hogan with no crowd present during the surreal Covid-19 final five days before Christmas Day. After winning six All-Irelands in a row, Dublin defender Jonny Cooper gave, in the circumstances, the most sullen interview one could imagine, never breaking into a smile once.

By contrast, in 2021, Fergal Logan and Brian Dooher, the Tyrone joint-managers, couldn’t take the smiles off their faces.

Cooper’s mood was very much indicative of the Dublin of that era. Though Dessie Farrell was the manager in 2020 – and effected a reasonable level of satisfaction in his interview – the reality was the six-in-a-row team was Jim Gavin’s and he would, we think, have nodded approvingly about Cooper’s demeanour.

Going into the press rooms in 2013, 2016 and 2017 after his Dublin teams had beaten Mayo by a cumulative total of three points across four finals (one draw) in dramatic deciders, someone who had been parachuted into the press auditorium with no knowledge of the result would have assumed this was an interview with the losing manager (if only!).

His interviews were anodyne, impassive and cold-eyed. Perhaps this is what All-Ireland winning managers ought to look like but of the six managers I’ve witnessed up close after leading a team to Sam Maguire, Gavin was out on his own in terms of how impassive he was.

After the 2017 All-Ireland, arguably the highest standard of a decider we’ve ever witnessed, where an utterly herculean performance by Mayo brought out the very best in a great Dublin team, we sat there as Gavin was asked if he had sympathy for Mayo.

“We’ve been there. We were there ourselves this year in a national final and we lost by a point and it is tough,” he replied.

So here was Gavin likening Dublin losing a league final with Mayo’s long wait, one of the world’s greatest sporting famines.

Considering his high intellect, it was hard not to think Gavin was toying with the vanquished side, like a cat playing with a mouse after it had administered the fatal blow.

It was a rare break from his dull, insipid answers, Gavin often playing with the media in the same way. You’d think someone who had just won an All-Ireland (2017 was a three-in-a-row) would betray some emotions but no.

There will be some who will praise Gavin for such an even-tempered approach, treating Kipling’s twin impostors of triumph and disaster just the same. Me? Perhaps it is the long wait but I think most reasonable thinking people would expect a smidgen of joy.

It is why when I first heard that Jim Gavin was interested in running for president of our country that I was shocked. He immediately strikes me as someone who does not have the personality or demeanour for it. It requires a 180-degree pivot from the personality we witnessed in those press conferences.

Malachy Clerkin in The Irish Times, who has interviewed Jim Gavin far more times than I, believes it to be a persona. I hope so because if it is his personality, Jim Gavin will need a transplant if he is running for president.

To be fair to Gavin, he was more engaging and interesting over the course of the last year when he was chair of the GAA’s Football Rules Committee (FRC) as he led a group of serious GAA minds on a phalanx of rule changes that have, on the evidence so far, improved the game of Gaelic football considerably for the better.

He was, let there be no doubt, an exceptional manager. A driver of high standards and through his work in the Defence Forces, a firm believer in the importance of serving your country. His background, as a pilot in the Irish Air Corps, requires coolness under pressure and an even tempered personality, attributes he certainly brought to managing his county. But it remains to be seen if he can connect with voters as he must if he is running for president.

How will he do? Well, unlike when he was manager of Dublin and Mayo were hot on his heels, the field is not high-level to replace Michael D Higgins who was a great holder of the office.

Gavin’s only rival for the Fianna Fáil nomination is Cork-based MEP Billy Kelleher, a likeable politician but one with a relatively low national profile.

(UPDATE: Jim Gavin was nominated as the party's Presidential candidate in a secret party ballot held at Leinster House yesterday, September 9.)

Retired former minister Heather Humphreys will run for Fine Gael. The Monaghan woman is well regarded by her political colleagues but whether she has the persona to make the required impression on the national electorate is another question.

Galway’s Catherine Connolly has no issues with regard to persona. She comes across as a warm and considerate politician but her previous support for the disgraced former journalist Gemma O’Doherty seven years ago as well her previously articulated views on Russia, Syria and global affairs are coming under the microscope and may damage her.

Perhaps Sinn Féin will nominate a candidate, maybe even their leader, Mary Lou McDonald. Rose Conway-Walsh has been linked with it too and has a lot of the right ingredients, though whether she has the required national profile yet is harder to say.

That McDonald is being suggested and many were debating if Martin would go helps to highlight the dearth of quality candidates out there in general, and makes one wonder if enough of our brightest and best are actually interested in being involved in politics at local or national level.

One thing pushing forward Jim Gavin does for Micheál Martin is cut out at the pass any hopes of Bertie Ahern running for presidency. Given his troubled past, that is a situation Martin and Fianna Fáil as a whole just did not want to contemplate.

Gavin, by comparison, has no skeletons in his closet.

But if he gets elected, I’m not sure I want to watch the press conference.