Irish women have the same right as men to enjoy a life after politics

IT’S a curious thing. If someone rises through the ranks of the Garda Siochána to become commissioner, they’re not expected, when their term ends, to go back to being a rank-and-file garda.

They’re expected to resign and become a director of a security company.

Similarly, when someone in the civil service achieves top ranking, nobody feels they should, once their seven years are complete, revert to clerical officer grade to show commitment. They become consultants.

Yet, in politics, reaching the dizzy heights of spokesperson, minister or party leader carries with it an implicit life-sentence: when the glory days are over, you return to the ranks and serve out the rest of your days in humble loyalty.

When politicians get out of serving the life sentence, it drives party apparatchiks nuts. Hence the bad-mouthing and near- ostracisation of Gemma Hussey when, having been a Minister for Several Things, she failed to accompany her party into opposition but fecked off into retirement instead.

Maire Geoghegan-Quinn escaped this fate, largely because the Taoiseach not only appointed her to the European Court of Auditors, but re-appointed her last year, thus removing the rug from under those party faithful who think that having become a minister and then leaving is the political equivalent of eating the good chocolates from the big Christmas box and going home when only the woodeners are left.

It’s perfectly OK to find other employment as long as the politician comes by the employment honestly, by a) being male, and b) failing to be re-elected. So it’s all right for Alan Dukes to work in WHPR: hey, brilliant man, charming with it, and let’s not even start on how tall he is.

But to be female, to be still a TD (short or tall) and to decide to forgo another go in the liquidiser - sorry - roundabout, ooh, that’s women for you, isn’t it? Never know what they want. Or want starring roles, without any of the back-stage grind. Always bleating on about family-friendly working hours, but none of them have any problem working late when they’re ministers, do they?

And did you hear that Liz McManus from Labour going on about it taking 400 years before we’ll have equal representation of women and men in Dáil Éireann? They’ve only themselves to blame. Sure, look at that other Liz, the O’Donnell one. She got a mini-ministry and was always on the telly talking about the North and then when that dried up she sulked in silence for aeons.

The attitude just outlined, widespread in politics, is best summed up, oddly, by Daniel O’Donnell, who recently said he got into music, not because he wanted to be in show-business, but “because I liked the sort of feeling that singing gives you.”

Same thing with politics. People get into it because they like the sort of feeling it gives them. The problem is that for many of them, that feeling excludes all other possibilities, and they therefore resent anybody, particularly any woman, who, having surmounted all the obstacles and achieved high office, then says: “You know what? I’ve got other possibilities and I’m going to go and do something completely different.”

In literary terms, the exemplar of this outrageous behaviour is JD Salinger, who, having transfixed a generation with The Catcher in the Rye, stopped writing and went into homeopathy instead. The nerve of him.

NOT much rage was expressed towards Sile de Valera when she announced, towards the end of last year, that she won’t be running again at the next election.

Timing was one factor in the relatively benign acceptance. The fact that she’s suffered serious illnesses in recent years, not to mention the humiliation of being moved from Cabinet minister status to a position as Minister of State, also contributed to the almost shrugging acceptance of her decision.

Although she will stay in role for the duration of the current Dáil, Ms de Valera will already be experiencing that centrifugal force in politics which subtly moves to the margins anybody unlikely to be of use in the future. Unlike those of her colleagues who find themselves in a parallel situation unexpectedly and without intending it, (like Ivor Callelly,) Sile Dev will be an amused and tolerant observer of this process.

Sile de Valera knows that plotting, betraying, lying, flattering, rumour-mongering, informing, funeral-going, name-dropping, grasping, gutting and abandoning is what people in politics do. In one of the periods when de Valera was out of Dáil Éireann, she went off and did a degree in psychology.

This made her arguably the only expert in Leinster House on Asperger’s Syndrome, but also, undoubtedly, gave her an escape route: a sense that her speculative intellect might be more at home in academia or at a writer’s desk than as a TD. Social yet solitary, her journey out of politics will be greatly helped, a year or so down the line, by her media-selectivity as a minister.

Comfortable and competent on radio, she never appeared on television if she could avoid it, and so is less identifiable, on sight, than the majority of her peers. Anonymity will be easy to establish.

Muted reaction to de Valera’s planned retirement reflects recent history in Ireland. Only in her 50s, nonetheless some of the most dramatic moments in her public life belong in a half-remembered past. One such moment was when she was present at the death-bed of IRA hunger-striker Bobby Sands. Another member of the tiny group of TDs who visited Sands days before his demise later pointed out that death by self-starvation is not a quiet fading, but a torturous sustained agony.

De Valera was reportedly distraught at being unable to help or comfort the republican martyr, blind and pain-racked as he then was. For someone who brought a can-do, will-do attitude to politics, this helplessness may have been a grim reality-check.

She may, of course, write a memoir, explaining her role in Jack Lynch’s resignation from the leadership of Fianna Fáil, telling how a volatile firebrand became a steady-as-she-goes minister, and discussing how formative - negatively or positively - were her family and her name. Or she may have other projects of more immediate interest to her.

Because what’s important about Sile de Valera’s departure from politics is not her past, but her future, and her clear belief that she has one. It illustrates that politics, like most other jobs, is now an option on a long career path, not a life-long commitment to something halfway between a tribe and a religion.

It may be exciting, fulfilling and well-paid, but it’s not the end. There is life outside - and after - politics.