An Irishman's Diary

POLITICS HAS a poor image these days, and politicians have to work hard to secure the respect and confidence of a sceptical electorate.

It was not always so. Politicians were held in high esteem in the deferential society of the 1950s, despite presiding over social and economic stagnation.

And so it was that nothing was left to chance when Éamon de Valera was invited to lunch in the family home of the then Fianna Fáil Kerry North TD, Dan Moloney, all those decades ago.

His daughter, Kay Caball, herself a member of Tralee Urban Council for some years, recalls the occasion in Owen O'Shea's Heirs to the Kingdom, Kerry's Political Dynasties, published by the O'Brien Press.

“I remember that when de Valera was taoiseach, he came to the house for lunch on a Sunday and even though it was a Sunday, we got the local creamery opened up so that we could get fresh cream for the taoiseach,” says Caball.

“And my abiding memory is of all the women fussing around in the kitchen getting things ready while all the men sat around the table with Dev. Women didn’t sit down with men in those days.” O’Shea’s book provides a fascinating insight into dynastic politics in that most political of counties.

Spring, Ferris, Healy-Rae, McEllistrim, O’Donoghue, Moynihan, Sheahan and O’Leary are among the familiar political names to populate the pages.

Dynasties do not always have an easy pathway to Leinster House, as John O’Donoghue, son of the then Fianna Fáil councillor, Mary O’Donoghue, discovered when he sought a Dáil nomination in the 1980s.

The then party leader, Charlie Haughey, wanted Kerry football GAA trainer, Mick O’Dwyer, on the ticket, rather than the Caherciveen-based solicitor who would go on to achieve ministerial office and many years later resign as

ceann comhairle in a controversy about his travelling expenses.

O’Donoghue recalls, “The convention (of December 1986) had to be adjourned three or four times by Mr Haughey because the party had discovered that I would win the convention. “Let’s be frank – the party didn’t want me to win the convention. I said I wasn’t going to pull out. I was offered a district justiceship through a certain politician and I told him hell would freeze over and I would not pull out.”

O’Shea reveals how the term “kitchen cabinet” can have a literal meaning in dynastic politics, with “the members of the political dynasty gathered around their own kitchen table within the security and privacy of the family home”.

He adds that decisions were taken “at those kitchen tables in the early mornings and the dead of night that have shaped and influenced the survival of political ascendancies in local and national politics for generations”.

Labour TD for Kerry North-Limerick West Arthur Spring, nephew of Dick Spring and grandson of Dan Spring, says, “It is still the family that I would be turning to most of all.

“Even in terms of policy-making, there was a kitchen cabinet at all times involved and I would have the same thing.”

The author outlines how dynastic politics, and the inevitable play for the sympathy vote, was a particularly prominent feature of byelections in the past.

At a time when politics was even more male-dominated than now, “the widow” was frequently seen as the byelection candidate to retain the seat.

John O’Leary, former Fianna Fáil TD for Kerry South, observes there were 33 byelections, invariably caused by the death of the incumbent TD, during his 31 years in the Dáil.

O’Leary recalls the great sense of urgency to get a candidate in the byelection field as quickly as possible. He remembers, in his early years in the Dáil, the phrase “put up the widow” being frequently used. “And I remember an old veteran, Martin Corry from East Cork one time when there was a byelection, and he said ‘move the writ and put up the widow’.”

O’Shea illustrates the accuracy of the Tip O’Neill dictum that all politics is local when recalling an exchange between Fianna Fáil’s John O’Donoghue and Independent Jackie Healy-Rae in the Dáil in 2007.

When O’Donoghue was made Ceann Comhairle, Healy-Rae rose to offer his congratulations.

“I congratulate the Ceann Comhairle in a very special way. I congratulate him because I go back to when I directed elections for him in the early years.

“God knows, I played a leading role in sending him to this House in the first instance . . .

“Standing here this evening, I guarantee the Ceann Comhairle that if there is a bad pothole around Waterville, on Dursey Island in west county Cork or anywhere in Caherciveen, I will do my very best . . . in the Ceann Comhairle’s absence, I will do my best to sort them out and I will keep him well informed all the time.” O’Donoghue responded: “I assure the Deputy that I will never be far away.” The exchanges had nothing to do with filling potholes or the much-criticised clientelism of Irish politics.

As O’Shea notes, it illustrated the “deep-seated personal and political rivalry between two of the great individual colossi and family dynasties in Kerry South, a competitiveness and animosity which grew out of the rancorous split in Fianna Fáil from which the Healy-Rae dynasty emerged prior to the 1997 election”.

And the rest, as they say, is history.