Category: Media (Page 10 of 11)

As appeared in Letters – Kerryman – 25 April, 2012 edition

Henry Gaynor (April 18) disputes the necessity and justification for Gender Quotas in our Elections. He does this by asking some very intelligent and searching questions; are women interested, if they are what’s keeping them back, where will they find the time, will they not lose some credibility if part of a quota and what happens to the men affected by quotas? Fortunately there is research on this topic so we know why since 1801, Kerry has only ever sent four women to represent our interests in London and more recently Dublin.

Simply put, women are prevented from enjoying the same level of success as men in the political world, because the system as it is now, was designed by men, for men and continues to be dominated by men. This may be the 21st Century, but when family commitments involve caring for children, elderly parents or sick relations, the responsibility still falls mostly on women. A fact made worse by the ridiculous hours politicians have allowed become the norm for their profession. Knocking on doors on a Monday, sitting in Dublin on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, followed by Clinics on a Friday means a woman (and in a civilised country, a man) with a young family, cannot hope to have her talents as a public representative, used at a national level.

This anti-family system has led to many women, not only shying away from participating in Party politics, it has became the norm to think women are uninterested and/or incapable of competing in the Political Arena. This notion has been around for so long now, that even many women have begun to think it is true. This despite the fact that almost every organisation; voluntary, religious, charitable, political, sporting etc, relies almost entirely for their continued existence on the energy, wit and enthusiasm of women.

How do we change this culture? How do we instill confidence, make up for the lack of cash, address the inequality of caring responsibilities? We’ve two choices. We can continue as we are, which is a valid option but it has been estimated that it will take at least three centuries, at the present rate of progress, for us to have a Dáil that truly represents the men and woman of this nation.

Or the second option, which is Politicians so reforming their profession, that a woman from Kerry, with the talent to best promote the interests of Kerry people, is not prevented from doing so, just because as she is putting her children to bed at 8pm, her less talented Party colleague is happily pandering to any and all enquiries at any time of the day or night. This reform can only be undertaken by politicians. Only politicians can change their operating procedures. And a first step in this transformation is to give the politicians a bit of a shove. Encourage them to find enough women to add to the ballot papers, so that the choice of the voter is enhanced. This is not so we can have token women in the Dáil. No, it is so that there are enough women in the Dáil that they will finish the job of transforming Irish politics to the extent that quotas are never again needed.

We all pay for the politicians and we all pay for the Political Parties so I don’t think it is expecting too much of them, to at least try to give everyone a fair go at trying for the responsibility of governing.

As appeared in Letters – Kerryman – 26 October, 2011 edition

I hate to admit this, but I was so distracted by the silliness and melodrama of the Presidential Campaign, that I plain forgot that not one, but two referendums, are being held on the same day as the Presidential Election. Presidents come and go, but our Constitution is timeless. It is a little blue book, which defines our Nation and sets out how we govern ourselves. Anything that is done to alter this document, has to be treated with great care and attention.

I had intended voting yes to both amendments. Cutting the pay of Judges and allowing the Dáil to investigate matters of public concern, are undoubtedly good and necessary things. Unfortunately the wording, in both amendments, does much more than that. If you have received your polling card, I urge you to read the amendments. Read them several times and then ask yourself this question, how much power do you trust your politicians to have?

Read the words again. Read them and remember that every single democracy has one thing in common, judges judge and politicians seek re-election. We all want to see judges paid less and Bertie Ahern probed good and hard, but read the words. Politicians, the class of people who with their rich friends herded this country over a cliff, want us to now trust them to decide what judges should be paid and what individuals should be hauled over the coals.

Read the words and then send a message to our politicians. Yes, we want judges paid less and we want the reasons for this recession properly examined, but we do not want politicians to take advantage of the situation to grab ever more power. Read the words and demand that the politicians come back to us with a better way, a fairer way and a safer way to do what we all agree is necessary.

