The very basic idea of a democracy – as you might explain it to a child – is that the public vote in an election, and the people who get the most votes are then put in power to deliver on the promises that they made during an election. Politicians who keep their promises are good, and politicians who break their promises are bad.
This is not, of course, how the system works in practice, either in Ireland, or in most of the western, democratic, world. In reality, some promises prove impossible to keep; other promises prove unpopular once they are kept; and many voters don’t vote based on promises anyway, preferring to vote for people based on what we might call “vibes”, or what the Americans call the “have a beer with” test. If voters simply voted based on policy, the country would probably be better off than it is. But voters do not, usually, vote on policy for the simple reason that voters do not – and could not be expected to – understand the details of policy. So instead, they vote on all sorts of other things – a sense that a politician cares, maybe. A sense that they are honest. A sense that they are sensible and levelheaded.
This is not an unreasonable disposition for a voter to have: It’s the main reason that at election time we often hear pleas for “someone like Michael O’Leary” to run the health service. Voters in practice would probably not enjoy a health service run like Ryanair, but they don’t think about that so much as they think about the idea of competence and expertise.
The net result of this is that politicians have developed over decades into a social class of their own – people whose talent is understanding the voters, rather than delivering for the voters. And so, for example, politicians are more than happy to enact policies which they know may be ineffective or even counter productive if those policies are likely to improve the mood of the voter. Much of Irish housing policy can be explained on that basis. You will struggle, I promise you, to find a Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael TD who privately tells you that they think rent controls are good policy. But they will vote for them, on the basis that they feel rent controls are a popular policy.
The problem is that when the talent necessary to succeed in politics becomes understanding what the voter will think, rather than the ability to change the voter’s mind, the system starts to rot. For example, it is simply true that the vast majority of people on the Government benches in the Dáil lack the ability to make a coherent argument against rent controls, or against the eviction ban, or against any of the hundred other things they may have personal misgivings over. They do not have the ability to change your mind.
Instead, the ability to change minds has been outsourced from elected politics altogether and become and industry in itself: the NGO and advocacy sector, whose explicit purpose is to advocate for policy and change public minds. The politician’s talent is no longer leading, but knowing where to follow, and at what time.
But what has all of this to do with Neasa Hourigan, you ask?
Well, when the aim of politics becomes gaining or staying in power for the sake of being in power, rather than for the sake of exercising power, the whole system becomes perverted. Politics is now a profession, not a vocation, and in a profession the objective is to remain employed.
And people like Neasa Hourigan struggle to fit into it. Because for her, politics is vocation, not profession. She’s in it to change things, not to simply follow along. She would, I think, rather lose her job than use her power to enact what she sees – she sees – as harmful policies. That is very admirable, but it’s entirely at odds with the settled disposition of the political class.
Hourigan has now voted three times against her own Government over the course of her short career in Irish national politics. This time, it was against the lifting of the eviction ban. When she left Leinster House the other night, having received a 15 month ban from her own party for the vote she cast, she had this to say to an RTE reporter:
As she left Leinster House alone tonight, Neasa Hourigan would only say that she was “not in a good headspace” and would not be commenting further.
— Mícheál Lehane (@MichealLehane) March 22, 2023
Yours truly has absolutely no political sympathy with Deputy Hourigan – I would not have voted as she did, either on this issue or on a range of other issues. Yet, it is difficult not to have human sympathy, or to see her as the victim of a political system that, despite its stated intent to do so, simply does not have room for politicians who believe that doing what you think is right is more important than doing what you think is politically necessary.
The paradox, of course, is this: If you asked voters whether they would prefer a politician who always acted according to the polls and political strategy, and who always followed their leader, or a politician who voted with their conscience, I am fairly sure that most people would say they wanted the politician who voted with their conscience.
And yet the system is set up in a way to ensure that we get as few of them as possible. I may be wrong, but I would not place money today on Hourigan retaining her seat at the next election in a competitive Dublin Central constituency with strong left wing competitors. I think she will lose.
Because voters, ultimately, do not want what they say they want: That is why politicians behave as they do – they understand you better than you understand yourself. You might say that you want an honest forthright politician who keeps their promises and votes according to their conscience. But when push comes to shove, those are not the people you vote for.