Could David Norris become Ireland's first gay president?

[w8liftinglady]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/oct/23/david-norris-ireland-presidential-race?newsfeed=true

Posh, intellectual and openly gay, David Norris is an outsider in the Irish presidential elections, but just might be the winner, if his showing on the campaign trail is anything to go by

Ten weeks ago, when David Norris quit the race to become Ireland's next president, sunk by an apparently devastating scandal, he crossed the Samuel Beckett bridge in Dublin and quoted the playwright. "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better." Norris, a witty, boastful, posh, Protestant, piano-playing, unashamedly intellectual Joycean scholar, was the runaway favourite to become Ireland's new president in the elections on Thursday. He would have become the first openly gay president anywhere in the world. But key members of his campaign team abandoned him after it emerged that the senator wrote to the Israeli authorities on senate notepaper appealing for clemency over the conviction of his former lover, Ezra Yizhak, for having sex with a 15-year-old boy.

Norris abandoned his independent candidacy and fled for a long holiday in Cyprus. Normal politics, in supposedly conservative Ireland, resumed, and more conventional candidates entered the race. After some weeks abroad, a member of staff phoned Norris. There were 3,000 emails in his inbox. Three were hostile. His Dublin home, where he keeps 10,000 books, looked like Christmas – it was festooned with cards. Ordinary people – from nurses to nuns – wanted Norris back in the race. So this stocky, bearded man with a cut-glass accent that seems to hark back to another era decided to try again. "Everybody's been talking about me as the Comeback Kid despite, all the flak," he says from a car hurtling between meet-and-greet sessions with the Irish public. Whether Norris is trying again only to fail again will depend on the forthcoming twists of what must be the most topsy-turvy presidential race on the planet.