As appeared in Letters – Kerryman – 7 September, 2011 edition

In April last, Minister for Education, Ruairí Quinn announced his intention to facilitate the reduction of National Schools, operating under Catholic patronage, from 90% to 50%. Understandably, many Catholics may feel unsure about such a development. The vast majority of us, Catholics and non Catholics alike, went to Catholic schools and again, for the majority of us, it was a positive experience. Today, we remain for the most part, Catholic and may be concerned that our children will not receive the grounding in our faith that we did, if the schools are removed from the Catholic Church’s control. We may even fear that schools will become godless institutions in this race to secularism.

These are legitimate questions, especially as we do not know how this process of divestment is going to proceed. I would however suggest, that a greater understanding of the aims of secularisation would go a great deal of the way in allaying any fears that Catholic parents may have. Secularism is not an attempt to remove god from the classroom, it is instead the creation of shared space for all faiths and those without faith.

National Schools are more than arenas for the teaching of multiplication tables and reading. A National School is both a self-contained community and that place which teaches us about the larger community. Until recently we were one large community. We were Catholic and Irish. There may have been divisions between town and country, Cork and Kerry, but we were all Catholic and Irish. It was natural then, for the Catholic Church to be the educator of our youngest children. This they did very successfully, contributing greatly to the production of well-educated Catholic Irish.

Things are now different now. Ireland is different. Our Irish community is now a community of multiple parts. We are Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, agnostic and atheist. We are many colours, many languages and we are many aspirations. We are an Irish community of many communities and this brings with it new challenges. The biggest challenge being, how to ensure that this diversity of Irishness becomes the wonderfully positive thing that it can be.

If this inclusiveness is deemed a worthy aspiration, then the process must begin in National Schools. Children this young are incredibly open to the messages we adults transmit. How we behave is the biggest teaching tool there is. Children will model themselves on our behaviour. If we create environments where difference is investigated, lauded and embraced then we will have begun the process of building a future Ireland today. The alternative is to choose exclusion; the couple of non Catholic children sitting in the hallway during religious instruction.

This inclusiveness and diversity can include faith, indeed it can celebrate it. Our children will grow up understanding the many faiths and non, that contribute to our Irish identity. They will become as familiar with Moslem ritual as they are with evolution and the importance of Easter. They can and will know more than us and they will become the Irish community of communities. As for the teaching of the minutiae of whatever faith we wish for our children? Let us remember that our schools lay idle every evening and every weekend. Imam, Rabbi, Priest or philosopher, whoever you wish to instruct your child, should be given access to these buildings. Let us allow our children become more Irish and more Catholic, but let us allow them know that one need not be Catholic to be Irish.

This is an interview I gave to Radio Kerry on August 8, 2011. Please excuse the gratutitous Arwen pics 🙂

The following is an edited version of my Cloyne Report post as it appears in the Letter section of The Kerryman

As appeared in Letters – Kerryman – 3 August, 2011 edition

Sir,

On 13 July of this year, The Cloyne Report was published and, in essence the report shows that the Catholic Church failed to protect children from harm between the years 1996 and 2005. That the Catholic Church failed to protect children is not a surprise, the surprise is the dates involved, 1996 to 2005. Perhaps it is a still a little early to use the phrase ‘last century‘ to describe archaic ideas, but if some of us had given credence to the excuse of ignorance, which Catholic apologists had used to explain away their Church’s behaviour, then 2005 wholly demolishes this ugly attempt at misdirection.

There are no more excuses left for the Catholic Church. Any organisation that routinely interacts with children should have a child protection policy. Best practice would have these policies based almost wholly on Children First (1999 and 2010) guidelines. This policy provides front-line staff and management, of any organisation, with an easy to follow guide on how to protect children and how to report instances of suspected abuse. Put simply, if a member of staff has a suspicion, they pass this information to their supervisor, who is responsible for ensuring that the suspicion is reasonable, if the suspicion is reasonable, the HSE and/or gardai must then be informed.

What the Cloyne Report shows is that this policy was adopted by the Catholic Church and then it was turned on its head. Instead of Children First, it seems to have became a policy of Catholic Church First.

