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We get the politicians we deserve
Read more about: Corruption, Democracy, Galway West, Irish Politics, Scandal, Uncategorized
Writing in the Irish Daily Mail today, Richard Waghorne quotes the judge who sentenced Galway County Councillor Michael “The Stroke” Fahy to prison for 12 months on fraud charges. “You have been declared a fraud”, the judge told the disgraced councillor.
Waghorne went on to make a far more important point:
He wrote: “We, though, must occupy an undistinguished place amongst democracies of the world as exceptionally, even ludicrously, forgiving of our corrput politicians…Only the most optimistic would expect that councillor Fahy’s recent brush with the law…will do too much damage to his next electoral performance.”
He goes on to cite a number of obvious example of politicians who enjoyed huge electoral support despite being implicated in major scandals: Michael Lowry, Beverly Cooper Flynn, Ray Burke, The Blaney family.
In an editorial last September, writing following the jump in support for Fianna Fáil and Bertie Ahern directly after the undeclared payments scandal, the Irish Times thundered:
“What sort of people are we? Now we know….The electorate, it appears, after 10 years of tribunals into various forms of corrupt payments, can set up a glass wall between this Taoiseach and Fianna Fáil, to distinguish between £8K from friends as distinct from £8 million to his mentor, Charles Haughey…The culture of nods and winks and looking the other way is alive and well in Irish democracy….If the rest of us “look the other way”, it won’t be long before the culture of corruption engendered by Mr Haughey will resurface. But, regrettably, this poll would indicate that this does not seem to matter.”
That might well happen, if we continue to elect fradusters and thieves and knaves and liars, and if we continue to allow the extistence of this bizarre and frankly perverted form of empathy we seem to have for disgraced representatives, as if they’re the underdog and we should be shouting for them.
As Richard Waghorne wrote:
“It’s true that we get the politcians we deserve. We keep electing them.”
Jim McDaid and “Stroke” Fahy to top their respective polls in the two elections? Nice accumulator, I’d say!
Throw lowry in there too. And i do agree with you lenny, but it is the hardest thing to explain about our system. I cannot get my head around it. It is tempting to boil it down to local delivery but other factors (whiff of cordite perhaps?) have to matter too. It just baffles me.
It’d make an interesting thesis to see why we do what we do.