If you’ve been looking for big political stories in Ireland in 2026, then the pickings have been sadly slim. The Irish Times, the self-styled newspaper of record, even had to resort yesterday to headlining their “politics” section with one of those mundane political rows that – if we’re honest – Irish voters have never cared about and never will care about:
A Government TD has claimed that schools in Minister for Education Hildegarde Naughton’s home county were given “priority” in a €1.6 billion investment package.
On Wednesday, the Government announced a list of 105 school construction projects that will go to tender or construction this year and in 2027. Schools across the country have been waiting for permission to go to tender on projects, with many waiting years for sign-off.
Fianna Fáil TD Malcolm Byrne said that there was one school in Co Wexford and three in Co Wicklow included in the list, “but 10 in the minister’s home county of Galway”.
The accusation here – that a Minister has lavished state funding on her own local area – barely even rises to the level of scandal. Voters expect it. Heck, they favour it and they reward it. The lesson Irish voters take from tales of money being lavished on the constituency is not and never has been “we must change the way we do politics”. No. It is and always shall be “we must get a Minister in our own constituency, or at least an independent with leverage”.
At the risk of sounding elitist (perish the thought) this tendency is the ultimate root cause of nearly all of the problems in Irish politics: Irish voters simply do not prioritise the national picture. They prioritise “local delivery”. The politician who brings home the bacon will always and everywhere do better at the polls than the politician who prioritises the national interest.
There are, aside from cultural factors – which we will come back to – two reasons for this. The first is that we use an electoral system so awful and terrible that we are one of only two countries on earth to use it in national elections. It is a system which rewards the accumulation of second, third, and fourth preference votes – which voters are naturally encouraged to use to reward the “good local politician”. Thus getting a reputation as being “good for the area” is disproportionately rewarded over being “good for the country” since voters have many more votes than they would have in a more ordinary electoral system.
The second reason is that multi-seat constituencies encourage intra-party competition: A politician with a running mate in his or her constituency cannot differentiate themselves from their fellow party candidate on national policy. But they can and do differentiate themselves on “local delivery”. Thus – if Hildegarde is guilty of lavishing funds on her own backyard – the local Fine Gael voter voting on national issues has every reason to prefer the Minister over her constituency rival who cannot bring home quite so much bacon.
Highlighting these issues is intellectually useful, but the bigger problem is that culturally, voters do not see this as a problem. A set of political reforms that were explicitly designed to ensure that TDs and Senators were less able to lavish funds on their own areas would – I would confidently predict – get absolutely smashed at the polls. Why? Because the existence of this system of doing politics has perpetuated certain incentives:
Politicians in Ireland are encouraged to talk down their local areas and “fight for their fair share”. The fastest route to winning an election is not to make some grand policy proposal for national reform, but to declare that one’s own area has been shamefully neglected for far too long and needs investment. One could hardly blame voters for internalising this, even though every Irish voter by definition lives in one of the wealthiest and most advanced places in the world.
Consider the effect, though: If – and it remains an if – the Minister for Education is guilty of the charges laid against her by Deputy Byrne, then consider the time and energy that goes into working up the lists of schools deserving of grants and making sure that the Galway schools are well looked after.
The result is that this is how our Ministers spend an inordinate amount of their time: Not on looking at how money is spent, but on prioritising where it is spent. Do you know who absolutely loves this state of affairs? The civil service.
If you want to keep an Irish Minister occupied, give him or her a list of 100 or so bodies in line to receive some kind of state grant or funding, and ask him or her to review the list and provide feedback. They will be so busy sorting out who should receive patronage that they’ll forget about bigger questions of policy for whole weeks on end, leaving the civil service in peace to run the multi-billion euro Department while the Minister works on divvying up a few million in grants to favoured groups and towns.
This problem does not only extend, by the way, to spending: If you want to look at our housing crisis, consider how many politicians favour housing nationally, but not in their own backyard. Or consider what great fun it would be if the country decided to build a Nuclear Powerplant, to watch politicians say that they favoured the idea but their own constituency would be unsuitable. Or watch how many local immigration protestors declare that they actually favour being an opening and welcoming country, but their particular town just can’t cope.
Localism is the biggest single disease affecting Irish politics. And it is going nowhere, soon.