Why vote? Let’s make being a TD hereditary!
WHEN my father died, nobody offered me his job. I sometimes wonder if that was an oversight or even a snub. Now, I was in no way qualified to supervise the comings and goings of the many vehicles operated by the construction company for whom Dad worked for most of his life, nor had I a shard of experience of walking in his shoes. Still, I would have expected to at least be asked. After all, that’s how we do things in Ireland, isn’t it?
It’s certainly how they do things in Meath East. Today, the good people of that constituency will be asked to elect a TD to take over the Dáil seat occupied, until last Christmas, by Shane McEntee. While the Fianna Fáil candidate, Thomas Byrne, has made a robust run for the finishing line, it is still widely expected that Helen McEntee, the daughter of the late junior minister, will win the by-election.
She seems like a lovely girl. On the Fine Gael website, McEntee introduces herself as, first and foremost, ‘Shane and Kathleen McEntee’s daughter’. It is an odd form of introduction. Most adults, asked to describe themselves in a single sentence, would not define their lives in terms of who their parents were.
McEntee does go on to tell us about her university education and her ‘strong interest’ in politics (although, in spite of that strong interest, I notice that she spells ‘by- election’ in the less familiar, archaic form of ‘bye election’). She tells us that at 26, she will be ‘a strong voice in the Dáil for those facing emigration’. Beyond that, she doesn’t really have very much to say at all. Because, of course, all you really need to know about Helen McEntee was summed up in her introduction. She’s the TD’s daughter. And in a country that prides itself on its hardwon republicanism, that alone apparently gives her the right to rule.
Why do we do this? Why do we blindly continue to nurture and support political dynasties when there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that any good comes of our voting for them? Why, after spending centuries trying to overthrow a colonial power ruled by monarchy, have we rushed to replace it with an effectively identical system based on birthright?
Our two most recent taoisigh were men who ‘inherited’ their fathers’ Dáil seats. Between them, they oversaw the total collapse of our entire economy and an attempted recovery that has created the worst hardship and misery this State has ever seen. Much of the blame for mishandling the economic crisis is now laid at the feet of the late Brian Lenihan, a man who also inherited his father’s seat. In fact, we liked the Lenihans so much that we elected another one of them, Brian Jr’s brother, Conor, in Dublin South West, in spite of the fact that he had absolutely no background in politics.
I did intend to list the dynasties in the Dáil but when I looked them up on Wikipedia, I learnt that there were literally hundreds of them. Before you even get to C, you’ve got Andrewses and Aylwards, Barrys and Beltons. Throw in siblings and the list is astonishing. I would go so far as to suggest that a shorter list might result from naming the TDs who didn’t have a relative in the Dáil.
This, of course, is not their fault. If we keep electing politicians simply because we once voted for their father, then we can’t blame whole families for putting themselves forward for consideration.
AFTER all, it’s nice work if you can get it and, even in its slimmed-down form, the expenses and pension package knocks everything else in the job market for six. So the proliferation of Healy-Raes is not – however much we might like to think otherwise – the fault of the Healy-Raes; rather, it is the fault of a lazy and short-sighted electorate that time and time again votes for sentiment rather than any real talent.
I’m sure Helen McEntee has talents but I seriously question whether, at 26 and with extremely limited employment experience, she has honed those abilities and learned how best to exploit them for public service. But none of that matters, does it? She had you at McEntee.
For what it’s worth, I hope Helen McEntee doesn’t win today – not just because she is Shane and Kathleen’s daughter. I hope she doesn’t win because, reading a recent interview with her in the Irish Mail on Sunday, I was reminded of myself in the months after my own beloved dad’s death. Her positivity and her bullish talk about grief brought me back to that time when I also thought I was doing fine, just before I toppled over a cliff of sadness and grief. And my father was an old man who died peacefully in a hospital bed.
She has a lengthy and absolutely horrible journey of grief still to navigate. Personally, I think it would be healthier and better for her to do that far away from the bear pit of Leinster House.
As to the people who hold Helen McEntee’s fate in their hands today, I would just point out that since the foundation of this State, we have tended to elect our politicians on the basis of who they know instead of what they know. And just look at how well it’s turned out for us.