Porno for the politicos means real issues go unseen

TDs pored over and passed around the glossy fold-out maps of the redrawn boundaries like pre-internet era schoolboys used to do with soft porn pictures as they pointed excitedly at the enticing and exotic curves of the new constituencies.

The reaction to the ripping up of the old order ranged from the smug (“Wicklow is safe”) to the relieved (“I can cancel the leaving party”) to the despairing (“that’s me fucked, so”).

The Constituency Commission report had been released just before leaders’ questions began, so the only question the deputies present in the chamber had on their minds was: “Me! Me! Me! Am I safe?”

Which was a bit unfortunate for United Left Alliance TD Richard Boyd Barrett. He had attempted to bring homelessness home to his colleagues by packing the public gallery with homeless people and listing them by name as he demanded the Tánaiste do something about there being 96,000 families on housing waiting lists at a time when 230,000 dwellings lay empty.

But the plight of the homeless went above most deputies’ heads — literally — as the TDs sitting below the public gallery barely noticed the real world encroaching upon them as they nudged each other and pointed to the maps showing which bit of territory had gone where and what it would mean for their first preferences. The homeless could look after themselves; as ever, the TDs were looking after their number ones.

How Environment Minister Phil Hogan, whose remit covers the constituency shake-up, must have chuckled to himself on the beach in Rio thinking of the sand he had just kicked into the faces of the boys back home who had given him such a rough ride in recent months.

The jittery TDs imagined Hogan posing as if in a Duran Duran video, saving the planet by sipping another poolside cocktail at the luxurious beach-front Sheraton Hotel which he insisted he had no hand in choosing. It was forced on him by his Brazilian hosts (at our expense) who could clearly just not imagine making their Earth Summit a success without the lucky touch of the man who made such a triumph of the household charge and water metering.

Back in the Dáil, attention was drawn to the vicious dog fights now unleashed with the stroke of a pen across central Dublin and Cork.

Fianna Fáil’s fifth-finishing Micheal McGrath admitted it would be tough to hold his seat in a Cork South Central reduced to four representatives, but fears around the house were greatest for Fine Gael’s Jerry Buttimer, who sees a large chunk of his support switch constituencies.

But one deputy from a rival party offered hope, noting admiringly: “You could put Jerry on Mars and he’d still get elected.”

Another was not so sure: “He’ll have to decide to stay where he is or cross the river. That decision will make or break him.”

Oh, how the TDs loved their self-absorbed melodrama. It was like porno for the politicos.

TDs are from Mars, homeless people are from... oh, who cares about the homeless or where they’re from.

See Constituency Commission Boundaries maps