ON THE CANVASS with NESSA CHILDERS:SHE HAS a family name that reverberates through the corridors of Irish history and into the dark corners of our tragic civil war.
Nessa Childers was getting on with her life and her profession as a psychoanalyst when the call came to run for Europe under the Labour banner.
In her day-to-day occupation, self-effacement is an essential requirement. “If you are a psychoanalyst, there can be no less important thing than your name.” But now her name is on the ballot paper for June 5th and she is asking people to place a number one beside it.
That means getting out in the Ireland East (formerly Leinster) constituency and this is generating some interesting results, including new facts about her family history.
A man came up to her in Wicklow town and introduced himself as the son of one of the soldiers who arrested her grandfather, Erskine Childers (1870-1922) at Glendalough House in November 1922. As he was being brought to Wicklow Gaol, the soldier told Childers: “Make a run for it, I won’t shoot you.”
Childers declined the offer, pointing out that another soldier in the party could shoot him instead. He was subsequently executed in Dublin for possession of a pistol which was reportedly a gift from Michael Collins.
The Labour Party is playing up the family connection and the campaign launch was held in the very cell in Wicklow Gaol where the candidate’s grandfather was held before his transfer to Dublin. Indeed, Erskine Childers himself had been elected TD for Wicklow in 1921.
But her late father, Erskine Hamilton Childers, who was elected president of Ireland in 1973 and died suddenly the following year, is clearly seen as the real campaign asset. Standing beside Nessa at the entrance to the Supervalu store in Tullow, Co Carlow, in the heart of the constituency, Labour councillor William Paton repeatedly tells potential voters: “You might remember her father.”
He only does this with people over a certain age. There’s no point in telling that young man with an earring about Nessa’s father, who was quite conservative and wouldn’t have had much time for young men wearing earrings in any case.
Campaign manager Keith Martin worked full-time last year in the US to get Barack Obama elected to the White House.
Liz McManus, Labour TD for Wicklow and the party’s energy spokeswoman, is director of elections. Formerly a Green Party councillor in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown for the Blackrock ward, Childers is reserved without being shy and the reaction to her is friendly without being effusive.
After the supermarket, she moves on to Johnson’s Tailors, established in 1867, the year of the Fenian rising. Robin Johnson belongs to the sixth generation of his family to follow the trade. He’s busy on the sewing machine, making up a pair of trousers for a customer while his father, Michael, talks politics with the visitors. Why is he voting for Nessa Childers? “Because she looks like her father.”
Meeting the candidate on the street, Loretta O’Connell Sinclair from Tinahely promises Childers her vote: “I want change and I’m really worried about what way it’s going with the banks. We need the truth out.”
During a coffee break, a member of the group quotes a Fine Gael contact who said in reference to Nessa: “Right party, right name, right time.” But the candidate herself is cautious: “Let’s not take anything for granted.”
Ireland East caused a major surprise in the last European elections in 2004 when it bestowed two out of three seats on the main Opposition party. Mairéad McGuinness is running again, but Senator John Paul Phelan has replaced retiring Avril Doyle on the Fine Gael ticket. Liam Aylward MEP is hoping to get back for Fianna Fáil and a leading firm of bookmakers has Childers and Phelan vying for the third seat. Sinn Féin and Libertas are also running and there are three Independents.
Childers resigned her Green Party council seat in August last year for personal reasons. The following month, Labour approached her to run for Europe.
“I had only about three days to decide,” she recalls. She says her mother, Rita, now 94, had “Labour Party tendencies” and worked with legendary trade union leader Jim Larkin.
Nessa Childers was with her father when he suffered a fatal heart attack in November 1974.
She feels that he protected her from politics when he was alive. “There was a blanket of silence over the whole question of the civil war and my grandfather,” she says.
But she says he had become concerned about Fianna Fáil: “He feared they had begun to think they were the State, rather than a party within it.”
