Will Michael Fitzmaurice’s political plan shake up localism?

A picture of Michael Fitzmaurice, sturdy and unsmiling in his working clothes, standing in bogland amid row upon row of machine-cut turf alongside a massive industrial peat excavator on tank treads, shows how far he has travelled. The days of three-prong pikes and the sleán are long behind him.

To dismiss the Roscommon-South Leitrim Independent byelection winner as a turf-cutter would be reckless; that Bogmiser machine spells business. He also happens to be the latest politician to announce plans to “shake up the political landscape”, harnessing the surge of Independents to create an alliance/party of some kind. Separate rumblings from Shane Ross – who plans to “change the face of Irish politics forever” – Lucinda Creighton and Michael McDowell, along with small parties or alliances such as the Socialist Party, People Before Profit, the Anti-Austerity Alliance, Direct Democracy Ireland, the Irish Democratic Party, Éirígí etc, suggest a ferocious appetite out there to eviscerate the tired old traditionalists.

Fitzmaurice’s alliance/party would be neither right nor left but “straight down the middle”; it would cater for the “average working man and woman ... who know what it’s like not to have a fiver in your pocket” as well as entrepreneurs.

No whip

He characterises the party whip as “a big wand like a gun to your head” so there will be none of that. Policies will be based on “what’s good for the country”, such as allowing a Dáil to see out its term and none of “this craic of the Dáil falling because a bit of legislation didn’t go in”. He wants ministers and their opposite numbers to confer openly and in collegiate fashion on policy and legislation and he wants a meritocratic Civil Service.

And since people live in the real world, he says, he’s against populism and in favour of water meters (he’s a member of a group water scheme) but no wastage.

Yeah, right, snigger the lads in the back benches; a man for all seasons. But what is Fitzmaurice actually saying? That people are sick of stupid gotcha politics and unaccountable decision-making. Not much to laugh at there. More intriguing is the hint that he might just be prepared to look beyond localism to the bigger picture. Now that would be pretty radical.

Because localism has never been so cool. Watch the TV ads. One supermarket chain uses the word “local” four times. Banks that once openly disdained grubby locals are clasping them to their bosoms. Jackie Healy-Rae, a politician who personified localism, was buried in the presence of two former taoisigh and vast crowds.

In its ideal manifestation, localism is a driver of practical, community activism. Its flip side however, can be a reckless indifference to the bigger picture.

For last Saturday’s supplement on a smarter society in this paper, I suggested that the smartest thing we could do was to educate ourselves on how to vote for and exercise influence over governments, as opposed to putting the fear of God into the local messenger. On Sunday, a text arrived from Charlie Flanagan, just back from China via the North, “My voters vote local. It’s all about delivery ...” said the Minister for Foreign Affairs, whose choice of office in a system fuelled by manic presenteeism, may have hastened his political death warrant. “Delivery”, we infer, is not about working to consolidate the peace on this island or facilitating exports to China.

A woman had just rung him pledging four number ones in return for getting school transport for her daughter. Representations had been made by his constituency office; he hadn’t even been aware of the outcome. That’s the system, he said.

At one party meeting, he was giving a rundown on the North when a man forcefully interjected, to general agreement – “Forget the f**king North. What about the potholes on the Castletown road?” We may assume they have not reconvened to hear his take on human rights in China. Flanagan was not the only politician to get in touch.

National legislator

In another constituency, a woman who smartly admonished her TD a year ago, saying she expected to see more of him speaking out as a national legislator instead of dealing with local issues, was back pretty soon to tell him about her mother’s medical card. He would be forever in her good books, she promised, if he could only get it back for her.

When voters like these casually trade votes for medical cards and school bus places, are they aware they are also electing a government? Is the school transport woman even aware that her local TD/gofer is now the Minister for Foreign Affairs? Does it matter?

This is the cultural soup of the Irish political system. The widely acknowledged fact that it incentivises MEPs to spend more time attending funerals and the like than they do burrowing through piles of reports in Brussels, points up the absurdity of it.

The clamour for political reform is real. This is that once-in-a-generation moment. But how many of the new reformers are prepared to tell their followers that real reform starts with them?