Posh off: Where you’re from doesn’t preclude you from office

You can not boil down the intricacies of a society to a chamber of 158 people, but diversity of social class matters in the Oireachtas, writes Noel Rock.

The front-page story by Irish Examiner Political Editor Daniel McConnell in Friday’s paper was an interesting insight into the private thoughts of some of my colleagues within Fine Gael.

The opening line contained two arguments which, the story claimed, ministers privately fear will kill our chances of continuing in Government beyond the next election.

The first reason they’re fearful is our failure to solve the housing crisis. It’s a common fear that the housing crisis won’t be solved — not alone among politicians, but among the citizenry too.

In this respect, the public wants us to succeed, but is wearied by a problem that seems incredibly difficult to unpick across a variety of segments: Record-high private sector rents, a lack of public housing, a lack of construction.

Yet, unlike what some have said in behind-closed-doors mutterings, the most common phrase I hear in relation to the Department of Housing isn’t that Eoghan Murphy is doing a good job, or a bad job, or that he’s too posh, or too whatever, but - rather - what I hear most often is this: rather that they wouldn’t want his job at all. Neither punter nor politician would. It is the toughest job in the country without question. And Eoghan has stepped up to it.

Yet the story opened with a separate criticism within the same sentence, chiefly: Fine Gael is fearful of its “posh boy” image. The truth is that some TDs are posh, in the same way that some in society are.

Some in Fine Gael are. As are some in Fianna Fáil. As are some on the left (Richard Boyd Barrett of People Before Profit and Solidarity’s Paul Murphy were both privately educated). Yet that’s far from the whole story.

While diversity of social class absolutely matters in the Oireachtas, is it fair to single out the ability of an individual to do his or her job based on his or her background? Absolutely not.

Consider some of our former ministers who are now lauded as being visionary and reforming. Did perceived poshness take a toll on their performance or how they were perceived?

Take, for instance, Donogh O’Malley. Did anyone doubt his sincerity to free education given he was, by all accounts, born into a wealthy middle-class family?

Having grown up in the Ballymun flats, born to an unmarried mother in the 1980s, I feel like pretty much everyone in the Dáil is posher than me. At times, that can be a little difficult, and I would always freely admit that the Dáil would be better served by having a greater mix of backgrounds represented.

Yet I would never for a second take on the argument that somebody’s capacity to serve the public and the State is somehow lessened by their background — regardless of what that background is.

If we solve the problem, the image doesn’t matter. If people believe we’re making inroads on the housing issue, if they believe our commitment, if they believe we care, and if they believe we understand, then they won’t care who is delivering it, what their voice sounds like, or what their bank balance is.

That applies equally to the housing minister as it does to all ministers and all problems.

Only by making it an issue does it become an issue. If people believe in your capacity to understand a problem, then they will believe in your capacity to solve it.

Our society is a representative democracy: I stand for election in the belief that I have empathy, the ability to understand problems from an individual level to an institutional level, and the capacity to do something meaningful to fix those problems.

I specify it’s a representative democracy, with the emphasis on representative, because that bit is often forgotten: it isn’t designed to perfectly be a mirror image of society, for it cannot be.

You can not boil down the intricacies and the complications and the nuances of a society to a chamber of 158 people. What you can do, however, is try and make it as representative as possible (hence our introduction of gender quotas) and, from there, work to ensure that each member understands, and can ably represent, as broad a cross-section of society as possible.

In the same way as you don’t need to be a teacher to be an education minister, you don’t get precluded from being a housing minister — or any kind of minister — simply because you happened to be born in a certain postcode.

I consider myself lucky to be born here, fortunate that I could get elected to our national parliament at the age of 28.

That’s real social mobility at work. Holding the background of anybody against them — regardless of whether it’s snobbery or inverted snobbery — goes against that.

We should judge performance on its own merits; there is much to do, and arguing about background and image does not serve us, the public, or the ideal of a Republic well.

Noel Rock is a Fine Gael TD For Dublin North West.