Friday is Presidential Election Day in Ireland. What was a ho-hum electoral season got overheated when the campaign of Jim Gavin, a Gaelic football legend turned political neanderfuck, and one of only three candidates on the ballot, imploded at the 11th hour over news that he'd screwed a former tenant out of overpaid rent 16 years ago.
Irish campaigns are a whole lot shorter than we’re used to stateside: The presidential ballot wasn't finalized until late September. But that still left time for Gavin to commit a passel of gaffes.
Gavin won six All-Ireland championships as manager of Dublin's football squad from 2012 through 2019, including an unprecedented five Sam Maguire Cups in a row in his last five years. Incumbent president Michael Higgins, a leprechaun-looking dude who became massively popular with his countrymen since taking office in 2011, was prohibited from running again because of federal term limits. Over the summer, Ireland's Taoiseach, Micheál Martin, began lobbying for Gavin to run for the job under his party, Fianna Fáil. Martin backed the footballer over several career politicians within the country's most popular party who were eager to be on the ticket. Gavin answered Martin's call, and on Sept. 9, he was officially named Fianna Fáil’s candidate.
Gavin's campaign got off to a rough start, and never recovered. As a sportsman, Gavin always cut a stoic figure—the Irish Examiner once described him as being in a “typically emotionless state” on the sidelines. And since he oversaw Dublin during what is generally considered the most dynastic era of football in the 140-year history of the Gaelic Athletic Association, Gavin rarely had his methods questioned or faced hard questions in post-match press conferences. The only non-politician on the presidential ballot, Gavin's inexperience at handling controversy or adversarial journalists was exposed from the jump. He took his first political hits when he made what for the Irish was a wishy-washy statement about Gaza. Gavin said what was happening was “unconscionable,” but added, “I believe the military objectives have probably been reached for that military campaign.” He apologized for considering Israel's actions as a military matter, saying he should have also pointed out “that genocide was taking place.”
And Gavin, who was born and raised in Dublin and made his name in the capital city, got pounded some more while making a shameless play for the rural vote. He shot his first official campaign video at his uncle’s farm in Kildare the same week that he attended the National Ploughing Championships, a sort of rustic Olympiad, in Offaly. But viewers mocked Gavin’s culchie cosplay, pointing out that while pretending to work the land in the ad, he was wearing white pants with his wellies, and that he’d left a farm gate open, which in real life would result in all the cows getting loose.
Gavin also had to apologize for not following the law while using drones to shoot footage for another campaign ad. Gavin is chief executive of Ireland’s aviation authority in his career away from the football pitch, and had made public safety announcements regarding proper drone use in his civil servant role.
But those blunders were forgotten after the cataclysm that took place at the candidates roundtable held during the Oct. 5 broadcast of the RTÉ network’s The Week in Politics show.
All three candidates on the ballot—Gavin; Catherine Connolly, an independent politician and member of Oireachtas (the parliament of Ireland); and Heather Humphreys, the Fine Gael nominee, former Oireachtas member and credit union president—showed up for the program. Polls showed that nearly a third of the electorate remained undecided heading into the debate, so the race was still anybody's to win. Host Áine Lawlor grilled them all with fervor. Gavin got what would turn out to be the most consequential line of questioning when she confronted him about a story that had been bubbling up over the weekend, that he'd once stiffed a former tenant at an apartment he owned:
Lawlor: Do you owe a former tenant €3,300 in rent that was overpaid to your account that you didn't pay back?
Gavin: Yes, on that matter, um, it's over 16 years ago. It was a very…
Lawlor: It’s simple: Do you owe the money?
Gavin: Stressful time for myself and my family. Like a lot of of families and couples, we got into financial difficulty at that time. And on that particular issue, I don't have all the information to date. If it happened, I'm very sorry that it happened...
Lawlor: And you haven’t managed to check it out since?
Gavin: No, I'm looking into it and I will deal with that with urgency.
Surely most viewers had no idea about the debt Lawlor was referencing in the stilted segment. But anybody could tell it caused Gavin to come apart like a cheap suit. Landlord is a much dirtier word in Ireland than in the U.S.; just being outed as a landlord likely would have posed political problems for Gavin. Being exposed as a tenant cheat was too much for him to handle. Gavin lived up to his promise to "deal with that with urgency," all right. Before the day was out, Gavin had completely bailed on his campaign.
Mere hours after the debate, Gavin issued a statement, saying, "I made a mistake that was not in keeping with my character and the standards I set myself. I am now taking steps to address the matter." He did not explain what the mistake was, but added that as a result he was ending his run for presidency "with immediate effect."
It later came out that Gavin's creditor was Niall Donald, a journalist and the host of a popular true crime podcast. Donald's story was that Gavin was his landlord for two years beginning in 2007. When Donald moved out of his apartment in the Northside section of Dublin in 2009, he forgot to cancel a bank draft that automatically paid €550 a month to Gavin for a portion of the rent. Upon discovering the mistake after six months of mistaken payments, he contacted Gavin, who was already affiliated with Dublin football but was little known outside the county GAA at the time, and asked for a refund of €3,300 (approximately $3,832 today). That was "the full extent of my life savings" at the time, Donald said.
He even brought a letter requesting the refund to Gavin's parents. But Gavin repeatedly ignored him. "If you've ever been in those circumstances where you know, you feel that you've been ripped off, like it gives you this feeling of being powerless, and you know, I was really struggling financially," Donald said on a podcast. "That's the truth of it."
Donald said he gave up trying to get his money back years ago. But because Gavin went on to become iconic as Dublin manager, Donald said, his buddies ribbed him through the years about the debt he was owed by one of Ireland's most famous guys.
"Every time Dublin won an All-Ireland or whatever," Donald said, "people would say, 'Oh, there's your mate Jim Gavin.'"
With Gavin possibly on the verge of the presidency, Donald understandably resurrected the tale. He did not expect it to hit with such impact. Donald also learned that Gavin's apartment had since been repossessed by a bank.
"Does the punishment fit the crime? Probably not," Donald said. "I kind of feel sorry for him that he wasn't handled better."
Gavin paid off his debt to Donald days after dropping out of the race. Because he abandoned his campaign so late, Gavin's name will still be on the ballot come Election Day.
