Ministers work harder than anyone else in Ireland, with little thanks

I am on first name terms with a dozen gardaí I’ve never met. I telephone them. I don’t mean to telephone them, but I dial the number and they pick up.

“Hello.”

Now, mark that — ‘hello’ with a full stop. Not a comma to encourage a developing relationship.

Not a question mark to indicate interest in the caller. Just a greeting.

That greeting is the non-mating call of the garda driver who’s got stuck with one of three ministerial phones.

The minister, for whatever reason, can’t answer one of the three, so the driver picks up. (Not physically, of course. Hands-free, if driving.)

The garda who picks up has to strike a note somewhere between subservient (just in case the caller is the Taoiseach) and discouraging, so that a caller egging to pass on a state secret to the minister doesn’t start disgorging straight away.

Once the garda driver knows it’s me, the temperature warms up and the information flows freely.

“Hasn’t come out of his house yet, but give him five minutes.”

“I can see him halfway down the street, he’s after getting caught with a bunch of women that are hugging him something awful.”

“She’s on the other phone but she’s nodding, she’ll be off it in a minute.”

The point about the three-phone pass-the-mobile game that ministers play with their drivers throughout each working day is how busy it shows ministers to be.

But hold, I hear you say, none of that lot have HAD a working day since early summer.

They’ve all been off on their long holidays, lying on the beach in Spiddal or in San Marino or Marco Island.

It’s a curious factor of modern Irish life, this largely media-driven rage over the long holidays politicians are supposed to have, this deep-rooted need to believe that TDs and senators rip us off by the length of their vacations.

Now, here’s where I take my life in my hands.

This is going to take courage.

To be honest, it would be easier to confess to glue-sniffing while wearing wedgies than to make the following claims, but make them I will.

1. Politicians work harder than almost anyone else in Ireland.

2. Politicians work harder during their so-called holidays than almost anyone else in Ireland.

Of course exceptions exist. But for most public representatives, the summer holidays come with inverted commas around them, because they keep working.

Ministers, except when they’re out of the country, pitch up in their departments fairly regularly throughout the so-called summer break.

But backbenchers work equally hard in the vacation months.

Take Peter Power, who’s in charge of that committee which has to report back pronto on the issue of statutory rape.

Or consider Denis O’Donovan, who’s dealing with the matter of the judge accused of having child pornography on his computer as well as working on several other Dáil committees.

Tell either of them that they had a big long idle summer — and stand well back, because they may get an overwhelming desire to smack you upside the head for the suggestion.

But even members of Dáil committees aren’t exceptional in their summer diligence.

This summer, backbenchers of all parties have been conducting constituency polls for themselves, or have been summoned to party HQs to hear the results of party opinion polls and told that they’ve got to get out more, knock on more doors, stand on more doorsteps, get a bigger profile in the local area.

The notion that politicians buzz off in early summer and don’t do a tap until the Dáil resumes is complete nonsense.

Even the notion that going abroad for three weeks of the summer means they don’t do a tap during those three weeks is nonsense.

Since mobile phones began to work all over the world, the same thing has happened to politicians: they work all over the world, too.

But, because they feel such pressure to prove that they’re NOT skiving off, the minute they get off the plane, they go rushing onto radio and TV programmes to let on they were here all the time.

Now, some politicians wisely use the summer holidays to get fit.

But even they feel the pressure to get photographed at the same time to prove that while they may not be at their desk, they’re at least HERE, doing worthwhile activities.

Hence, this summer, we got full colour pictures of Enda Kenny’s enviable thighs in cycle shorts.

Now, you may say that Enda’s thighs are neither here nor there, but you probably didn’t see them. A revelation, they were.

Whooo! Who’d have thought? Those thighs have to be good for a couple of percentage points in the next opinion poll, they were that good.

No insult to Pat Rabbitte or Trevor Sargent, who may be proven to have equal assets, but, right now, in the thighs department, the Fine Gael leader has a substantial lead.

When it came to being physical, this summer, Dermot Ahern held up the Government’s end, (so to speak), by being pictured windsurfing on the east coast. Clever sport for a politician, windsurfing.

Not obvious, like golf.

Very pro-environment: relying totally on wind-power and delivering zero emissions. Generates neither winners nor losers. And don’t tell me Dermot Ahern’s wetsuit is not blue-toothed.

The most high-tech man in the Dáil would never go offshore without a communications link to his ministerial portfolio.

It’s a great unfair fact of political life that politicians get bad press for not coming back until the Dáil resumes, yet get no credit for being dragged back, well in advance of the Dáil resuming, to attend think-ins in different parts of the country.

Think-ins that could be called The Electric Picnic, Unplugged.

I have my doubts about these think-ins. When the Government parties bring along a local to point to unsolved problems, the public reaction is, “Oh, so you’re so out of touch, you never noticed what head-the-ball had to come and make a speech about?”

In that regard, for example, Father Sean Healy of CORI did a hell of a lot better than Fianna Fáil did out of the think-in he addressed.

Contrariwise, when they bring along an international expert, the reaction is “Oh, we have to rely on overseas professors to do our thinking for us, do we?”

Most politicians worked through the summer. This week, they’ll start attending think-ins.

Then they’ll go back to Leinster House and get abused for having been away so long.

After which they’ll spend the autumn and winter fighting with their own friends and colleagues to make sure they’re on the ticket, which in turn will give them the right to spend weeks walking their constituency taking stick from total strangers and begging those total strangers for another few years of constant media abuse.

What are they? Nuts?