Alison O'Connor: At last! A multimillion euro landlord to tackle the privilege of urban TDs
Michael Healy-Rae purports to have a particular connection with voters, and besmirches urban TDs as if they're some sort of elite — despite himself being the Dáil's biggest landlord. File picture: Don MacMonagle
IT’S the age-old political trope — “that crowd beyond in [name of city where the national parliament of a country resides] simply don’t understand the ordinary folk and the problems they face every day”.
We hear no end of it ourselves from a particularly raucous rump in the Dáil — the Rural Independent Group.
The behaviour can range from the simply ignorant matter of your mobile phone ringing constantly in the Dáil chamber when business is being conducted — Kerry TD Danny Healy-Rae, who favours a childish response to deputies who complain, saying they’re jealous they’re not in as much demand — to delivering a homophobic-sounding statement (Michael Healy-Rae) across the floor of the chamber to Tánaiste Leo Varadkar and then insisting it wasn’t an insult and refusing to apologise.
Perpetual flat cap-wearer Micheal Healy-Rae is a bright man, and also a highly successful one. He never lets an opportunity pass to cement his image as a man of the (rural) people.
Imagine if those tables were turned, though. Just think if it was Dublin TD Leo Varadkar who insulted the Kerry TD, telling him he was out of touch with ordinary people — all while owning a multimillion-euro property empire scattered all over Dublin and registered as the Dáil’s biggest landlord, not to mention having shares in 'The New York Times'. Or having a contract, for instance, to supply diesel to Dublin City Council.
It is an act of political mastery, all the same, to have your fingers in so many lucrative business pies, with the millions piling up in the bank, and yet carry on all the time as if you couldn’t be closer to the lived experience of those “ordinary” people. Then you go one better and launch regular, often nasty attacks on those who you target as privileged — some simply because they dare to reside in an urban rather than a rural environment.
It takes some political cojones for this Kerry TD to dish it out in such a personally insulting manner to his opponents while he, and those he targets, know he has a bank balance that would make a mere millionaire blush.
In the Oireachtas Register of Members’ Interests, Michael Healy-Rae’s occupations are entered as postmaster, politician, farmer, service station owner, and plant hire. Under land (including property) his long list has 23 separate entries in terms of land, a private house, farmhouses, vacant premises, houses for letting, and student accommodation.
Under ‘Other information provided’ it states: “Supply of diesel to Kerry County Council.” Better again, he generally refuses to comment on any of this when asked by journalists. What’s good for the goose is certainly not good for the rich Kingdom gander here.
For the record, under Mr Varadkar’s listing, the only entry is “private home”. This is not to say a politician is not entitled to their wealth. After all, every year each one is required to list their other occupations and directorships, shares and properties they own, and gifts they’ve received. This is public information.
Still, it is a surprise that some of those who are subject to over-the-top Healy-Rae tongue lashings don’t bite back a bit more often, given the material available.
Labour TD Duncan Smith did just that last year, very effectively.
The Healy-Rae siblings had been needling his party with the usual digs.
“I’m absolutely disgusted because it hit me personally,” said Mr Smith, who represents — God forbid — a constituency in the capital, Dublin Fingal. “Usually what they say is water off a duck’s back to most or all of us in this House.
“Well, I’m the son of carpenter, I’m not the son of Fianna Fáil privilege. I’m not going to be lectured on understanding workers, I don’t have to put on a political costume and a caricature to pretend I’m working class like they do.”
As an aside, it is more of this sort of thing that the Labour Party should be up to, and hopefully it will happen under the new leadership of Ivana Bacik. But even her candidacy has been the subject of this reverse snobbery. How, as a lawyer and an academic and a TD who represents Dublin Bay South, can she connect with the traditional Labour voter?
Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald — a politician who majors in outrage — tried it on with Taoiseach Micheál Martin a few weeks ago. It was the usual implication that he was out of touch with people’s reality in terms of the housing crisis. He could have said more in terms of her own relatively comfortable background when he bared his political teeth. But he left it at this: “I just want to say, my background, and where I grew up, and what we had to put up with, was far different from yours. Don’t you dare lecture me, OK?”
Micheál Martin was on to something in calling out Mary Lou’s efforts at moral superiority.
As Leo Varadkar told the hyperventilating Michael Healy-Rae in the Dáil on Tuesday: “Deputy, the truth is you look down on me.” Here’s a sample of the Healy-Rae tirade:
“Because when I hear some of the nonsense that you come out with, my goodness, you’re no man to look down your nose at me as if I was doing something that you stood up on top of. I am elected here every bit as good as you are, and you know, maybe be a lot better than you.”
On it went, before he added: “But like I say, off with you to the airy fairies and see how far ’twill get you.”
No doubt he’d object to the particular phraseology here but in making that remark the deputy was “beyond the Pale”.
No amount of obfuscating changes that.
It was clear the Tánaiste was hurt and believes he is owed an apology. He is entitled to one but the deputy has said he will not be apologising, did not use the term “airy fairies” in the way that is being implied, and he would never set out to offend or upset anyone. So not even an “I’m sorry if”.
The Healy-Rae brothers serve the people of Kerry well, with a highly impressive constituency operation that takes hard work to maintain. Ahead of the general election in 2020, Michael Healy-Rae told , which ran a feature on the electoral successes of the family, that if people in certain sections of society want to laugh at or insult him, they’re insulting the people that support him as well.
It’s a long time since I moved from rural Ireland to be one of those “above in Dublin”. But I do hope and imagine there are many voters in Kerry this week disgusted with their TD and aware that no matter what part of Ireland you live in, a horrible insult is just that.
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