Yesterday afternoon, I received a surprising message from a man I’ve known for about five years, asking for my views on whether he should go forward with an idea he’d been tossing around in his head for a few months: Running in the local elections.
Like many people in Ireland who might presently be entertaining such thoughts, my correspondent is not what you’d call “political”: He has a good, respectable job, and a wife and family to whom he devotes most of his time. What he mainly wants from the political system is to be left alone, and for the basic contract that the public makes with politicians to be honoured: I pay my taxes, and you make sure that when my kids are sick, they can see a doctor, and that when they reach the right age, they can go to a decent school, and that when they walk down the streets on their own, they are safe.
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