Justine McCarthy: A TD’s work is never done – they’re too busy gallivanting

Loath though I am to rain on the World Cup, any schoolteacher will attest that it simply is not possible to concentrate on your work if you’re watching football on television and posting on Twitter at the same time. Andrews is not alone. The prevalence of TDs on the skite is such that we no longer even protest about it.

For pointy-headed political analysts, strategy and ruthlessness were the defining aspects of Fine Gael’s recent botched putsch against its leader, Enda Kenny, but what mesmerised more prosaic mortals was how little work these highly paid, patriotism-preaching individuals do. Apart from squandering a week of the Dail’s 99 sitting days this year on internal party affairs, the attempted coup provided copious examples of TDs having a high old time.

There was Kenny himself, travelling to Cork on a Friday for the retired politician Peter Barry’s investiture as a freeman of the city. Kenny’s would-be nemesis, Richard Bruton, was unable to kick-start his leadership campaign on the Friday before the parliamentary party vote because he was attending a wedding in Killiney.

To cap it off, the day after Kenny won the confidence vote — another Friday — Michael Ring, his Mayo constituency colleague, announced on RTE’s Morning Ireland that he was heading off to a wedding. On the same programme, the Wexford TD Michael D’Arcy, an erstwhile malcontent, declared he was “going to the football field in 20 minutes for a good, long run”.

Isn’t it well for some?

Remember when the unfortunate Fianna Fail TD Jim McDaid was arrested in April 2005 for driving the wrong way up the Naas dual carriageway after partying all day at Punchestown racecourse? What nobody commented on — as if it was an even more delicate matter than the former minister’s drunken state — was that he had left Leinster House on a whim that morning and gone gallivanting for the day.

This is the same former minister who recently vowed not to give up his €22,487 pension because, he argued, how else would we attract the nation’s best brains into Dail Eireann? He offered this brass-necked defence in a television interview recorded at his Letterkenny home on one of those rare days when the Dail was actually sitting — 149 miles away in Dublin.

Then there was the morning that Dick Roche, the minister for European affairs, was held hostage during an armed robbery at Druids Glen hotel in his Wicklow constituency. He had emerged from the hotel at 9.30am on a Monday after his morning swim and was rummaging through government papers on the back seat of his car when three men in balaclavas pounced.

Given that the AA route planner estimates it takes 38 minutes to travel from Newtownmountkennedy, where the hotel is located, to the centre of Dublin, where Roche’s office is to be found, the soonest he could have intended being at his desk was 10.10am, around the time the thoughts of other office workers will have been turning to their mid-morning break.

A TD’s day job can be a distraction from his sporting pursuits, despite having Mondays and Fridays free from the office. Our noble patriots found a way round that during the heady days of the Celtic tiger by locking up Leinster House for a week each spring so that the then ministers for finance, agriculture and fun could hold court at Cheltenham racecourse in England along with a slew of backbenchers.

In 2003, eight TDs — four Fianna Failers and four Fine Gaelers, each sponsored to the tune of €5,000 by the bank AIB — were absent for the first two weeks of the new Dail session. Why? Because they were engaged in urgent business of national importance: participating in the Six Nations Parliamentary Rugby World Cup in Australia.

In response to criticism back home, Simon Coveney, the Dail’s team captain, parried that they were all keeping their briefs in mind as they huffed and puffed in the scrum. So weary was Coveney following his endeavours that he stayed on in Australia after the competition to watch the opening matches of the World Cup proper.

Last year, the Seanad — which will have sat for a grand total of 94 days when the Oireachtas year ends next week — shut down entirely because some of its members felt obliged to play golf instead. It turned out that Donie Cassidy, the Seanad leader, had a pressing appointment with Martin McAleese, the president’s husband, on the first tee at the Royal Dublin.

TDs bleat that their work is never done, what with holding clinics, going to funerals (where mourners often resent their barefaced politicking) and generally keeping their constituents sweet. They say these activities are essential because of the precarious nature of their jobs.

Would that the rest of us could schmooze the boss in the pub all day and call it work. Besides, it is the TDs themselves who cultivate such a system, because it is in their best interests to do so. The same is true of an overcrowded Dail where most deputies suffer the tedium of having nothing to do other than act as voting fodder.

Our 166 TDs will cost us more than €17.6m in pay this year, plus another €10m or so in expenses. Nobody would begrudge them that if they were worth it, but why are we paying people lavish salaries for playing golf or backing horses when they’re supposed to be working for us?

When the high cost of living became an issue during the boom years, the solution proposed by Mary Harney, then enterprise minister, was that consumers should shop around for better value. It is sound advice that we voters should bear in mind.

justine.mccarthy@sunday-times.ie