From top Former Fine Gael minister, independent Tipperary TD and Ireland’s wealthiest parliamentarian Michael Lowry; Eamonn Kelly

Someone once quipped that champions league football is a game where 22 millionaires kick a ball around a field. In the same vein you might say that the Dáil is a place where an assembly of millionaires discuss budgeting and poverty.

Wealth Creation Is Easy

I know it can seem mean-minded to go on about politician’s pay and pensions. But they really are quite generous and it’s no surprise to anyone really that we are represented by so many millionaires. They can’t help but be millionaires with the kind of pay, pensions and perks they enjoy.

But, apart from what some might think about wage and pension fairness and so on, such well-paid positions may actually have the effect of putting politicians out of touch with the lives of ordinary people. If wealth is coming to you as easy as it comes to Irish politicians, it must be very difficult for them to conceive of people who cannot create any wealth whatsoever.

It’s little wonder then that wealthy right-wing politicians from privileged backgrounds often conclude that poor people aren’t trying hard enough. To the fortunate in this society, wealth acquisition is a cinch, because wealth begets wealth.

But for a class of people who are creating policy and budgeting for others, it is a deadly delusion to assume that wealth creation is easy, particularly when you consider that Irish people were landed with such a huge bill after the banking collapse, along with austerity for their “sins”, due in no small way to gross mismanagement by the same overpaid political class.

The Political Rich List

Michael Lowry, the disgraced Fine Gael politician, now independent, tops the rich list, because the people of his constituency re-elected him in a landslide, impressed no doubt by the following Wikipedia entry, and deciding he was just the man to be sending to Dublin to crack open the coffers.

“A succession of political scandals pursued Lowry throughout his time in office. These included allegations of irregularities relating to the granting of a mobile phone licence to Esat Telecom, which were later investigated by the Moriarty Tribunal, plans for the Dublin Light Rail System and the closure of rural post offices. The 1997 McCracken Tribunal revealed supermarket tycoon Ben Dunne had paid IR£395,000 for an extension to Lowry’s home in Tipperary.^[5] The Tribunal concluded that Lowry had evaded tax. This allegation prompted Lowry’s resignation from the Cabinet in November 1996. Taoiseach John Bruton announced that Lowry would not be allowed to stand as a Fine Gael candidate at the next election, and he resigned from the party.”

He ran for election as an independent, topping the poll in three successive elections, and now tops the political rich list.

You hear the word mandate bandied around a lot in politics, but what exactly is the mandate for this politician from the people of his constituency? It’s a fair question, because he’s not alone among Irish politicians in having a chequered career endorsed by poll-topping returns. Maybe they just think he’s good at appropriating lots of cash from various sources. Which he apparently is. And that, in an Irish politician, are really the only skills required by a hungry electorate.

The Public Sucks

Maybe the reason Irish people keep re-electing millionaires, even those ones with dubious pasts, is that ultimately, the electorate doesn’t admire policy creation or social equity quite as much as it admires raw brute power and cold cash.

The American comedian George Carlin once said that he never complains about politicians. He listens to other people complaining, as if politicians come from some other rarefied reality, rather than from the ranks of ordinary people. He reasons that if politicians suck, well then, the public must suck too. The politicians are a reflection of the electorate. You’re simply not going to produce a high-minded politician from a low-minded electorate. As Carlin quips, it’s a case of garbage in, garbage out (the exception to this of course is Michael D. Higgins, a testament to the high-mindedness of the Galway electorate).

Over-paid, over-pensioned and overbearing

Ultimately, the electorate are the architects of an arrangement where an assembly of over-paid and over-pensioned millionaires make budgeting decisions for everyone else, and then the same electorate, with their Christian credentials to the fore, are aghast at the social injustices this system produces, blaming it all on the politicians.

While George Carlin makes a valid point, he spoils it a bit by saying he never votes. But he’s a comedian and this is just a setup for a fresh joke: he reasons that if he doesn’t vote he has every right to complain, but that if he did vote he’d have no right to complain, because he’d be partly responsible for electing the self-serving politicians in the first place. By voting, he has relinquished his right to complain.

Eamonn Kelly is a Galway-based  freelance Writer and Playwright. His weekly round-up appears here every Monday.

Previously: Eamonn Kelly on Broadsheet

From top: Des O Malley (left), following his resignation as leader of the Progressive Democrats on September 5, 1993; “I’ve never laid a brick before,” joked Tánaiste Leo Varadkar while holding a concrete block at the Galway City Innovation District last Friday

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In a photo op the Tánaiste Leo Varadkar went tricking around with a concrete block, which he referred to as a “brick”. Later, hard hat still on, he turned his builder’s eye on twitter and decided it was actually a sewer. One whose passages he’s often seen to scuttle through, both as himself and in disguise.

