Politics: A Family Business

The birth of Captain Moonlight coincides with the formation of a new government, following a general election on May 24th. So how does one get to sink in to one of these coveted seats? Well, Daddy already having done so helps.

There are 166 TDs in Dáil Eireann. Of these, 29 are the sons and daughters of past deputies. A further 11 had other family members in politics to whom they owe their start in political life. Some, like Tom McEllistrom, have a pedigree stretching back three generations. The majority (26, if we include that latter-day Lazarus, Beverly Flynn) of this privileged 40 are from Fianna Fail; the rest are from Fine Gael with a handful of Labour. What is more, this may be a lesser figure than in the outgoing Dáil. I haven't crunched the numbers quite so assiduously, but we lost at least half a dozen with a familial background in politics, including Síle de Valera and both O'Malleys. One third of the new Cabinet (Lenihan, Hanafin, Coughlan, Cowen and Ó Cuív) fall into this catagory.

So a quarter of all TDs are a product of political "dynasties", which have to be one of the most unappealing things about Irish political life. It is of course widely recognised all politics are ultimately about the parish pump in this country. But there is nothing quite so sickeningly parochial as the spectacle of voters queueing up to elect Niall Blaney as the fourth in his line. These people may be efficient constituency operators in their own right, of course, but there are certainly cases where a candidate has been swept in on the strengh of name alone, like when Enda Kenny won the bye-election precipitated by the death of his father in 1975. And as Sean Sherlock showed in Cork East, that mindset is alive and well.

Not exactly democracy at its finest. It might remind some of a reasonably poor film called The Distinguished Gentleman, where a con man played by Eddie Murphy manages to get elected to Congress because he has the same name as the previous occupant. "Jeff Johnson: The Name You Know" was the slogan, and God help us that's pretty much how it goes up in Donegal North-East. The movie was a comedy, but this is supposed to be our legislative body. Surely there should be more qualifications to be in there than just surname.