The Dáil is a total waste of time. It’s pure theatre, Gaiety down the road
He’s headstrong and opinionated and he shoots from lip. But even if his no-holds-barred style shocks you, you will f ind what new TD Michael Fitzmaurice has to say very refreshing indeed
MICHAEL Fitzmaurice has only been in the Dáil for a few weeks but already he exudes the easy familiarity of an Leinster House old hand. As he walks past what our cadre of political journalists call the plinth and down towards Kildare Street, he has a word for everyone. The guards in the security hut get a hearty wave while Michael, a great big bear of a man, extends a hand towards anyone who greets him. On the way back to his office, he spies a statue of Éamon de Valera. ‘Not the worst of them,’ he mutters, while nodding in the direction of the Fianna Fáil aristocrat, the slightest hint of reverence in his voice. Then he shrugs his shoulders as if remembering the reforming ticket on which he stood for election and flinches slightly. ‘This place is an awful lot of auld sh***, though, isn’t it?’ he says.
One of the country’s two newest TDs, a distinction he shares with socialist politician Paul Murphy, Michael won Luke ‘ Ming’ Flanagan’s seat in the recent Roscommon/South Leitrim byelection. When he took his seat he vowed to shake things up in national politics, adding that if he didn’t see results smartly he’d head for the hills.
‘I can make a living outside this sh***,’ he says. ‘I’m not a quitter and I don’t want to be George Lee [RTÉ’s agriculture correspondent who successfully ran for Fine Gael but threw in the towel once he realised the limitations of the Dáil backbenches].
‘I’ll always remember Vincent Browne saying to me, “Sure, how could anyone spend their time in the Dáil?” I know what he means but I’ll call it if I think it’s b******s. When I was a councillor, people knew I’d speak my mind. I’d tear up a road if it had to be done.’
I can make a living outside this. I’m not a quitter and don’t want to be George Lee
He smiles broadly at the recollection of his heady days in local politics in Galway, where he was born in 1970 on a farm in Williamstown, on the border between Roscommon and Galway.
He lost his mother Margaret when he was 10 years old and was raised by his three older sisters: ‘My mother had a massive heart attack when she was 45. We grew up in a two-bedroom cottage and we had just put in the bathroom when she died.’
The farming family were completely self-sufficient, rearing turkeys for Christmas, keeping pigs and hens and growing all their vegetables and oats.
‘We had no fridge. We stored the ham from the pigs in a tea chest and covered it with salt. We had absolutely nothing but we didn’t want for anything either,’ he says.
He spent a few years in the local comprehensive but quit to work the farm, which had become run down after Michael’s father lost an eye when he was hit with a sheaf of oats. In order to pay for livestock and outbuildings, Michael took any work he could get.
‘I drove cattle around the ring in the mart for £2 an hour; I was a bouncer at the local dancehall; I worked on other farms – we had f*** all on our farm, so I needed to.’
A well-known local figure, he has had his fingers in many pies over the years but it was his leadership of the Turf Cutters & Contractors Association that brought him to prominence and paved his way to the Dáil.
He insists he’s neither left nor right about the growing ideological divide in Dáil Éireann but rather ‘straight down the middle’. It’s obvious that he’s a man of action but his rough and ready manner disguises a quick brain and a stubborn streak coupled with a readiness to roll up his sleeves.
He also doesn’t agree with everything that his predecessor Luke ‘Ming’ Flanagan stood for, as I discover when I ask where he stands on the cannabis issue.
‘I don’t smoke cannabis, just fags,’ he says, unhesitatingly. ‘But I think now there would be more pressing issues than having cannabis legalised. I’m not driven by politics like the crowd in here. I don’t give a damn about the whizz and the buzz. If I have an idea about how we could create a few jobs, I’ll ring a man at midnight about it and I don’t care who gets the credit for it.’
At the moment, he’s fired up about his plan for 600 apprenticeships to bring broadband technology to rural Ireland and has passed a document about it to Richard Bruton.
‘I found him fairly sound to deal with,’ he says of the senior minister. He’s also getting his ‘nails stuck into’ an EU directive that will, he says, cripple lorry manufacturers.
When he was first elected to the Dáil his friends asked him what they should call him.
‘Did you ever hear the beat of that?’ he guffaws. ‘I says call me Fitz like ya always have. I have no time for any of that auld s****. You know how people who go off to Amerikay or England for a wet weekend and come back with a new accent. That’s odd.’
He is keen to emphasise that he has no
high and mighty airs. Even on the night of his election, while his campaign workers had a few bevvies in the local, he headed off because he had to be at a livestock sale at Roscommon market the following morning. After that, he had a charity tractor run.
