Miriam Lord: Polygamy and throuples in the Dáil chamber? Doesn’t sound like a durable relationship

TDs are quite partial to the occasional bit of swapping.

There are big parties and small parties and it’s been going on since the early 1950s. Deputies meet in secret in special rooms in Government Buildings and Leinster House and occasionally they gather in upmarket hotels around Kildare Street just for the thrill of it.

Some politicians will go off with anyone – if they get the right offer. They can sometimes hook up for years, but it always ends in grief.

These relationships never last. They are not durable.

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Roderic O’Gorman, Cabinet Minister and member of the Green Party, knows this because he is currently in a politically polygamist arrangement with a number of like-minded parliamentarians.

Therefore, he was well qualified to speak to the subject when Michael McNamara, the Independent TD for Clare, held forth at some length on the subject of polygamy.

It wasn’t a discussion we were expecting to hear late in the afternoon on the Dáil’s first day back since the Christmas recess.

Housing? Yes. Gaza? Of course. Roscrea migrants shambles? Absolutely.

But not polygamy.

And throuples. That’s when most people in offices around Leinster House who had the proceedings on in the background reached for the remote and turned up the volume.

“Are we to say that a polygamous marriage is not a durable relationship?” wondered Michael during a debate on the referendums and the proposal to amend the Constitutional definition of a family to one “founded on marriage or other durable relationships”.

People in other cultures have been in polygamous marriages for centuries, he informed Roderic, the Minister for Children, Equality, Integration, Disability and Youth, who is the busiest Minister in the land, despite Heather Humphreys’ gushing praise for Housing Minister Darragh O’Brien earlier on.

“Working day and night,” she marvelled as Darragh went slightly red and smothered a smirk.

Although she pronounced his surname differently, in the way comedian Dara Ó Briain pronounces his.

The way things are going, maybe the Government could do worse than put a comedian in charge of a housing situation which a lot of people think is a joke.

[ Expanded concept of family in Constitution will not cover polygamous relationships ]

But back to Roderic, or Poor Roderic as he is increasingly known, such is his workload. He has his hands full with a dangerously simmering immigration issue which runs across many Government departments whose Ministers make fleeting guest appearances while he does all the heavy lifting.

For respite, he was confined to the Dáil chamber all day on Wednesday, carefully reading through piles of documents and chewing his ballpoint during Leaders’ Questions and the Order of Business when Heather, the Minister for Social Protection, stood in for the absent Taoiseach and Tánaiste.

Then he nipped into her seat to take the committee stage debate on framing the terms of the forthcoming referendums.

It was scheduled to run for hours.

As the afternoon unfolded, what we desperately wanted was to hear that famous chant from Monty Python’s The Life of Brian ring out around the chamber.

“Welease Wodewick!”

Instead, he had to stay in situ while Michael McNamara riffed on polygamy and how it is probably misunderstood by most people in this country.

To say such unions are not durable “would be inaccurate, I think” he told Poor Roderic, who is a law lecturer and was well across the detail of the proposed amendments.

Would it be right to rule them out of constitutional consideration?

Polygamous relationships won’t be recognised under the proposed changes to the Constitution, confirmed the Minister. They do not represent a “moral institution” in Irish law.

McNamara was like a dog with a bone. But once upon a time in Irish law homosexuality was not considered a moral institution. Look at it now.

Is polygamy not durable?

It’s not recognised under Irish law, explained the Minister. Labour leader Ivana Bacik, a law professor, said it’s a criminal offence here.

No, said Roderic, it will not be classified as a durable relationship.

“Why?” persisted Michael.

The Minister started explaining again about the Government’s clear policy intention “whether it’s a polygamous relationship or some other arrangement”.

“I’ve heard the word ‘throuples’ thrown around these sort of relationships.”

McNamara did a double take.

“What?”

“Throuples,” repeated Roderic.

“Truffles?” said Michael, who is a barrister.

“Throuples.”

“Three,” explained Labour’s Seán Sherlock, very slowly.

“Oh, sorry. Truffles. I thought you said truffles.”

“No, I did not.”

The penny dropped.

“I thought you said truffles. I wondered if there were truffles in the restaurant. Sorry.”

Deputy McNamara’s sudden realisation was reminiscent of the great Mattie McGrath/Adrian Lynch exchange during a committee hearing last year when an RTÉ executive thought Tipperary TD Mattie was asking him who he was lying to, until it dawned on him that Mattie wanted to know who he was loyal to.

And when Lynch then repeated the word “loyal”, the way McNamara repeated the word “truffle” on Wednesday.

“Are you hungry?” asked Ceann Comhairle Seán Ó Fearghaíl. It’s far from truffles he was reared.

Roderic O’Gorman, of course, is currently in a throuple with Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil.

Not to be categorised as a durable relationship either.

At this rate, these referendums, which haven’t exactly caught the public’s imagination yet, might provide some diversion after all.