‘You should be ashamed... it’s not right’

As politicians traded cliches on TV, one young woman spoke and brought reality into a tired, cynical election, writes Gene Kerrigan

THERE was a moment last week when the General Election got real. Up to then, it was a well-rehearsed game. Leo Varadkar had been polished, prepped and propped.

Everything about him and his fellow ministers — his collection of hustlers and landlords — shouted “Vote for me, Mr Charisma, ready to continue the wonderful job that I and my talented ministers have been doing”.

Micheal Martin had been sanded down to give his party a less shop-soiled appearance.

Everything about him and his collection of chancers, landlords and Haughey-apologists shouted, “Vote for me, Mr Reliable, here to demonstrate that Fianna Fail has learned humbling lessons and we’re ready to do again the job we did so brilliantly in decades gone by”.

They and their parties were brimming with confidence. All they had to do was slip into the old roles, and mouth new versions of the well-worn lines, and we’d respond like dogs who’ve heard a familiar whistle.

And, who knows — before this is over, perhaps we will.

The establishment at

RTE and VMTV decided to cooperate with this strategy, by hyping the boring headto-head debates that exclude Sinn Fein and anyone else outside of the old firm of FGFF Ltd (& Sons).

It might work.

We might, yet again, buy the proposition that all Irish elections, forever and ever, are about whether we’re sufficiently pissed off with Tweedledum to replace them with Tweedledee.

For me, the hold-on-aminute moment came in the Prime Time programme on RTE last Thursday evening.

It was about commuting from Navan to work in Dublin — but it could have been about dozens of different ways in which reality has slapped our young people in the face.

In their greed, and their conservative politics, the people who run this country have vandalised the infrastructure on which all of us depend.

Wedded to outdated ideology, they have repeatedly proven themselves incapable of change.

A nation needs reliable housing, transport, health facilities, education. And we require them to be maintained in line with the numbers of people who need all these things.

That’s a basic of how humans live. It’s a building block of society. If you haven’t got a handle on that you oughtn’t to be in the politics business.

Just look at the kip. Just look around at what they’ve done to it.

Record waiting lists for basic medical procedures.

Crucial services skimped on everything from autism to scoliosis.

A GP emergency, with experienced doctors retiring and new ones emigrating, so there’s nobody to fill their roles.

Nurses who’ve emigrated looking sceptically at offers to come back. Once burned.

Emergency departments with exhausted staff, huge numbers of people on trolleys, a problem that was declared a ‘national emergency’ 14 years ago.

Professionals tell us such facilities are degrading for staff and dangerous for patients.

“So much done, just a bit more to do!” declares Micheal Varadkar, or is it

Leo Martin?

Meanwhile, extraordinary acts of violence have rocked our cities and towns. And some of us wonder if some of this is a consequence of the way hard-earned social protections were casually discarded in the austerity blitz.

A new generation of kids has entered the old prefab classrooms, cold and damp and vermin-infested, that some of us complained about 20 years ago.

Housing is vastly more expensive — whether buying or renting — than the equivalent would be in any of the many places abroad that we don’t want to live in.

People in their 20s and 30s live with their parents. Meanwhile, another generation of fat cats use their fortunes to dominate a bloated, exploitative housing market, where they prosper from hoarded land and extortionate rents.

Many people who work in Dublin have to live in distant towns, as they’re the only places they can afford.

And it was one of those people, Kellie Dempsey, living in Navan, who made it real last Thursday.

Prime Time carried a report on two couples — one of them featured Ms Dempsey — who spend three hours a day commuting, in a country where politicians decided not to provide adequate public transport.

It was a sobering look at the tiring lives of people who don’t see their kids for 12 hours every working day — if they dare to have children in such circumstances.

How come we’ve arranged things so that large numbers of our people can get affordable housing only by living hours away from where they must work to pay for it?

Coincidentally, isn’t it nice to see the landowners, speculators, builders and landlords profiting from this?

It was a moving, angermaking report. I ended up admiring the couples, feeling sorry for their plight — and damn the bit of use that is to them.

In the studio, David McCullagh did his usual to-the-point job, and we had good politicians speaking. None better than Catherine Connolly, who has almost despaired of making those in power listen to sense.

Minister Regina Doherty represented Government. She spoke of how such problems are a symptom of the success of the recovery led by her Government.

There was the usual tired old verbal shimmy. Ms Doherty had a go at the Fianna Fail guy and he had a go right back.

Ping-pong politics.

Don’t they know what this lack of basic services does to people? Don’t they care? Have they anything, anything at all relevant to say about it?

(I didn’t make a note of the Fianna Fail TD’s name. And, memory being what it is, I’ve forgotten. But I’m pretty certain it was a man in a suit. My apologies, sir. But, then, you really didn’t say anything relevant to anything other than your own re-election.)

In the report, Kellie Dempsey had despaired at the quality of life forced on her and her partner by the politics of FGFF Ltd (& Sons).

She spoke of emigrating. Abroad, they’d be away from their loved ones — but if they had children they wouldn’t have to see them only when the kids are asleep.

And before the programme ended, David McCullagh asked her if she’d heard anything to change her mind.

“No,” she said. She said she found it embarrassing that the minister spoke of success. “I think you should be ashamed that you are pushing this on people. This is our quality of life. We’re forced to emigrate to have a family. It’s not right.”

And the camera cut to Regina Doherty. She had nothing to say. The minister had the decency not to throw meaningless words at Ms Dempsey. She just sat in silence. Irrelevant.

It was a moving moment, in which one of us — to use that old cliche — spoke truth to power, and power was momentarily stunned.

Meanwhile, the pundits speak of “the numbers game”, and how it has to be Tweedle Fianna or Tweedle Gael. And they know the numbers better than most of us.

And they know, as we all do, what that means.

It’s frustrating.

It’s shaming that the left hasn’t made more of the utter failure of the right to provide the basic services and conditions on which a modern society depends.

Lives are forced out of shape and hopes of a job, a home and a decent quality of life are crushed. Meanwhile, the comfortable classes prosper from this.

A general election by itself won’t change things. The muting of Sinn Fein is despicable, but I’m long past placing my hopes in Sinn Fein alone.

But I do know this.

Every vote cast for the twin parties of Micheal Varadkar and Leo Martin is a vote that says things should never, ever, ever change.

‘Just look at the kip. Just look around at what they’ve done to it’