BROADCASTER GAY Byrne has admitted he did not have the “stomach” for a tilt at the presidency and accused the media of pestering him to make a decision over the course of the last week.
Speaking on RTÉ radio yesterday, Mr Byrne said he had been “pestered to death” by the media since his name had come up as a potential candidate in the race for the Áras.
In comments which are likely to cause further embarrassment to Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin, who was strongly supportive of a Byrne candidacy, he suggested much of the momentum for the story came because it was the newspaper “silly season”.
“I completely accept that the campaign process is the campaign process and I completely accept that this is the silly season and that it is August and newspapers and media are looking for some kind of story, but I really felt that I was in the middle of a firestorm,” he told interviewer Claire Byrne.
He said the idea of running for president “was a completely new scenario” for him.
“The people that are going forward, the four declared candidates, are obviously people who really really want to be president of Ireland. And that is a worthy and noble objective, but they have obviously put a great deal of thought into it and they know about it. It was a totally and completely new concept for me because, in truth, I had never dreamed about being president. I never thought about it, it never occurred to me, it never came up on my long-range radar.”
He said that once he had been “confronted with the situation and confronted with the offer from Micheál Martin and confronted with the poll results and the pressure being brought to bear on me, I had to give it some consideration, and that is what I was doing”.
After he decided against running, he phoned Mr Martin “out of courtesy” to the Fianna Fáil leader.
“I don’t know whether the man was disappointed or not but he simply said ‘That is your decision and that’s fine and thank you very much indeed’.”
Mr Byrne said he had been warned by some of those he had sought advice from that the race was “not a sprint, it is a marathon, and it was going to go on for a long, long time and I didn’t have the stomach for all of that.
“I wouldn’t be dragging my wife and family through what we were going to go through for the next two months and I didn’t want to do that, I chose not to do that. It is that simple.”
In a statement, Fianna Fáil said it respected the broadcaster’s decision to rule himself out of the race and said a decision on whether or not the party would field a candidate and who that might be would be taken next month.
The party said it had “made it very clear that we believe that potential candidates for the presidency with substantial public support should not be prevented from standing because of the very restrictive nomination process”.
“As was fully demonstrated in this week’s opinion poll, there was very wide public support for Gay Byrne’s potential candidacy.”
It said Mr Byrne had “many fine qualities and would have made an excellent candidate”.
