Turncoat TD Neasa will NOT get my vote again
IVOTED for Green TD Neasa Hourigan in the last election. The leftie firebrand seemed to have come out of nowhere, but I was taken by her profile as a mother of a special needs child and an educated professional who knew how tough it was for families to get on the property ladder, not to mention the obstacles parents face getting supports for vulnerable children.
Neasa struck me as someone who lived in the real world, not some cosseted bubble. But perhaps just as important to me was her potential as a foil to Mary Lou McDonald and Sinn Féin’s unstoppable rise in the constituency.
More fool me.
Neasa’s throwing her lot behind Sinn Féin’s motion that the new maternity hospital be built on State-owned land might not have been a shock to political insiders, but it felt like a slap in the face to me.
And that’s before we get to speculation about her leaving the Greens to become Mary Lou’s running mate in the next general election. The horror!
In putting her idealism ahead of making concrete progress in the shape of a long-awaited state-of-the-art maternity hospital, Neasa also weakened the Government she signed up to support.
Doubtless she and her defenders would argue that principle is everything but even if we take that purist view, which I certainly don’t, surely there are higher principles than the right to give birth without catching sight of a Child of Prague statue on a shelf?
LIKE the principle of not cosying up to a party with such a dubious recent past as Sinn Féin’s with its links to paramilitary violence? There is also a delicious irony in how the freedom that Neasa enjoys in the Green Party – the liberty to vote against the party whip on pain of a slap on the wrist for her first offence (failing to support tenancy legislation) and the stiffer penalty of a six-month suspension for this one – is not on the menu in Sinn Féin.
The Shinners didn’t become the strongest force in Irish politics from tolerating members voting according to their treasured ideals, rather than toeing the party line.
To say that Sinn Féin is ruled by an iron discipline is an understatement.
From 2014 to 2019 there was an exodus of councillors from the party amid claims of bullying and authoritarianism.
As we know from Derry MLA Martina Anderson’s treatment, the party’s Northern branch has form in taking seats from MLAs who it feels are party liabilities and giving them to handpicked favourites.
Neasa may be sleepwalking into helping Sinn Féin into power, not even realising that with her high ideals, she wouldn’t survive a minute within that party.
It might be a cliché to say that politicians campaign in poetry, but they govern in prose. But very often the likes of Neasa Hourigan, and indeed Clare Daly and Mick Wallace, seem to have missed the memo.
In the past, Hourigan has complained about hostility in the Greens towards her. But that might be nothing compared to the reception she could meet on the doorsteps of Dublin Central come the next election.
STRONGLY held principles give politicians an identity – they become part of their brand which is designed to be consistent and familiar. But politicians have also to compromise their principles for the bigger picture, something the hard left and hard right often refuse to do.
Neasa’s stubborn refusal to support the Government against Sinn Féin is a disappointment for those who, like me, voted for her in good faith, confident that she would do the right thing.
For there was nothing brave or admirable about her actions. Like so many so-called ‘principled stands’ it proved nothing apart from the wisdom of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s saying that ‘a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds’.