As Dáil resumes, former politicians ponder life outside Oireachtas

Finding a new job was an immediate priority for Ciara Conway (36), a social worker, when she lost her Dáil seat in Waterford in the last general election. However, the long negotiations to form a new government made it harder, as potential employers were sceptical she would stay with them if another election was called.

“It took quite a bit of time to get back on my feet. It was pretty stressful,” the former Labour TD says. After the trauma of losing her seat, there was extra pressure to find employment because her husband, who worked in Leinster House, was also out of a job and she was pregnant with her second child. She got a job in May in Wexford as a project co-ordinator with children’s charity Barnardos in family support services.

“I will always be a member of the Labour Party for good or bad,” Conway says. “I still believe in politics but my time in elected politics is done.”

She served as a town councillor in Dungarvan and was selected to run for the Dáil only 2½ weeks before the 2011 general election. She says she enjoyed the work but the next five years were “a really difficult time to be in politics” as a government TD.

Conway misses the camaraderie of her colleagues, many of whom also lost their seats. Projects she worked on are now coming to fruition, including new roofs on school buildings and the opening of the Waterford greenway.

“The money was coming, the money was pledged,” she says. It just did not happen early enough for Fine Gael and Labour. However she does not miss the abuse and hostility. “I didn’t realise how stressed out I was until it all stopped.” It was only when she closed her Facebook account that she realised how much more time she had.

She is now out of the bubble of Leinster House politics and to keep up with the Dáil, she just “turns on the six o’clock and nine o’clock news like everyone else”.

When Fine Gael TD Noel Harrington (45) lost his Cork South-West Dáil seat, he did have a job to go back to in the family business. But he “had to re-apprentice myself” as it was 17 years since he worked full-time as postmaster in Castletownbere. He had been a county councillor since 1999 and had focused increasingly on politics.

As for the lessons he learned in his five- year term as a TD, “the whole bloody thing was a lesson”. The frustration was that often it was the daftest comments from the loudest voices that “will get the oxygen of media”, he says.

Of the 166 TDs in the Dáil, he believes about 40, including government ministers, received coverage with the other 120 getting very little.“You’d be working away quite hard” but without the publicity, he says. “The only time you’d ever get a call is if there’s a tragedy.”

His work interest was a “niche” area for the fishing and seafaring community of a large constituency but the media was focused elsewhere. “Nobody else gives a damn about the islands,” he says.

There were also the logistical issues of an hour’s drive from his home to his constituency office in Bantry and a further 30 minutes to Skibbereen, so a meeting could take half a day. TDs have to be around their constituency and not just up in Leinster House, otherwise “you’re punished”, he says.

Former senator Jillian van Turnhout was a taoiseach’s nominee in the last Seanad. The former chief executive of the Children’s Rights Alliance gave up that job when she was nominated. “I didn’t think the roles were compatible,” she says.

That decision has left her unemployed since leaving the Seanad. She has continued her voluntary commitments, including her work with the girl scouts, enjoyed the summer and is now “thinking about my next career”.

Her five years in the Seanad started with some “good advice” from Taoiseach Enda Kenny to “home in one or two areas and concentrate on those”.

Following that advice, she focused on issues such as corporal punishment and says she is very proud to say with absolute certainty that it was she who got the ban passed on the physical punishment of children. Such success however can only be achieved by “sticking with an issue” and it took years to “nudge [the issue] up the hill”.

The lesson she learned was to “trust myself and my instincts and to have that confidence in myself” because in Leinster House “everyone is a sole trader. Everyone is there for themselves.”

Retiring from politics is a different kind of leaving. Former Donegal TD and minister of state Dinny McGinley (71) knew five years ago he would be retiring. “I had almost 35 years as a TD but you have to get off the merry-go-round eventually,” he says. As a TD “my day was planned, my week was planned, my year was planned”.

He found it strange for the first while, not to be travelling to Leinster House, but “you soon get over that”. He has done more travelling in the past number of months than in the past five years, including three weeks in Spain. As a TD “you couldn’t go anywhere for three weeks”.

When the Taoiseach did a reshuffle and he lost his role as a minister of state, “I thanked him for the time as a minister because after 30 years I didn’t expect to get anything”.

His advice for rural TDs is to give priority to the constituency. “It is very important for TDs to be seen by the people, because the worst thing someone can say to you is, ‘We haven’t seen you for five years’. That is the kiss of death and there’s no such thing as a resuscitation,” he says.

Former Sinn Féin Sligo-North Leitrim TD Michael Colreavy had just one term in the Dáil before he retired. The 2011 election was his first national election after 12 years as a councillor – “I said that I would do one term only.”

In the Dáil, he was struck by the “devastatingly slow” process of turning proposals into action. Many good proposals get lost in analysis, he says, and “inertia is a big problem”, but the Oireachtas committees were “fairly good because you had time and suggestions did get debated”.

When the general election was called this year, “I could feel the responsibility lifting like a weight from my shoulders.” He worked as election agent for his successor Martin Kenny and plans to remain involved in issues such as renewable energy projects.

However, since the election, he has been involved in looking after his grandchildren and “playing Pokémon Go”.