Life experience not needed - Village Magazine

2 8 December - January 2017

POLITICS

Britain’s and Ireland’s Political Class

follow predictable careers

by Cormac Shine

N 2007, as the spin-heavy, scandal-bruised Blair era

came to a close, British journalist Peter Oborne pub-

lished a harsh polemic titled 'The Triumph of the

Political Class'. The book describes the rapid growth

of a professionalised cabal of career politicians in

the UK from the late 1970s onwards – a self-interested

clique more devoted to perpetuating long, lucrative

careers than to unselfish public service. Inspired by the

work of Gaetano Mosca, an early twentieth-century Ital

ian political theorist, Oborne’s analysis of this

problematic development has been repeatedly vindi

cated as Britain’s confidence in its politicians continues

to plummet.

Although Oborne dubiously concludes that the solu

tion to the corrosion of British public life is to return to

the safety of government by a mythical, highly moral

and disinterested elite drawn from the traditional

establishment, his identification of the career structure

of modern careerist politicians is accurate nonetheless,

and provides some insights on recent parallel

developments in Ireland. It is worth analysing how Irish

politics, always a hyper-local closed-shop, is now prey

to the professionalisation of politics, and the associ-

ated problems, as Ireland’s political elite in general

does little to represent the views of its constituents.

Oborne describes, step by step, the well-travelled

career budding British politician should follow. First,

study at Oxbridge, preferably PPE at Oxford, and

immerse yourself in the youth wing of your chosen

party. After graduation, become a journalist or a

researcher to an MP, then a special advisor, and per-

haps briefly a think-tank researcher or corporate

lobbyist. All going well, the party leadership will add

you to the A-list, parachuting you into a safe seat by the

age of thirty. Thence you can start your (hopefully swift)

ascent to the cabinet. Politicians who have followed

this advice to the letter include David Cameron, George

Osborne, the Miliband brothers, Nick Clegg, Boris John-

son, Michael Gove, Ed Balls, Yvette Cooper and Andy

Burnham.

Life experience

not

needed

December - January 2017 2 9

First, join the party at a

young age. Ideology is

not a major factor so

longevity, loyalty and graft

matter above all. Next,

choose your constituency

and never leave

While Ireland lacks the size and political infrastruc-

ture necessary to systematically facilitate such

regimented career paths, the blueprint for young politi-

cos here is almost as straightforward. First, join your

chosen party at a young age. Ideology is not a major

factor in party politics, and so longevity, loyalty and

graft matter above all. Next, choose your constituency,

move there, and never leave. In fact, ideally you have

been born there and only left for three or four years to

go to college (where you spent every spare minute with

your party’s youth branch, far away from actual politi-

cal activity on campus). Unlike your British counterparts,

you have to foster a strong local connection with your

constituency due to proportional multi-seat constituen-

cies, which don’t allow for ‘safe’ seats to be handed to

favoured out-of-towners by party elders. To build this

stock, run in local elections, early and often if needs

be. This is the surest way of building your profile, and

of gaining renown within the party and local area. 38

of the 52 TDs elected for the first time in 2016 previously

served as county, city or town councillors, illustrating

how crucial local experience is in getting to the Dáil.

“The Political Class is distinguished from earlier gov

erning elites by a lack of experience of and connection

with other ways of life. Members of the Political Class

make government their exclusive study. This means they

tend not to have significant experience of industry, com

merce, or civil society”.

Of course, deputies emerging from the ranks of

county councils are nothing new. A more recent devel-

opment in the make-up of Ireland’s political class is an

explicit devotion to politics as an independent voca-

tion. An increasing number of TDs have little to no

experience outside the political bubble: of the 52 first-

timers elected in 2016, one in four is a member of this

newly professionalised political class – that is, career

ists who have worked almost exclusively as political

advisors, parliamentary assistants, appointed sena-

tors, and party or union apparatchiks. The Dáil still

houses plenty of teachers, barristers, solicitors, phar-

macists, accountants and publicans, but an increasing

number of TDs have already spent most of their adult

life working at Leinster House.

While the road to the Irish cabinet is more parish-

pump than PPE, and more Fleadh Cheoil than Financial

Times, this increasingly common career path is no less

damaging to the quality of our political discourse than

its British equivalent. A TD who has spent their entire

career within the Oireachtas bubble is unlikely to fully

represent or empathise with the concerns of most of

their constituents. This is especially true since a pro-

fessional politician’s priority is staying within that

bubble, not only as a matter of public service, but also

as a matter of survival. Members of the new political

class have no career to return to should they fail to be

reelected, because politics is their career. While many

members of Ireland’s old political elite are solicitors or

teachers in name only, at least these professions have

some connection, however tenuous, to the “real” world

outside politics. The professionalisation of the political

class is eroding this concept, further increasing the

already yawning gap between the Irish electorate and

their representatives.

