Letters to the Editor: Why I will not put my name forward for presidency
My thanks to those who encouraged me to answer Ireland's call, not for any leadership skills, values, vision, pride in the jersey, etc, on my part but for the free digs when they're up for the Kerry football matches.
The Government has all the executive powers, so I'd be spending my days hosting garden parties and walking the dogs. Micheál, Simon, Mary Lou, and the TDs would have all the fun jostling over housing, health, criminal, and global issues, while I'd be a powerless oddity with a peripheral role.
I'd be bored to tears in the opulent 95-room mansion. I'd have servants and military aides-de camp fussing all over me and a vintage chauffeur-driven 1947 Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith landaulette and Mercedes-Benz S-Class saloon to transport me to ceremonial events.
I'd have to do very little for the outlandish €350,000 salary other than play solitaire or watch day time television. I'd feel uneasy about spending €50m to run the presidential office during the term — an amount which would build 250 family homes.
I couldn't go for a drink or to a match without a posse of security personnel for company. OK, I'd get in free to the matches, but I'd probably have to throw in the muddy ball or shake hands with colossal rugby types, whose grip would crush my fingers.
I'm far too busy and active to retire to the Áras. I'd be very lonesome in the big smoke, and I'd miss the good life in Kerry.
No, like the late Garrett Fitzgerald, my temperament isn't suited to seven years of mundane and innate inactivity.
Billy Ryle
Tralee, Co Kerry
Presidency: Nah, I'll stick to the fishing
Having a choice is wonderful, but the opposite can be true too. Right now, I'm on the horns of a dilemma, stuck on the negative side of that equation: I do not know whether to run for the presidency or offer to sit in front of RTÉ's Liveline mic.
One position requires dignity, magnetism, political maturity, and perception as well as a generally sunny disposition. Great charm and exceptional empathy are required too. The capacity to bite your lip is essential. The other requires the capacity to exploit and goad, all facilitated by well-disguised cynicism.
One offers a life under the unforgiving public eye for the incumbent and their family. The other offers a hurler-on-the-ditch distance from the consequences of their shoot-from-the-hip blathering.
One is very well rewarded financially, the other less so. One can be influential, the other is influential. One can be held to account — the other, again, less so. One is seen as a champion of the people — whatever that is today — and the other is derided as a first-class passenger on the perpetual gravy train. One is seen a conduit to vent our spleen the other can too often be an object of that spleen.
One is free to pronounce on any subject no matter how bizarre the views offered are. The other is — well, sometimes anyway — constrained by government policies. One is shackled, the other celebrated.
To quote a man who once faced a similar dilemma: On mature refection, I think I'll stick to the fishing, or what's left of it in 2025. A pity, as I would have liked a well-made tweed suit.
Jack Power
Inniscarra, Cork
Praise for Higgins
Our President, Michael D Higgins ,is to be congratulated on reminding his fellow European presidents of their moral duty to do their upmost to end the genocide being conducted at Gaza by Israel before the eyes of the world.
J Anthony Gaughan
President Irish PEN
Blackrock, Co Dublin
Cork losing Lucey
As a Corkconian, are we to keep Wellington, Marlborough, etc, emphasise Victoria, and then ditch Bishop Lucey, homegrown and an original thinker and worker for the less privileged of his era?
Hugh Lee
Kilcoole, Wicklow
Obscuring body parts on internet
The modern technology which can prevent airport passengers' own private body parts from being seen by members of airport security is something that should, obviously, be welcomed by everyone.
But, I think, this same helpful technology — with its ability to obscure parts of the human body — could also be put to great good use everywhere on the internet to prevent illicit images of the human body from being observed by mistake by underage individuals who could then, as a sad consequence, become disturbed by them?
Such safety measures that are presently designed to keep the travelling public's modesty intact at many airports could also, I feel, in the near future potentially make the internet of the 21st century a much more safer place for many people to happily grow and develop their talents and their abilities in?
Along, too, with less hidden dangers for them to worry about?
Hopefully, this should be the happy outcome — most especially for the young and the vulnerable?
Sean O'Brien
Kilrush, Co Clare
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