In response to this betrayal of trust by the Catholic Church, the Government is now keen to make reporting of suspected abuse mandatory. The discretion that organisations had will end, childcare professionals will have to endure investigations when subjected to malicious and nuisance accusations and careers will be unnecessarily harmed or even ended.

When I began my childcare career in 1994, I was taught that children never lie about sexual abuse. I left childcare in 2004, utterly exhausted by the measures required to protect oneself from false allegations.

I do not resent those requirements, because the best child protection practice, exactly mirrors that which is required of staff to protect themselves from false allegations. Allegations will of course still be made, but if everyone has followed the prescribed protocols, then that allegation can be quickly assessed as either credible or malicious.Thus a well run establishment provides a safe environment for both service users and staff.

Mistakes continue to be made, but today, when the State or organisations who operate under the auspices of the State get involved in a child’s life, that child is physically and emotionally safer than they have ever been in the past.

The problem in the case of Cloyne was not Catholic organisations, largely staffed with lay people, who see their service users as their prime responsibility, the problem is the Catholic Church itself interacting with children.

In my view, the prime motivation moving the Catholic Church is the Catholic Church. Since its inception it has put its needs first. It sees itself as God-touched. It has spilled blood on an epic scale and still maintains its visage of pious saintliness. That it would confuse the rape of a child with a PR problem is unfortunately a limitation in their morality they may never overcome. And so we must look at mandatory reporting.

Is there an alternative? I don’t think so. There is no democratic way of ending all interaction the Catholic Church has with children and if the Catholic Church is habitually untrustworthy, then child protection policy must be so stringent that even that institution is forced to put children first.

In the interim however, spare a thought for those thousands of social care workers, social workers, community workers, nurses, teachers and special needs assistants whose working environments are about to drastically deteriorate. And spare a thought for the coaches and volunteers and neighbours and foster parents and unfortunate parents who will have to face interventions in their lives that they wouldn’t ordinarily have to endure.

Bear in mind too that these hard working and dedicated people will have to tolerate the imposition of mandatory reporting for the simple reason that priests cannot be trusted to put the safety of children above the interests of the church.

As appeared in Letters – Kerryman – 27 October, 2010 edition 2010

There is an ugly term being used by bankers and politicians during these economically troubled times. The term is ‘moral-hazard’ and while moral is in the term, it isn’t in the meaning of the term. Moral-hazard is the dirty little piece of philosophical sophistry that the banks and politicians have invented that will allow them to reenact the evictions of the nineteen century.

What moral-hazard means is that if our government doesn’t beggar several generations of taxpayers to save the banks, instead choosing to save the heavily mortgaged tax payers of today, we citizens would party like twas 1999 and never again pay back a loan.

The banks, the professional lenders, are more trustworthy than we fools who availed of the services of these licensed loan-sharks. Think on that, think hard on that, the politicians, and by politicians I mean all 163 members of the current Dàil, have opted to save the banks at our expense. The men and women whose fabulous wages and outrageous pensions we pay have decided, on our behalf, that it is morally acceptable to save the bankers but morally dubious to save the rest of us.

How do we react to this? How can we react to this? I am hit by my desire for two, apparently contradictory things, fairness and vengeance. If the bank ends up owning my house, then I will want some conditions met before I can be sanguine about being thrown to the State’s mercy.

Moral-hazard is particularly galling as it should also apply to banks, to bankers and to politicians. If a bank is considered too big and important to fail, then why would it concern itself with conducting its business in a proper manner? If the tax payer is always available to bail it out, it can behave in whatever way it wishes.

As for the bankers themselves, well their behaviour is easy to understand. Some got rich through the mishandling of their banks and it seems the worst they face is living off their hefty pensions. Banking seems to be a consequence free profession.

Speaking about consequence free professions however one has to look at the politicians who destroyed our country. Thirteen years of Fianna Fàil rule has brought us from recession to recession, but this time it’s a recession with the added pain of huge personal debt. It took 20 years, from 1977 to 1997 to recover from the previous Fianna Fàil recession, just in time for them to learn from their mistakes and make the this recession the most destructive of them all.

