We get the politicians we deserve (Part II)

In a feature in today’s Daily Mail, Nicola Byrne interviews locals in fraudster Michael ‘The Stroke’ Fahy’s home town of Adrahan, Co.Galway, to see if his conviction has changed locals’ perceptions of him.

Unsurprisingly, it hasn’t.

One giggled that he had been “a bit naughty, but that’s The Stroke for you.”

A shopkeeper revealed: “People are crossing their fingers now and hoping he’ll get away with it.”

Another local said: “It’s a country thing. People in the city wouldn’t understand. We look after our own.”

Speaking at a lecture address in NUI Galway last year, Dr Garret Fitzgerald said: “Much of Ireland remains pre-modern in important respects…These include an almost tribalist form of localism, and a clientist approach to politics, together with a weak commitment to the state..our state is still marked by a notable abscence of what has become known as civic republicanism.”

Dr Fitzgerald was making an important point: that we continue to put petty local concerns over the larger issues that our elected representatives should spend their time dealing with.

The mindset behind this “pre-modern” “localism” and “tribalism” that Dr Fitzgerald spoke of might also be the reason we continue to support one of “our own”, even when they are found to have defrauded us of our money, lied to us, and attempted to blame their wrongdoings on an entirely innocent man.