Page "Patrick Hillery" Paragraph 15

By 1990, Hillery's term seemed to be reaching a quiet end, until the events of 1982 returned, changing the course of the history of the presidency, Ireland and Hillery forever.

Three candidates had been nominated in the 1990 presidential election: the then Tánaiste, Brian Lenihan from Fianna Fáil ( widely viewed as the certain winner ), Austin Currie from Fine Gael and Mary Robinson from Labour.

In May 1990, in an on the record interview with Jim Duffy, a post-graduate student researching the Irish presidency, Lenihan had confirmed that he had been one of those phoning Hillery in January 1982.

He confirmed that Haughey too had made phone calls.

Jim Duffy mentioned the information in a newspaper article on the history of the Irish presidency on 28 September 1990 in The Irish Times.

In October 1990, Lenihan changed his story, claiming ( even though he had said the opposite for eight years ) that he had played " no hand, act or part " in pressurising President Hillery that night.

He made these denials in an interview in The Irish Press ( a pro-Fianna Fáil newspaper ) and on an RTÉ 1 political show, Questions and Answers.

When it was realised that he had said the opposite in an on the record interview in May 1990, his campaign panicked and tried to pressurise Duffy into not revealing the information.

Their pressure backfired, particularly when his campaign manager, Bertie Ahern, named Duffy as the person to whom he had given the interview in a radio broadcast, forcing a besieged Duffy to reverse an earlier decision and release the relevant segment of his interview with Lenihan.

In the aftermath, the minority party in the coalition government, the Progressive Democrats indicated that unless Lenihan resigned from cabinet, they would resign from government and support an opposition motion of no confidence in Dáil Éireann, bringing down the government and causing a general election.

Though publicly Taoiseach Charles Haughey insisted that it was entirely a matter for Lenihan, his " friend of thirty years " and that he was putting no pressure on him, in reality he gave Lenihan a letter of resignation to sign.

When Lenihan refused, Haughey formally advised President Hillery to dismiss Lenihan as Tánaiste, Minister for Defence and member of the cabinet, which the President as constitutionally required duly did.

Lenihan became the only candidate from his party to date to lose the presidency, having begun the campaign as the apparent certain winner.

Instead Labour's Mary Robinson, who already had had a spectacularly successful campaign, became the seventh president of Ireland, the first elected president from outside Fianna Fáil, and the first woman to hold the office.