Consequences however for the Fianna Fàil ‘brains trust’ who did this to us? Fat pensions and a delusional refusal to accept that they destroyed us. A delusion so strong that they would rather see politics debased beyond repair than resign, a confusion so deep that they cannot distinguish between Fianna Fàil and Ireland.

Men and women so divorced from normality and morality that come the next election, they can look forward to six figure pay offs, when they are thrown out of office. That is their future, comfort, ease and a few decades of writing memoirs that show it was all the fault of an American bank.

What though, can we do? How can we endure these hardships, while those responsible get to put their feet up and relax on the money we are paying them? How can the pain of every death caused by cut backs, every suicide, every life ruined, every family torn apart by emigration, be placed at the feet of these vile creatures, these bankers and politicians of ruin?

We are exhorted to come out onto the streets in protest. Irish people don’t do protest. What we do is follow, doesn’t always matter who we follow, but that’s what we do. Now we need someone to follow who will make the right promises. Don’t downplay the pain to come, we know now thats unavoidable. Do promise that no one is going to get off easy this time.

Make us just ten promises and Ireland will follow;

1. Promise us a new Constitution.
2. Promise us less TDs on significantly less money.
3. Promise us that incompetence will cost a banker or a politician their pension.
4. Promise us that this will be back dated to include every member of the Government now in power.
5. Promise us that the banks will pay back every penny, with interest and without them passing this onto their customers.
6. Bring the solicitors, barristers, consultants dentists, judges and anyone else, paid for by the tax payer, to heel.
7. Break the Public Sector Unions.
8. Eradicate the quangos.
9. Dispense with all the higher grade civil servants. The tax payer is forced to pay for expensive Government advisers anyway. Why pay double?
10. Finally and most importantly, any TD not pulling their weight, should be forced to face a by-election.

A Party who promises to remake, punish and lead will be able to save those of us who remain on this benighted island. A new Ireland may just be able to avoid destroying itself again.

The real moral-hazard the Irish people of today face, is if we bequeath a nation worth living in to our children, or do we just pass on our debt?

As appeared in Letters – Kerryman – 13 October, 2010 edition

Over the years, there have been many things used to scare entire countries. The Vikings, the Normans, the Protestants (or Catholics), the Communists, the immigrants have all scared or been used to scare populations. In Ireland it used to be the English that scared us. Today however, the rich people, who took over from the English, are telling us that it is the IMF that should be feared most.

The International Monetary Fund is the big scary monster that the powerful, suit wearing, men in Dublin harp on about, when we dare to question why they are mortgaging our unborn grandchildren’s futures. Their argument can be summed up as, ‘if you think we are bad, the IMF will eat your children. ‘

What is the IMF? It is the organisation which tries to keep all financial crises local. They will lend money to nations that no longer can borrow money from the usual sources. They do this to keep the global financial system operating smoothly. It is an organisation which a country goes to when there are no other options. Think 19th Century Poor House. A person would avoid starvation, but only just and pay a painful price.

They are an organisation that cares for one thing and one thing only, financial stability. They don’t do emotions. They also don’t do small print. They will say exactly what they want for their money and what they will want, what they always want, are cutbacks. The young, the old and sick will suffer.

I can’t bloody wait. I can’t wait because I can no longer see any other options. We all know that our Nation must be restructured, must be rebuilt, to save it from our suited men in Dublin. The IMF are the only ones who will break these rich men who are sucking the life blood from our county.

Only the IMF can cut out the cancer of cronyism that threatens our 90-year experiment with independence. The cronyism that is the small number of men that run our Government, our banks, our civil service, our Public Sector Unions and our quangos. This small number of vastly over paid men are guilty of destroying this nation through a combination of greed, incompetence and rank treasonous stupidity.