He had reservations about whether he was doing the right thing becoming a TD but it wasn’t until he was a week in the Dáil that it really sank in. After a long row one evening in the chamber about some arcane rule over procedures, Michael was feeling fairly dejected when he climbed into his Ford Mondeo to drive to Roscommon town for a ceremony with Hollywood actor Chris O’Dowd.
‘It was a long auld drive. I had plenty of time for thinking and it wasn’t great,’ he says ruefully.
Did he feel depressed about what he had witnessed?
‘Nah,’ he says, ‘that would be too strong a word for it.’
Disappointed maybe? ‘Nah,’ he says, shaking his head. Frustrated?
‘Yeah maybe I was feeling a bit frustrated. But then when I heard Chris O’Dowd speaking, he was so inspirational that I felt better. The
I think there would be more pressing issues than legalising cannabis
Dáil chamber is just a total waste of time; it’s pure theatre. It’s like the Gaiety down the road.
‘If you ask a question in there, it’s twisted and turned every which way. They’ll talk about everything bar the question. I don’t believe in this whip system. If legislation is being brought in, it should be through consensus, with everyone free to add their bit. There has to be a more efficient way of doing things’.
After most Dáil sittings, Michael drives the 160km home to his farmhouse, which he shares with his wife Maria and three children, whose ages range from nine to 14.
‘Maybe one or two nights I’d stay in town – we get a good deal in the Mont Clare if we don’t take the breakfast. I have the breakfast in the restaurant here, usually a bowl of porridge. I wouldn’t have the fry every morning,’ he says about his new lifestyle.
Once he’s fuelled up for the day, Michael is continually on the go. His new office in Roscommon town is almost ready but, until he moves in, he runs his clinic out of his car, tearing along the boreens of his rural constituency, attending meetings on everything from organic farming to EU directives on welding and helping his constituents with problems over farm grants and so forth.
He rises every morning at 6am to check his cattle and is rarely home before 1.30am.
Even if he’s at meetings late at night in a hotel, he doesn’t touch a drop of alcohol: ‘Don’t get me wrong, if I’m at a wedding, I’ll drink as much as the next fellow and I’ll dance as much too but I won’t have alcohol for another three months. There’s something evil about alcohol.’
A close relative suffers from alcoholism and Michael spares little in telling of its effects on children and family, as well as the five tough years he spent getting his relation back on to the straight and narrow.
He’s passionate about bringing jobs and industry into the countryside and helping small farmers in the west, where he says farming is the lifeblood of the community.
If he’s not out and about or in the Dáil, he’s meeting people in his fam- ily home, which sounds like a bustling place. His long-suffering wife Maria – who works as a chef locally – knew what she was getting into when she married him, he says. They met in Dowds, the local pub, when Michael was on his way home from a football match.
‘We have an open house, the door is never locked or anything. A fella comes in and I say to him, “Put on the kettle there and make yourself a drop of tea. Make me one when ye’re at it.” I don’t believe in bulls***. Always remember where you came from is what I say.’
For all his misgivings, he seems to enjoy the cut and thrust of the Dáil and the feeling – which may turn out to be illusory – of being in a position to change things. Up to now he has made a living by farming and contracting.
‘I have been doing silage, saving
If pushing hard for your local area is called parish pump, then that’s me
hay and turfcutting for farmers since I was a boy,’ he says. ‘It’s tough work but it suits me. You don’t take any notice of the hours you work – you could be up half the night on the farm and you’d never think of it as work. I’m not one for pastimes or reading books.
‘I was on a holiday 10 years ago in Portugal. We were in Lanzarote last year for a wedding – ’twas desperate, all lava and concrete. You can’t beat Ireland on a nice day.’
His foreign forays are not the only issue he has with Europe: he blames the EU for destroying small and mid-sized farms.
‘They told us not to grow vegetables, that we weren’t efficient at it, and then gave us a grant for punching a staple into a bullock’s ear.
‘The EU sucked the life out of the small farmer and turned him into a robot.’
Farming and family are obviously two of the most important things in his life and he’s dead proud of his nieces and nephews, reeling off their impressive achievements in university and in the professions. One of his nieces is singled out for special praise.
‘She’s like me. There’s a bit of auld drive in her. But I’m an awful believer in education. Those kids never had very much. It just shows you what can be done.
‘Yet for all their degrees and everything, not one of them lives near home.’
He adds: ‘That’s one of the things I want to do when I’m here – give people the choice to live in the west of Ireland. If pushing hard for your local area is called parish pump, then that’s me.’