Winners

After an inauspicious start, the big winner is Mary Lou McDonald and Sinn Féin.

So what if they drove people up the walls with their weeks and weeks of dithering over choosing a candidate?

There was the will-she-won’t-she mini-drama of whether party leader Mary Lou McDonald might run. Talk of various high-profile Shinners entering the race. Respected public figures from outside the party were mentioned.

And then, with everyone fed up from all the faffing about, Mary Lou ramped up expectations with the teaser promise of a “game-changer” intervention before the close of nominations.

It would be of Match of the Day proportions.

In the end, the party didn’t field a player, plumping instead for Catherine Connolly, who had been on the pitch and under their noses for months.

Such a damp squib.

But such a good choice.

Humble guys

The Men of Humility are winners too.

That would be Fianna Fáil’s Billy Kelleher and Fine Gael’s Seán Kelly, two sitting MEPs who wanted to run for the Áras but were denied the chance by their respective leaderships.

Billy and Seán, with the utmost humility, bowed to the pleading of their many friends and supporters and decided to enter the fray.

Seán was firmly bundled off the pitch before he got a chance to make his case. With Tánaiste and party leader Simon Harris backing Heather Humphreys from the outset, a wave of senior Ministers and parliamentary party members declared their support for Heather. Once he knew he hadn’t the numbers to win, the Kerry-based MEP stepped aside for his Monaghan colleague.

Billy, meanwhile, wanted a contest and not a coronation. Taoiseach Micheál Martin’s inexplicable determination to impose Jim Gavin as Fianna Fáil candidate went down like a lead balloon outside of his cohort of acolytes with Government jobs.

Billy, with the utmost humility, went in to bat for them.

Micheál strong-armed enough backbenchers into voting for his unp