They still have the power and they won’t give it up. They won’t give it up because just like the previous bunch, the English, they think they are not only entitled to rule and rob us, they think themselves best qualified to rule and rob us.

The IMF will bring with them suffering, there will be tears and despair. They will however give us back our country. We will be a poorer country but we will be a wiser country. We will have learned that allowing a small number of men to run absolutely everything in the country, for their own benefit and their friend’s benefit, is not to be endured. We may then finally see patriotism as it should be, politicians wishing to serve, not to benefit.

This is an article that I had published in The Kerryman in April, 2008

It seems that not a day goes by without some reference to the environment. Be it the melting ice-caps due to global warming or eagles being reintroduced to Kerry or stringent planning laws to prevent house building. Decisions are being made and laws passed that seek to reduce our freedoms and choices to make the environment better. How can this be happening, when only 4.7% of the electorate regarded the environment important enough to vote for the Green Party at the last General Election?

Where is the democratic will of the citizenry in a situation where six TDs can inflict their ideology on an entire nation? We now find ourselves having this, tiny Dublin based entity, deciding how we in Kerry should conduct our lives. And the focus of their ire is directed at ‘one-off housing’. There is no democracy in changing a way of life without the agreement of those who are most affected. The values of the Green Party are not our values and in a democracy they are obliged to convince us not impose upon us.

Why however do these city dwellers so object to us building our houses wherever we choose? Why having lost the argument at the last election do they legislate as if they had won?

There are few people living in Kerry today who pine for the past. One would have to be absolutely perverse to miss the unemployment, the emigration, the crippling taxes and the sense of hopelessness. One cannot but be staggered by the new found wealth and energy of our county’s people. Anywhere one turns one can see new houses built and new house being built. Our lost generations are returning to enjoy the prosperity and in their wake we are experiencing the entirely new phenomenon of inward immigration.

Yet the environmentalists say that our house building is objectionable, unsustainable, harmful and even ugly. Would they have us return to the bad old days of stagnation and Christmas parcels from America? Where are their arguments and their respect for our culture and our democracy?

We should not however object to the environmentalist agenda just for the sake of it, we should first examine their case in detail. Give them the respect of the open mind that they seem unable to show us. There are eight headings under which the environmentalists object to one-off housing. They are all about sustainability, which really means that we will suffer in the future for what we are doing now. The arguments are as follows:

1) The environmentalists speak about ‘visual impact’. In other words what we are doing is making Kerry a lot less pretty. Unobstructed views of fields, trees, rivers and mountains are what bring the tourists to Kerry, not apparently the multitude of bungalows, dormers, holiday homes and mansions which have been built in the last ten years. This they say has and will impact on our spiritual and financial well being.

2) One-off housing also leads to increased reliance on cars. I suppose that’s an obvious one really. With everyone spread out then of course we will need to travel more. And public transport can only survive if heavily subsidised by the tax payer, who will also have to keep the roads in good shape. And the car users themselves are going to see the cost of keeping their cars going up and up.

3) Then of course there is the problem of electricity, water, phone lines and sewerage. We now have the most polluted water in Europe. This according to the environmentalists is because everyone has their own septic tank, whose contents are seeping into our drinking water. Plus we didn’t spend the money in the first place to upgrade our sewerage system. And phone lines and electricity pylons cost money, and do admittedly look ugly as they run through the countryside searching out every new house.

4) They also speak about other things such as schools, shops and jobs. The more scattered a population the more difficult and more expensive it is to provide essential services. And as mentioned before, it is becoming more expensive to actually travel to these increasingly expensive services.

5) Then there are the old people, who are used as yet another weapon in the environmentalists’ attack on our freedom. The more our population ages, in our scattered bungalows, the more difficult it will be, to provide the type of care needed to keep older people in their own homes and out of institutions. The number of carers provided will grow hugely and the cost of this will be borne by the tax payer. This is yet again a very expensive outcome.

6) The environmentalists don’t stop at that however. They also claim that we have a moral obligation to people who don’t even exist. They assert that in destroying our environment, we are destroying the environment of the unborn generations that will follow us. How can we be expected to build our homes based on what may be in the best interests of people not yet born?

