Delaney was not Oprah

YOU have to say fair play to Michael Healy Rae for his, eh, questioning of John Delaney at the Oireachtas committee last week. No seriously, the Kerry TD did a marvellous job of making the one-time Football Association of Ireland CEO squirm in his seat.

That it was with embarrassment at the unabashed and breathtaking obsequiousness of Deputy Healy Rae doesn’t lessen the value of what the flat-capped one did. The deputy’s contribution was perhaps the most illuminating of the entire debacle for it showed how Irish politics really works.

There in committee room four it was a case of game recognising game. Healy Rae is the ultimate parish pump politician and in Delaney he spied a kindred spirit, a man whose politics and methods are not at all that dissimilar to his own.

Their constituencies are different, but their means of cultivating them aren’t. Healy Rae is ubiquitous in his constituency and so too was Delaney in his. Both men would turn up at the opening of the proverbial envelope.

On the scene pressing the flesh, retail politics as the Americans call it, gladly taking credit for everything and anything good that happens on their turf. Delaney had this down to a fine art.

If you were to listen to his defenders around the country you’d swear he was responsible for every pitch development, every grant. Over the years he was all too happy to create that impression by his attendance at ground-breakings and ribbon-cuttings.

This narrative of Delaney as some benevolent benefactor spreading

his largess to the provinces fails to take certain things into account, however. For one thing it wasn’t his money, it was the FAI’s and even at that quite a lot of the time it wasn’t even the FAI’s money. The sports capital grants scheme has done more to transform sporting facilities in this country than anything else.

The notion of Delaney as this Oprah-like figure – you get a grant, you get new floodlights, you get a 3G pitch – is utterly fallacious. Clubs and district leagues that got grants did so because they were entitled to them, because people worked bloody hard, got their ducks in a row, crossed Ts and dotted Is, got matching funds, fund-raised and generally burst a gut. Ironically enough those are the people who should be most disgusted by the disfunction that’s been revealed at the top of the FAI. To be fair most of them probably are, but enough of them have been taken in by Delaney’s projection of himself as the indispensable man.

That’s how clientelism works making people feel thankful and indebted to the politician – in this case Delaney – for getting something they were entitled to, something they were going to get regardless of who turned up at the opening of that envelope. So thank you Deputy Healy Rae for making the single most revealing intervention of the entire Delaney affair. Alas we have our doubts as to whether he’ll be all too eager to claim credit on this occasion. A shame, it might just might be the most valuable contribution he’s ever made to public discourse in his decade or so in our national parliament.