AFTER Mrs Mary Robinson, we must not have the deluge. Over the last seven years we have all gained from her performance as President. It would be a disgrace if those gains were to be washed away by a returning tide of mediocrity. An agreed candidate for the office would be a betrayal of all she has achieved. But an election fought between three party veterans would be almost as bad.
The first option might give us quality without democracy, the second, democracy without quality. What we need is something that combines the best aspects of both and gives us a President who adds a new dimension to our political life while knowing that the people themselves have chosen what that dimension should be.
This is not an easy thing to do and it is made all the harder by the unreformed state of the constitutional provisions that govern the presidency. One of the few disadvantages of Mrs Robinson's presidency is that her personal effectiveness in the job has to a large extent concealed the inadequacy of the office.
Its constitutional basis manages the difficult feat of being at once extremely vague and extremely restrictive. On the one hand, as the late John Kelly put it, the Constitution "does not attempt to explain in terms facilitating comparison with other states what the President is." On the other, the President is denied the right to act independently of the government except in a few very specific and limited circumstances.
These problems were widely recognised at the time of the last presidential election, and there was general agreement that the office itself had to be reformed. The obvious success of the Robinson presidency, though, seemed to remove all urgency from the question.
The tensions inherent in the present system did come to the surface at the time of the famous Gerry Adams handshake and when the Government refused Mrs Robinson permission to chair a group on the future of the United Nations - but once they had subsided, they were soon forgotten.
We find ourselves, seven years on, with, if anything, a worse situation than before - as the office has become more important, the gap between what we expect from it and what it can actually do has grown even wider.
The Constitution Review Group under Dr Ken Whitaker, for instance, recognised that the constitutional requirements for nominating a presidential candidate are too restrictive and not sufficiently democratic. It called for ways to be found of strengthening popular involvement in the process.
But here we are, about to fix the presidency for another seven years on the basis of the old, democratically deficient system. What has been achieved by Mary Robinson has been given no shape or form that can survive her tenure.
IN this situation, the political parties, having failed to reform the procedures for the election, have a duty to act as if they had managed to do so. The letter of the law may still be on the side of the old system, but the spirit of change has to be recognised and acted on. In practice this means following four fairly straightforward steps.
The first is that the parties have to see themselves for what they are in this process - mechanisms for nominating candidates. The Constitution gives any group of 20 members of the Dail or Seanad the power to nominate a candidate, but the parties should accept this as a duty rather than a right. It is not an invitation to get one over on the other side, to get rid of potentially troublesome veterans, or to reward faithful servants.
It is a responsibility to offer the people a choice of suitable candidates. All the parties should agree, therefore, that their role is to find and nominate people who can conduct a meaningful campaign, and, if elected, represent Irish people with courage and dignity.
The second step follows rather obviously from this. The parties should form a small, informal all party group charged with identifying and approaching these candidates. An initial list of, say, 5 people should be drawn up. Let me offer some suggestions merely to indicate the kind of candidates the parties should be looking for.
One obvious group to look towards is those religious figures who have embodied a sense of inclusiveness in their lives and visions: the historian and nun, Dr Margaret MacCurtain; the former Presbyterian moderator, Dr John Dunlop; the Catholic theologian, Prof Enda MacDonagh; the Presbyterian clergyman and Gaelic scholar, the Rev Terence McCaughey; and the antipoverty campaigner, Sister Stanislaus Kennedy. A second area is the artistic: the poets Seamus Heaney, Brendan Kennelly, and Eavan Boland, and the novelist, John McGahern, come to mind.
A third is campaigners such as Ms Adi Roche, of the Chernobyl Children's Project; the environmentalist, Prof Emer Colleran; and Senator David Norris. And there are others, such as the educationalists, Dr Aine Hyland and Dr Sheelah Drudy; Dr Ken Whitaker; the former Northern Ireland ombudsman, Mr Maurice Hayes; the development expert, Ms Anastasia Crickley; and Ms Justice Catherine McGuinness, who would make excellent candidates.
The next step is that having identified those who would be willing to run in an election, the parties should pick from among them the ones they want to endorse. Two or three candidates, probably but not necessarily one supported by Fianna Fail, one by Fine Gael and one by the left wing parties, would then be guaranteed enough support to secure a nomination.
And the last step would be to introduce legislation providing limited public funding for each of the campaigns - say £100,000 each - and outlawing any further expenditure on the campaigns. This would have for the parties the incidental benefit of avoiding the expense of an election, but for the public it would have the much more important advantage of ensuring a dignified campaign untainted by the need for candidates to beg from the rich.
Instead of being dazzled, cajoled or browbeaten into supporting Brand X rather than Brand Y, the public would be asked to listen to what three individuals, each of whom has been nominated, have to say. Instead of being a horse race, the election might just be an opportunity for a civilised discussion about where our society is going, and where it would like to go.
Any other way of trying to fill Mrs Robinson's shoes will be unfair, not just to the people, but to anyone unfortunate enough to be elected as a result of a traditional, straightforward party contest.
Does anyone really want to end a political, career as the President who squandered the legacy of Mary Robinson?