7) There is also the issue of rural isolation and rural pubs. Without massively subsidised public transport or the relaxing of drink-driving laws then the time honoured culture of meeting up in the local pub will die out. We either stop drinking and drive to the pub or we all live within walking distance of the pub or we pay for someone to transport us all there. Whatever we do the present situation cannot be allowed to continue as in extreme cases it is leading to suicide.

8) Our creaking and crisis ridden health system has it in mind to centralise services. It is hoped that the fewer centres they have the better their expertise will be. This for many will mean eight hour return journeys for things like chemotherapy. So we can have substandard services on our door steps or we can travel for days for life saving services. It appears that where we live will decide if we will survive cancer or not.

This summary highlights the obvious weakness of the Green Party philosophy. They speak to us about prettiness and unborn generations and spirituality when they should be speaking about taxes. Stop talking about the environment and ask us if we areprepared to pay for our current life styles.

This is an article I had published in the Kerryman in 2009

I took a very grown-up step last year, I bought a house. Now don’t immediately switch off, just because I have mentioned property buying in the middle of a property crash, this is not about the epic financial crisis that our country is experiencing. This is a very uplifting discussion about funerals. Really! What do buying houses and funerals have in common and more importantly how can this be uplifting? Well, put simply, I now have an excuse to write a Will.

Healthy thirty-something year olds don’t usually have any reason to write Wills. It is one of the many advantages of being young and healthy. What I had not realised however, was that despite the eye watering length of my mortgage, the Life Assurance Policy I was obliged to take out, will pay whatever balance is left on my mortgagee, if I die prematurely.

So I find myself in the unexpected position of having an estate to distribute after I die. Of course my first wish would be to take everything with me in a Viking style funeral, but we are all environmentalists now, so I cannot be so irresponsible. I have to therefore sit down and write out what I want done with my possessions, who gets what, who is in charge of the process and how I want my body disposed of. I also get to pay a solicitor to make sure all this happens according to my instructions.

When I mentioned writing a Will to those close to me, I found them staring at me, searching for some hidden signs of terminal ill-health. They did not share my enthusiasm for controlling things from beyond the grave which is what a Will really is. Whether one believes in an afterlife or not, a Will is an exercise in extreme vanity. By signing a piece of paper, one gets to distribute property and listen to particular types of music, even though one is dead. How can one not be attracted to such power? A power I certainly don’t get to exercise while alive.

In writing a Will one must choose a solicitor and one must decide who gets what. That is the easy part of the process. After this it gets tricky. One must decide on an Executor. This is kind of like deciding on a Best Man or a God Parent. Except that liking the person is optional, one can dislike the Executor and prove this by leaving them nothing other than the unpleasant task of fulfilling one’s wishes.

Though in truth, picking a trusted friend is the best option. Again like a God Parent, the nominated person should first be asked. And when you have convinced them of your continuing good health and they are no longer angry at being given a fright, one has to make clear to them one’s specific wishes for how the immediate aftermath of one’s death is handled. It is a heavy responsibility, having to deal with one’s grief for a lost friend or relative and still having to attend to the details of that person’s particular wishes. So some pre-death planning should be done.

Fortunately, humanity has ritualised death to such a degree that in most cases one can go through the practicalities of losing a loved one on autopilot. A good undertaker will understand this and will quietly take almost all the pressure off the grief stricken, by simply doing their job. The process from the very moment of death up to the actual burial will happen almost as if by magic, because that is what a good Funeral Director can do.

Problems can arise however in a situation where one is not a traditionalist. If one wishes to alter one aspect of what is the usual process of burial, then that is where a Will, a well-informed Executor and an excellent Funeral Director become even more important. This only became apparent to me a few months ago. An elderly lady in Donegal died and as she was non-religious, her son ended up having to bury her in Derry.

