We elect politicians to represent us, not serve as moral role models

IN the middle of the current — albeit dwindling — feeding frenzy, a politician who shall be nameless let out a statement which went unchallenged, perhaps because the interviewer was having too much fun pursuing the story of the loans/gifts/whiparounds for Bertie Ahern. Or maybe because the interviewer found the statement inarguable.

“Public representatives must be held to a higher standard,” was the statement.

A higher standard than what? Dolly the cloned sheep? Of course not. The politician meant that public representatives must be held to a higher standard than sleazebags like you and me.

The TD didn’t say “might be held to a higher standard.” The word used was “must.” No choice. Imperative. Agreed by all. Laid down in law.

Well, hold it right there, Sunshine. Would you like to point us to the cabbage leaf under which you found this rule, this notion to which you presume national acquiescence? Because you can stick it right back under that cabbage leaf.

When I cast my vote in the next General Election, I will, if the wind is in the right direction and the bank comes through, have moved to Trevor Sargent’s constituency. Now, let’s say Trevor arrives around on his bike in the pre-poll weeks, seeking to win my first preference, clutching, in his hot little hand, a leaflet promising to adhere to much higher standards than are adhered to by me. He’ll be lucky to get back in the saddle unmaimed. The bloody nerve.

Not that he would. Not that any decent individual politician would. It’s just that, collectively, they now parrot this incredibly insulting bilge about having higher standards than us poor lower caste voters. Well, no offence, lads, but based on the Tribunals and media coverage of the last few years, politicians have the rest of us beat when it comes to the race to the bottom. (The race to the bottom of the brown paper bag, that is.) The claim also misses the point of what we elect TDs to do. We elect them to represent us. Not excel us. Not serve as moral role models for us. Just represent us. If they keep their hands out of the till while doing the job, that would be good, too. But keeping your hands out of the till doesn’t count as exceptionally high in the standards department. Most of us get through the working day without nicking more than paperclips and leftover biscuits that would go soft anyway, if uneaten.

I’d be curious to know just where these holier than thou, purer than the driven snow, Caesar’s-wife type standards can be viewed in action. I know where to find manifestations of other standards.

If I want to see comedy on the part of politicians, for example, I go to the Dáil the day they fuel up Joe Higgins. If I want to hear about the workings of a Dáil Committee, I listen to Michael Noonan.

But these imprecise higher standards I wouldn’t know where to find. Or how far they extend. Do they roll out to the home? It’s possible that TDs believe they should be better husbands/wives/parents than the rest of us, but I doubt if they can deliver. My guess is that female TDs let as many full-throated roars at their husbands for dishwasher-avoidance as do the rest of us.

Now, if you tell me that these higher standards apply only in Leinster House, I’m still at a loss. They cannot relate to presentation skills, for instance, since the capacity to deliver an arresting speech is confined to a handful within Leinster House. Not only are the presentation skills just about average, over there, but wit and repartee in the form of heckling are better at almost any other venue than in the Oireachtas.

What’s that you say? These higher standards are financial only? Oh. How disappointing. If public representatives are going to make claims to unequalled rectitude, why confine their elevated standards to one narrow area? Why don’t they want to have higher standards of time-keeping, telephone manner, texting, putting down the loo seat, visiting their granny, and watching their weight, rather than seeking to excel only in one narrow area? Because it would be ludicrous and improbable, that’s why.

We don’t and shouldn’t expect politicians to have higher standards than ordinary, decent people. We just expect them to stop mucking around the way we know a lot of them mucked around, financially and in other ways, in the pre-Tribunal days. In classic post-trauma reaction, they’ve now surrounded themselves with committees, Green Books and questionnaires, all supposedly geared to keeping the political nose clean.

I’ve got doubts about some of that form-filling. Take, for example, the fact that a minister now has to fill out a form declaring who it was lent them the location where they took their holidays. In theory, this means that a millionaire can’t stake a minister to four weeks in a five-star hotel in Cannes. In practice, what it means is that a life-long friend of a minister who happens to own an apartment in Spain can’t let the politician stay in the apartment, as would happen between any normal set of friends, because if at some later stage the apartment-owner got a state job, it would look like a payoff.

Then there’s the gift thing, where politicians are supposed to declare any gift over a certain cost. This may be the interesting point at which politics does have standards just a smidgeon above the rest of us.

Come Christmas, for example, lots of business people in the private sector will get sides of smoked salmon, bottles of whiskey or puky little desk clocks with miniature golf drivers and the logo of the giver on the front.

The people most likely to get these presents are people who purchase stuff from the company. If you spend money at a company, you’re worth cosying up to.

It does, of course, make sense that if a company presents a gift like a laptop computer to a minister, that it should be properly declared in a questionnaire.

The problem is that there’s no questionnaire in which politicians can declare the myriad of pointless, useless, dust-gathering bric-a-brac they get given on a daily basis.

The reality is that we neither want nor expect politicians to have higher standards than the rest of us. We’ve just backed them into a corner where they have to declare things we don’t have to, on a multiplicity of forms.

Staying within the rules and filling out the forms to prove it does not establish virtue on the part of the form-filler. It just feeds into the ever-growing bureaucracy this country has become.