Forget about 'culchie' jibes and let's put rural neglect back in spotlight

Michael and Danny Healy-Rae’s resounding electoral success (30,000-plus votes) proves that all politics is local and dismissing them is to denigrate the people of Kerry, despite that county’s great diversity, writes Clodagh Finn

Sat, 05 Mar, 2016 - 00:00

THANK heaven for the distraction of Caitriona Perry’s stunning dress at the Oscar ceremony last Sunday. RTÉ’s Washington correspondent wore an exquisite, hand-embroidered gown, designed by Kerryman, Don O’Neill. That gave us a reason to shout ‘Up the Kingdom’ without having a Healy-Rae — or indeed a flat cap — in the frame.

Not that there’s anything wrong with a Healy-Rae, flat-capped or otherwise, but it’s nice to show the world that Kerry has many different faces.

And the county has many faces, though you wouldn’t have thought so with the lazy rush to paint Michael and Danny Healy-Rae, the brothers who made electoral history, as a pair of parish-pump Darby O’Gill politicos.

Did you hear the one about the Kerry stereotype? Well, how could you have missed it, when even the New York Times lapsed into Kerryman-joke mode.

Here’s how it covered the election of Michael Healy-Rae, after he logged a staggering 20,378 first-preference votes: “Boisterous supporters lifted the lawmaker into the air, his trademark farmer’s cap somehow staying on his head, as they sang his campaign song: ‘Make your vote and pray, that he goes all the way! He’s flat to the mat with his black cap, and there’s no time for tae (tea)’.”

Tae? What we need in Kerry, right now, is a stiff drink to take on what the Healy-Raes described as “racism” in a front-page Kerryman article that ran under the headline: “They think we’re all a pack of culchies”.

And they do.

The election of the formidable brothers has made three things clear: 1) ‘Culchie’ is still a term of abuse. 2) All politics is local, no matter what anybody argues. 3) Rural Ireland is worth fighting for.

Let’s start with the word ‘culchie’. You’re a culchie, apparently, if you have your dinner in the middle of the day; if you make tea (tae?) for the men who are doing a bit of work for your father, or if you can complete the lyric ‘Rock me mama like a wagon wheel/Rock me mama …’ Yes, it’s funny, but it’s too easy to split the country into two regions: Dublin and everywhere else. That’s a disservice to everyone, but particularly those of us in the regions.

For anyone unfamiliar with life outside the city, it is hard to describe how varied a county can be. Take Kerry, for example. If its elected representatives — and by inference its inhabitants — are dismissed with a few choice insults, as happened this week, how can anyone appreciate that life in that stunning county changes mile by mile?

You’ll hear it in the accents, which can lose a syllable or gain one, depending on which stretch of road you’re travelling. That is also true of an individual’s outlook, and experience of the world.

Don O’Neill’s design ethos — to make every woman feel gorgeous, even if her body shape is not the type to make the cover of Vogue — was inspired by his early days in Kerry.

The man from Ballyheigue, in north Kerry, dressed Oscar nominee, Emma Donoghue, this year, but his Theia label has had many outings on the red carpet. Oprah Winfrey, Amy Poehler and Taylor Swift, to mention but a few, are all devotees.

He once told an interviewer: “My whole ethos is about taking care of people and that’s something I learned growing up in Ballyheigue, with the bed-and-breakfast. Seeing mum and dad taking care of the guests, and making sure that people were comfortable and they didn’t want for anything. I think, years later, that has become my philosophy.”

The founding father of economics, Richard Cantillon, also came from Ballyheigue, a town with a population of 1,459.

Cantillon, born in the 1680s, was the first to use the term ‘entrepreneur’ and his book, Essay on the Nature of Trade in General, written when he moved to France, was regarded as the first complete treatise on economics.

Would you call him a culchie?

Of course, Michael and Danny Healy-Rae are far too focused on for their constituents to worry about being called ‘culchies’, but — call me humourless and PC, if you will — I think the term should be banned and bleeped-out on TV.

If the landslide victory in Kerry has exposed our continuing urban/rural divide, it has also exploded the myth that Irish politics is anything other than local.

Some have bemoaned the Healy-Rae victory as a return to parish-pump local politics. The truth is that national politics never left the parish pump.

Michael himself was spot on when he said that a minister will do anything to be photographed announcing new jobs in his own constituency. Politicians of all hues shake hands, go to funerals, and visit constituents, though few have mastered the local touch and vote-management as well as the Healy-Raes.

If you want to talk about political reform, acknowledge that Irish politics runs entirely on clientelism. It’s not clear if Michael Healy-Rae was calling for structural reform, when he told politicians “to give up their nonsense and get on with it”, but we’re right behind him.

Though, I have to admit, this Kerry native watched his campaign song through closed fingers (what was that scene with the shotgun about?). But, then, 30,000 people can’t be wrong.

So, let’s get on with it and put the real issues that affect rural Ireland back in the spotlight — crime, closing post offices, poor broadband networks, unemployment, emigration.

And to the begrudgers and the insult-slingers who write things like “idiots electing muck-slingers for a joke… and thats (sic) why Kerrymen are the butt of Irish jokes”, let’s consider the wise words of another great Kerryman, Con Houlihan: “A man who will misuse — [or not use] — an apostrophe is capable of anything.”