His predecessor, Mary McAleese (btw: when you leave office in Ireland, you no longer use the title), came from the sort of squishy populist center of Irish politics, except that she's from the North, which is a big deal. Oh yeah, I should mention, we've had women Presidents.
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Big take-away: 30 years of Irish Presidents have been progressive in significant ways, supporters of the little guy, compassionate, and extremely popular in office.
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A not insignificant factor is how Irish elections work. We use a ranked system. This prevents "wasting" votes, discourages divisive two-partyism, and promotes broader sort of compromise position taking.
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Not one of those presidents was elected with a simple majority of first preference votes. Mary Robinson, widely regarded as our best president ever, didn't even a plurality of first preference votes!
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Instead they were elected based on "transfers": 2nd and 3rd preference votes from voters whose 1st and then 2nd choices were eliminated.
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We've had divisive candidates, Dana Scalon comes to mind, a former star (she sang for Ireland at the Eurovision) who ran on a platform of strong support for "traditional values". She got 2.9% of the vote.
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...recently *repealed*...
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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Plus - she currently campaigns for climate justice, under
@MRFCJ (I saw her speak very passionately on this topic not too long ago, as a guest of@lisapjackson ) -
And she fought against the contraception ban!
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