In keeping with this, whereas once the youngest TDs

were scions filling an unexpected vacancy in the family

seat (think Enda Kenny, Brian Cowen, Máire Geoghe-

gan-Quinn or Mary Coughlan), the Dáil’s freshest faces

are now consummate careerists, who display a uniform

lack of experience outside of the political realm. Fine

Gael’s Noel Rock (elected at 27) worked as a parliamen-

tary assistant in Dublin and Brussels for almost his

entire pre-parliamentary career, and first ran in local

elections at 21; Sinn Fein’s Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire (27)

was a political advisor to his party’s Oireachtas mem-

bers; and Fianna Fail’s Jack Chambers (25), a county

councillor at 23, was once a summer intern at Arthur

Cox. These men follow in the footsteps of other recent

Babies of the House, like Simon Harris and Lucinda

Creighton, both of whom had equally short or non-

existent careers outside of politics before winning

a seat.

This phenomenon isn’t just a young man’s game,

however (and Irish politics is still very much a man’s

game). TDs such as Sinn Fein’s Eoin Ó Broin (43) and

Fianna Fail’s Marc MacSharry (42) have spent most of

their careers as political insiders, as a party

Ireland's Bullingdoners!

3 0 December - January 2017

POLITICS

apparatchik and three-term senator respec-

tively. It’s also a cross-party phenomenon.

Members of the new political class populate the

parliamentary ranks of Fianna Fail, Fine Gael,

and Sinn Fein (Labour escapes this charge, only

because it returned six stalwart TDs in 2016).

Independents are indulging in the practice, too.

Finian McGrath’s ministerial press advisor,

Damien O’Farrell, is a Dublin City Councillor,

who will ineluctably strive to succeed his boss

as an independent TD for Dublin Bay North

some time.

Ireland, of course, has always had a tight-

knit, hereditary elite of self-interested

careerists with little experience of anything but

politics. That eleven of our thirteen Taoisigh

have been closely related to other TDs is evi-

dence enough of the deep-seated nepotism

present in our politics. The Irish case is unu-

sual, however, because the rise of a

professionalised political class hasn’t dis

placed this old establishment, but instead the

two groups have developed together and are

seamlessly merging within our stale political

culture. 28 of the 158 current TDs are closely

related to a former TD – the vast majority of

them the child of a TD who served in the same

constituency. If we include those TDs whose

parents were county councillors and senators,

a total of 32 TDs are closely related to former

officeholders, or more than one in five. This

proportion is fairly constant among new TDs,

too, showing how the recent rise of the profes-

sionalised class hasn’t displaced our

electorate’s atavistic nepotism. Of the 52 new

deputies, seven are the children of former TDs,

and two more the children of county council-

lors, which means that more than one in six

first-time TDs are related to former officehold-

ers (including Maria Bailey, whose councillor

father is also her parliamentary assistant).

These two strands of the political class now

coexist, combining the worst of both worlds:

clientelistic hyper-localism and the discon-

nected, self-interested nature of political

careerism, with neither proper representation

of constituents’ needs nor an appetite for ambi-

tious national reform and leadership. The

recent Constitutional Convention and the cur-

rent Citizens’ Assembly were proposed as

means to hear directly from the Irish people,

but they were also clever methods of allowing

TDs to shy away from publicly debating poten

tially controversial issues that might hurt their

local stock and re-election prospects: abor-

tion, climate change, equal marriage, and

political reform. Instead, the Government can

choose to follow (or not) the recommendations

of these forums, after gauging how the public

might respond, and without endangering much

political capital.

The increasing chasm between politicians

and constituents has been a common theme in

Western democracies in the last few years, and

Ireland is no different – the election slogan

“Keep the Recovery Going” jarred with many

voters earlier this year, since it incorrectly

implied that the recovery was already being felt

across the country. If we are to avoid the nastier

strand of populism sweeping through much of

Europe and America in reaction to this disen-

franchisement, our parliamentarians will have

to start leading, rather than following, on

issues of major importance to their constitu

ents. But the fact that our political system is

still beholden to the confluence of parochial pri-

orities and naked self-interest is also an

indictment of ourselves. The status quo is

unlikely to change if we continue to elect self-

interested, inexperienced hacks from a shallow

political gene pond, risking further alienation.

The road to the Irish cabinet

is more parish-pump than

PPE, more Fleadh Cheoil

than Financial Times but no

less damaging in alienating

participants from their

constituents