My plank for the Presidency

YOU THINK you’re angry, do you? Reading the paper, watching Brian Cowen on TV, seeing the bankers, developers and financial gurus who got us into this mess get off scot-free while everyone else gets it in the neck makes you a little mad? Peeved perhaps?
I’m so mad I’ve started randomly setting things on fire.
I stand outside Brian Lenihan’s house in the pouring rain, just watching and waiting. I practice quick-drawing a pistol in front of my mirror. I ask everyone I meet if they’re talking to me, which they aren’t as I tend to mutter when I walk down the street now.
I’m mad. I’m screaming incoherently while making no sound mad and it’s time to do something about it, so I’m running for President. Not for President of Sinn Féin, I hasten to add. I’m mad - I’m not completely detached from reality. No, I think it’d be a nice idea if Ma Carney’s daughter made it into the Arás.
After all, look at the other options. It’s like watching the Kilkenny senior footballers limber up.
Fine Gael is thinking of running some lightweight former farming journalist who gets her hair cut to look like Princess Diana. Fianna Fáil hope Brian Crowley will get enough sympathy votes for being in a wheelchair that people will ignore his links to the extreme right in Europe and which party he’s a member of.
Labour are thinking of running Billy Wright confidant and tobacco industry pimp Fergus Finlay. Maggie Thatcher must have ruled herself out. Though, in fairness to Labour, they’re also thinking of running well-known poet and ‘eccentric’ Michael D Higgins.

I’VE a soft spot for Mickey D. A staunch lefty, speaks the Irish, got rid of Section 31. To be honest, if I don’t make it due to some Florida-2000-type trickery, I wouldn’t mind seeing him get a go. He’s a bit touched in the head but so was Stalin and look what he made of himself.
But they don’t have a gimmick like me. Every President has to have one. Mary McAleese is our first Northerner. Mary Robinson was our first woman and had these crazy hands that wouldn’t stop moving.
Paddy Hillery’s gimmick was that, during the recession in 1980s Ireland, he owned two of the five good suits the country possessed at the time. Charlie Haughey had two of the others and the last one was in Bobby Storey’s house for when our lads had to dress up like rich people. Since neither Haughey nor Bobby Storey could be president (albeit for very different reasons), Hillery got the job.
My gimmick is a two-by-four – plank of good, solid Irish timber.
Think about it. The presidency is about symbols, about communication, about explaining to the Irish people and those in the growing Diaspora, the kind of Ireland we want to live in. Take racism, for example. I don’t like it and Mary McAleese doesn’t like it. She made speeches against it. If I was President, I would make speeches against it.
But then I’d take my two-by-four, go find a racist, and beat him into Cork University Hospital. Because that’s a symbol too. It’s a message. It says something about Irish society when the head of state is prepared to take a racist into an alleyway off Patrick Street and set about him with a lump of wood. Think about it. A President who does that or one who just waves at cameras like some useless lump of a Brit royal?
It works on a global scale too.

ONE of Robinson’s first trips abroad was to some place in Africa where people were starving. I remember because she wept while telling journalists about it at a press conference. That sent a message. The message said people here are dying of starvation, it’s horrible beyond imagining and all I can do is cry.
Think what a President with a two-by-four could have done. She could have found whoever was delaying the aid convoys and sent a simple message. Every minute a truck is delayed, I’m going to hit you with this piece of wood. What could they do? Like the bad guy in Lethal Weapon III, I have diplomatic immunity but I want to use my powers for good.
This is what we need, you see. We need someone to represent those of us who wish the fella who rammed the truck into the Dáil had tipped the Sinn Féin team a warning to get out before cramming it full of Semtex.
We don’t need a President who’ll write think pieces in The Irish Times or light candles in the window. We need a President who will beat Fingers Fingleton and Seán Fitzpatrick with a plank of wood. Not to get money out of them or information, or even an apology, but just because it’s the right thing to do.
That’s the kind of President I want to be. Vote Julia Carney - because I’m madder than you.