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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
36 July 2021
as being some sort of left winger or, at least,
‘progressive’ and she took a strong secularish
line too on the National Maternity Hospital.
In fact, she is, on all the issues that count,
made of the usual reactionary blue-blooded stu
without which Fine Gael would cease to be itself.
This was illustrated during a comical episode
while she was Mayor of Galway City in 2012. In
June 2011 Galway City Council unanimously
agreed to a proposal by then Labour Councillor
Billy Cameron that a permanent monument in
memory of Latin American revolutionary Ernesto
‘Che’ Guevara – an actual left winger – be placed
on the Salthill promenade as a tribute to
Guevara’s Galway ancestry via his father Ernesto
Guevara Lynch, whose forefathers came from
Claregalway.
The structure was to be jointly funded by the
Cuban and Argentinean embassies and based on
a design by artist Jim Fitzpatrick, creator of the
iconic Che image which has adorned millions of
t-shirts and student bed-sit posters.
However, when Declan Ganley and a couple of
anti-Castro Republicans in the US House of
Representatives hued a little, Mayor Hildegarde
dutifully collapsed and the majority on Galway
City Council followed suit.
Apparently, she hadn’t been aware that Che
Guevara was a blood-curdling communist.
In a statement to the Connacht Tribune,
Naughton said: “The history since his life and
death has shown that the type of society he was
advocating was no more equitable than what he
was fighting to displace”.
So Hildegarde Naughton isn’t much of a one for
action or ideas but for Fine Gael she’s sound on
the big questions and, in a tired and ageing party
looking to rejuvenate, she’s younger than Heather
Humphreys so she’ll do.
haves. If she has qualms, she has kept them to
herself.
Naughton’s election to Galway City Council in
2009 was a shock, most of all for her running
mate, long standing Fine Gael Councillor, and
renowned bookmaker, John Mulholland, who
apparently didn’t see the refuse truck coming to
take him where former Mayors of Galway go to be
recycled.
Mulholland had represented Galway City’s
most prosperous ward on the Council for a quarter
of a century. Naughton, a trained classical
soprano, was mostly known for playing first
Calamity Jane and then Yum Yum, in Gilbert and
Sullivan’s Mikado in Galway Patrician Musical
Society productions. But she took the seat.
Similarly, then Government Chief Whip Sean
Kyne’s seat was meant to be the safer of the then
two Fine Gael seats in Galway West when
Naughton entered the Dáil after the 2016
election. Kyne is a serious type with a furrowed
brow second only to that of another Fine Gael
great, Neale Richmond TD for Dublin Rathdown
and, of late, loud advocate of pouring all manner
of heavy weaponry into Ukraine.
Unlike Richmond, Kyne rarely expresses what
could be called an opinion. Indeed, he seems to
have spent most of the Eighth Amendment repeal
referendum campaign hedging his bets in his
garden shed.
Hildegarde, on the other hand, overtly backed,
and publicly campaigned for, repeal. Naughton’s
stance on this issue is to be welcomed and it is
good that when times got rough for Fine Gael in
February 2020, it stood to her in holding her seat
whereas Kyne, who seems to have kept quiet in
the hope of keeping an option on the holy-Mary-
Mother-of-God vote, was the one who got flushed,
to the Seanad.
Naughton’s decent stance on the Amendment
led some arts liberals types to lose what passes
for their minds and start talking about Naughton
H
ildegarde Naughton journeyed from
Oranmore via a French and
Economics degree in NUIG and a
spell as a primary teacher to a year
working on the Commodities Market
of the Chicago Board of Trade to momentous
election to Galway City Council in 2009.
She’s now a ‘super’ Junior Minister of State at
the Department of Transport with special
responsibility for International and Road
Transport and Logistics, and a parallel Minister
of State at the Department of the Environment,
Climate and Communications with special
responsibility for Postal Policy and Eircodes.
Glamorous it’s not.
Naughton now attends cabinet though, despite
the fact she has been a good number of things,
she doesn’t appear to have actually done
anything, politically at least. Still she’s only 45
and she’s not finished yet.
It’s even said that inebriated Fine Gaelers at
party functions in the superior bits of Salthill have
been heard to mutter what people think is the
word “Hildegarde” when the discussion turns to
the dark matter of who takes over the party
leadership when Leo Varadkar is sent away to
wherever it is people like him go when they stop
being leader of parties like Fine Gael.
Such gin and tonic induced mutterings are,
surely, over stating the case. But one can see the
logic. Hildegarde is the sort of exemplary posh
girl who gives a certain class of Fine Gaeler warm
feelings. But unlike, say, Dun Laoghaire TD
Jennifer Carroll MacNeill, Naughton doesn’t give
the impression that she gets pleasure out of
inflicting pain on poor people.
Her rise through the party ranks has not been
characterised by any apparent reservations
about her party’s tendency to always favour the
Profile: Junior Minister Hildegarde Naughton;
ideas-free, but vaguely secular,
ascendant, and thoroughgoing,
Fine Gaeler
Naughton’s decent stance on the Eighth Amendment
led some arts liberals types to start talking about
Naughton as being some sort of left winger
By Kevin Higgins
POLITICS
