Michael Moynihan: Some advice to new TDs in Leinster House — if you’re from Cork then own it
To Representation Redrawn, Were After Cork To To Next Ten The Going City The Eight Dáil Tds From The Return City’s House Is Expanding Leinster Ten Boundaries
It’s all up for grabs tomorrow, after approximately 19 months of canvassing.
Apologies. It only feels like that from the outside, as one of the canvassed. If you’re inside the machine it probably feels like the entire election campaign started in 1988 and has been grinding on ever since.
Anyway, Cork city is going to return 10 TDs to the next Dáil after the boundaries were redrawn, expanding the city’s representation from eight to 10. That means in a couple of weeks some people are going to enter a different world in Leinster House, starting work as brand-new Deputies. Yours truly worked there once upon a time, and a Cork TD of long standing once recalled for me his first day as a public representative on Kildare Street.
“Someone showed me into the office and closed the door behind them as they left. And that was that.”
Nowadays new arrivals are given more help — orientation and pamphlets are involved — in order to get them up to speed fast, which is obviously better.
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Given my own experience, can I offer some advice to new Cork TDs?
You’re from Cork. Own it.
I won’t name the man because he’s retired now, but one of Leeside’s long-standing reps spelt it out once on the floor of the House.
“I will gut you for Cork and I make no apologies for that.”
Each of them is simultaneously independent, industrious, and progressive — yet at the same time also in dire need of all the resources and facilities which are somehow being hived off for major conurbations like Cork. See below for more.
You can never praise your native heath too much. In fact, truth be damned.
It was an education for your columnist to listen to Deputies from all corners of the country talk up the various hamlets and settlements in their constituencies when speaking in the House. More than an education, in fact: a revelation.
One would be forgiven for thinking some of them were describing the Athens of Pericles, and I was duly impressed until a Cork representative told me he had recently been to one of these latter-day Byzantiums when he was taking a short cut driving home from the capital.
If the cats and dogs of Blackpool and Togher knew where it was, he said, they’d go there to kiss.
At least I think he said ‘kiss’.
The more obscure place names from Cork you mention the better.
In the course of his duties, your columnist often had to ask Deputies for their speaking notes for clarification.
This was pretty entertaining when I had to ask one parliamentarian how to spell the name of the man who gazumped him on a house thirty years before: reminding him of what had clearly been a tense period in his life led to aspersions being energetically and vividly cast.
Usually, though, it was a matter of asking about obscure place names mentioned in contributions.
For instance, a few would be happy to make a stab at Togher or even Youghal, but the likes of Poulraddy and Gurranabraher could cause havoc, particularly when the latter was abbreviated.
Matehy and Nohoval we will gloss over.
On a serious note, it is what it is.
A few years ago, I wrote a book about Cork in the eighties and chatted to some of the politicians who remembered that time.
The late Bernard Allen was particularly interesting on the period, pointing out that a plan for a new dental school in Dublin was a good example of the disadvantages facing politicians from outside the Pale: “People from Trinity and UCD would be meeting ministers and senior civil servants day in day out, and the deal would be done informally: it'd be presented as a fait accompli in terms of legislation or policy, but the details would have been worked out over a pint in Doheny and Nesbitt's or coffee in Buswell's Hotel.
“If you were a TD from outside the Pale then you were a Tuesday to Thursday politician really, and the real work was being done in Dublin over the weekend, networking at functions, dinner parties, all of that.
“If it were the two of us, say, we'd meet up informally and agree the points, I'd send you a memo on that or whatever, and it rolled on from there.” True then, true now.
Don’t be distracted unnecessarily. But don’t let them get away with anything either.
I was once present in the Dáil chamber for a debate of such mind-warping boredom that I seriously considered faking my own death in order to escape.
Suddenly I realised that one of the contributors had tried a witticism: he promised one of the Cork TDs on the benches opposite him that a football team from a certain Leeside constituency would find out who made the world the following weekend, oh yes, just you wait, etc. etc.
Said Cork TD took the bait and interrupted his opponent’s contribution with some technical observations which brought some entertainment. Then we went back to gnawing our own kneecaps for relief a minute or two later.
Later I bumped into the Cork native outside the chamber, and he immediately started: “Did you hear what he said, in fairness what kind of—”.
(He was right, by the way. Nemo vaporised the other crowd the following Sunday.)
But for God’s sake be careful on the train.
I’m a long time gone from Leinster House so I don’t really know how everyone travels back to Cork nowadays, but there was a time before the coming of the motorway when the iron horse was the conveyance of choice.
The veil of discretion must be drawn across a few of the occurrences on some of those later trains on a Thursday evening when, ah, the homesickness could become quite overwhelming. It is enough to suggest that new Deputies should at least try not to be removed by security personnel before the train leaves the station. More detail will not be forthcoming.
Remember where you’re from and what you’re representing. Even when you're not representing where you’re from.
The legend goes that after the 1977 general election Jack Lynch, fresh from his appointment as Taoiseach, was strolling through Leinster House when he came to a knot of TDs: John Horgan, representing the constituency of Dublin County South, Michael O’Leary of Dublin North Central, and Barry Desmond representing Dun Laoghaire.
It was pointed out that the three TDs were all from Cork but were representing constituencies in Dublin.
“I know,” said Lynch. “You should be ashamed of yourselves.”