It can be argued that this was a pointless thing for her son to do; he could have just given her a Catholic funeral and not worry about her wishes. Everyday people who live non-religious lives and lifestyles attend Catholic Churches for ceremonies, because Churches are where ceremonies are conducted. Even the Priests are aware of this ongoing pretence.

Respect for the dead however is something we take very seriously in this country. We are all keen to speak well of someone who has died and to ensure that their funeral is a picture of solemn reverence. So we must decide which is more important, a respect for tradition or our respect for the dead. Not an easy question. But a Will, with clear instructions will allow the Executor and the Funeral Director the opportunity, at least, to fulfil the wishes of the deceased.

I certainly don’t want to end up like that Donegal woman and have my friends and family traveling the country, with my coffin, looking for an unconsecrated hole in the ground. Thankfully however that won’t happen. There are 139 cemeteries in Kerry owned by the Council. So even the dead non-religious have rights in Kerry. But what of our need of ritual?

This thankfully can also be satisfied. Funeral homes, Community Centres or other public buildings will accommodate those who wish to attend the Memorial Service. And perhaps more importantly, one can also get someone to direct proceedings. An organisation called the Humanist Association of Ireland has trained personnel, who conduct Naming Day Ceremonies, Marriages and Funerals. Our need to do things the same as we have always done is still possible. It can look the same and even more importantly feel the same, but it doesn’t have to be the same.

The very last thing we will get to have any control over is our Funeral. Planning for it is not a bad thing.

As appeared in Letters – Kerryman – 15 September, 2010 Edition

I have written to you before about my anger towards the great and good of Ireland and their destruction of our Nation. Who could not be angry at their actions and enraged that they will not face any consequences? I would however like to be more constructive in this letter.

One of the most important elements in our economic ruination was our politicians. Their ignorant self interest made it possible for the bankers and the developers to behave as they did. I am of the opinion that this happened because we don’t elect people to sit in our national parliament, we instead elect men and women who’s primary job is to screw over all the other constituencies.

We in Kerry have seen this played out since 1997. In electing Jackie Healy-Rae, South Kerry was more than just fortunate, it hit the jackpot. As an Independent, who’s vote was and is needed by the governing parties, he gets to attract a great deal of money to South Kerry. Such money that we in North Kerry are left watching, with pot holed roads, green with envy.

At the next election the situation will change and Mr Healy-Rae will not have the same level of influence, but that doesn’t mean North Kerry will be doing the screwing. There is no realistic electoral arithmetic that will give any of the prospective North Kerry TDs any clout. We may get a junior Minister, but in a government with an overwhelming majority and during a decade of cut backs. We will not get our turn, we’ll be lucky to even get our passports back.

The alternative to a system of public representatives working mightily to get one over on other public representatives, is to elect men and women who’s job it is to look after our country, not our medical cards. This system is called the List System.

Put simply, each party will present a list of it’s candidates and depending on the number of votes the party gets, the bigger the number from the list are deemed elected. Now there are many ways to fine tune this system so that voters can have more or less influence on which particular people from a list get elected, but in the end, our TDs will have been elected to do one job and that job is running our country, not acting as messenger boys for the rich and powerful or pushing their snouts into the trough at the expense of the other pigs.

There are also two side benefits to this system. The first is that we would require fewer politicians, as we could decide on a number of TDs per citizen, instead of trying to make sense of the differing counties, constituencies, cities and populations.

The second is that instead of teachers and lawyers running our economy and heath system, we could actually access experts. Men and women who wish to offer their expertise to their country but not their lives to a career of meetings, bake sales, golf outings and boot licking.

Kerry has seen the best and the worst of our present system. The sighs of relief coming from our shock absorbers as our cars pass into South Kerry should tell us that this system is rotten. Even those in South Kerry must acknowledge something is wrong as they face the loss of access coming with the next election.

We can continue to elect hard necked shouters, hoping that luck and hunger for power will play the ball into our paths, or we can choose legislators whose job it is to govern all of us equally. I support the green and gold of Kerry, I don’t know what colours a constituency wears.