I was born second in a catholic family of seven. My mother had to stop nursing due to the marriage ban in the local psychiatric hospital where she had met my father. Nothing out of the ordinary in the late 1960s early 1970s. Plenty of Work, Mass, School, lessons and hurling.
The discussion around the feeding table of my childhood was never political or topical and I can mostly remember a lot of squabbling about Tomato Sauce.
But being a one-channel, one-telly, one-radio, one Irish Press newspaper per day house, combined with my father’s insatiable appetite for current affairs, by osmosis I think politics and the doings of the world soaked in to me. It has to be remembered that this was an Ireland where the price heavy store bullocks made in Ballinasloe made prime time viewing on the telly (Mart & Market). Most aspects of Irish life deemed suitable for young ears and eyes were there in your face. If you wanted to watch the telly, listen to the radio or flick through the newspaper, you were cornered, only the odd copy of the Beano, and Wanderly Wagon providing any means of escape.
Like many families in rural Ireland in the 1960s/70s we were net producers rather than consumers. Our house on one cottage acre supported a cow, poultry and a kitchen garden and due to my parents’ fear of idleness, provided more than the house could consume so the rest was sold. The local Co-op even had to give us a milk quota when they were first introduced.
It could be said that this background is not one conducive to fostering a political identity different from anything around you. I was always politically conscious being acutely aware of the power our political system has in our democracy and how it affects everyone’s lives.
From this vantage I remained a political spectator for many years. I did go to one or two Fianna Fail fund-raisers but I don’t think that amounted to political activism. During my years in Bolton St, I remained as a spectator, never getting involved in any of the myriad societies’ promoting or protesting.
Staying up all night watching the returns from the General elections was the height of my involvement for years.
Around 1992 I took a conscious decision to join a political party and requested information from Fine Gael, Labour, Greens, Sinn Fein and Fianna Fail. The only one that didn’t reply was Sinn Fein. 1992 was a year I won’t forget. My Father Died, I became a Father, the Bishop Eamon Casey Scandal broke, there was a general election - Trevor Sargent was elected to the Dáil and as usual Dan Boyle in Cork wasn’t. Our country was changing and I wanted to try to ensure that the change would be for the better. I clinically appraised the Information from the parties in managing and controlling the inevitable change Ireland would go through.
It was not a decision I took lightly, The Greens I guessed would be as popular as small pox in a rural constituency west of the Shannon but I had listened to and read Trevor and Dan, and as an avid reader of realistic economic assessments the Greens seemed to me to be the only hope of influencing the change to longer term needs of this society. The others, though well meaning, did not consider long term consequences of their polices. And so it was that some time in 1994 this 26 year old father of a baby girl joined the Green party and it didn’t impress any one.
My electoral record is on the website if any one wants it so I am not going to go through it here but I will finish by saying that I Love Politics and I have a great admiration for all politicians. The Greens think out loud and tell people what they don’t want to hear but it is part of who we are and those who adopt lazy positions in assessing us or are directly challenged by what we represent will recognise the value of our policies well before this party is fifty years old.