Our political bed-hoppers dived under a heavy blanket of hypocrisy

WITH Northern Ireland now being jolted by a couple of sex scandals, maybe we should ask why our politics have remained strangely free of such scandals? The whole thing undoubtedly has a lot to do with hypocrisy.

We did have a massive sex scandal in this country, and it took essentially a century to get over it. That was the one involving Charles Stewart Parnell whose ghost haunted Irish politics for more than a century.

His affair with Kitty O’Shea was essentially an open secret in its day. He was living with her long before she divorced her estranged husband who had been exploiting the whole thing to secure his own political preferment with the help of Parnell.