Speaking of building, Patrick Freyne had an excellent piece in the Irish Times about the small cottages in Dublin’s docklands being dwarfed by high rise buildings. But given that this was the Irish Times, Freyne felt it necessary to mention that two of the people finding themselves buried alive in this manner had a “beautifully tended garden”, just in case you might be thinking that they were tasteless working-class lazybones deserving of all the annoyances big business can inflict on them.

Why do ordinary people always have to prove they are good and decent people, undeserving of the crap that is often dumped on them by the generally awful people of big, unanswerable money?

Climate

Anyway, it hardly matters anymore, the way things are going we’ll all soon be washed away in a flood, fried like eggs on a griddle or simply starve to death from food shortages.

Will I tiresomely point out once again the relationship between neo-liberal policies – perpetual growth in a finite system – and climate change? No, I won’t. I’ll get in line with the delusionary talk, in the belief that thinking positive will somehow fix the climate.

RTÉ news reported that Madagascar is the first country in the world in the process of being almost totally destroyed by climate change. The people are starving due to drought and crop failure. This, according to scientists, will be the likely scenario for much of the Southern part of the African continent.

But David McWilliams in the Irish Times, thinking positive, countered this bleak view with the idea that Africa, due to demographic anomalies, would actually one day be the richest continent in the world, because everyone else is dying off. Given climate change, that sounds like traditional African bad luck to me. The meek shall inherit a scorched Earth with occasional severe flooding.

Des O’Malley

Desi O’Malley died. Known as the best taoiseach Ireland never had, there were fitting tributes from all sides of the political spectrum, as they say on RTÉ.

My one abiding personal memory of him was when I attended a rally in the 1980s, in Galway’s Leisureland, when the Progressive Democrats (PDs) formed. I was there more out of curiosity than any particular interest in the PDs, and simply because I happened to live nearby at the time. All the representatives of the new party were seated at a long table on the stage, not unlike the arrangement for the last supper. There was a podium out front from where Mary Harney stirred the partisan crowd to whoops and cheers with fiery rhetoric flung around the place more for effect than sense.

But the highlight for me was that Des O’ Malley kept dipping his head beneath the table while Mary roused the rabble. I wondered what he was doing and watched carefully to see that he was actually sneakily smoking cigarettes down there. That, in a way, formed my political opinion of the PDs. They were wont to sneak away to do things you mightn’t like.

Man Up Van

Van Morrison is still going ballistic about live gig starvation, demonstrating how much he really needs an audience to maintain his emotional equilibrium. I love his music, his style, his soulful singing. But in relation to the pandemic, he has been coming across as an awful prima donna. Man up, Van.

Across the water Boris Johnson declared that he had never lied to anyone, despite there being ample evidence everywhere that he had lied at one time or another to practically everyone. People rose up in indignation in the twitter sewer, apparently not realizing that he was actually just lying again.

Meanwhile in Tokyo, someone on the Irish Olympic team had the good idea for the team to bow to their Japanese hosts in a gesture that was both heart-warming and appreciated. Now that’s style.

Future’s So Bright…

The Galway Film Fleadh (FlimFla) did its thing in a local park to avoid the not so great indoors. This one was different because, even despite the heatwave, mask-wearing has curtailed the donning of serious sunglasses, changing the entire tone of the festival. What is it with plonkers who stare you down from behind dark glasses?

Meanwhile the pandemic continues. On Friday I heard at least a dozen ambulance sirens during the course of the day. While they might not all be virus related it added to the sense of urgency and panic. Or maybe they were just people being rushed to hospital from the Film Fleadh, blinded by the sun.

Finally, in a polity that can’t seem to regulate big business, greedy landlords, exploitative employers and corporate tax-dodgers, officials become Mr Speed when it comes to regulating soup kitchens. That, in a sense, is all you really need to know about FFFG Ireland. We can turn a blind eye to tax-haven billions, but we absolutely won’t tolerate possible low standards in soup kitchens.

Still, it’s not all bad news. Soup kitchens or not, the Indo reported that the Irish are now, proudly, the fattest people in Europe. It’s either a feast or a famine around here – and often at the same time.

Eamonn Kelly is a Galway-based  freelance Writer and Playwright. His weekly round-up appears here every Monday.

Previously: Eamonn Kelly on Broadsheet

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