A single sight of all those would-be leaders of the Labour Party prompts a deep sense of interrogative melancholy, writes Kevin Myers. Why do people enter political life? What do they want from it? What is the purpose of all those meetings, with all those cranks and monomaniacs, night after night, weekend after weekend, with no thanks worth having, and seldom any status worth seeking?
Politicians are like coarse anglers, or stamp collectors. Their habits are inexplicable. But it is what they do, and perversely, we need them, even though we purport to detest them. In fact we don't. It's easy to ridicule politicians, because they are so intrinsically ridiculous. But somebody has to sit through those hours in the Dáil, in the county and urban councils, in the cumann, from whose dreary waters the occasional soundbite is netted and gaffed for presentation on the news.
But the salmonid-sheen of the quote decorating the evening bulletin no more represents the unspeakable bleakness of political debate than a Tesco chicken tikka masala exemplifies a street urchin's diet in Bombay. For the most part, politics is witless words from witless souls, meaningless meetings achieving nothing but the confiscation of most personal free time; and all combined with a mesmerising ability to remember strangers' names.
What ideas?
Politicians will tell you that it's worth it; politics gives them the chance to put their ideas into action. Ha! What ideas? Some of the leading members of the Labour Party were once in Democratic Left, and before that in the Workers' Party, and before that Official Sinn Féin. And that was the organisation which became the official voice-piece of the Soviet Union, which faithfully mouthed whatever foreign policy line Moscow told it, which defended all the Communist iniquities of Eastern Europe, which sneered at Solzhenitsyn, and which vehemently opposed EEC membership.
Now, multiply transformed, these suited, smirking ones are pumping mitts and urging people to say Yes to enlargement; and on the far side of Europe, the former Communist apparatchiks, the ones who issued the party line to their toadies in Ireland, now similarly grinning, similarly suited, are in charge of privatising Russia, slashing taxes and urging people to buy their own homes.
Politics doesn't usually recruit passionate idealists so much as busybodies whose ambition is to interfere in other peoples' lives; and such ideas as they do possess merely constitute a useful vehicle on which to pursue their careers. And like a bus at a terminus, those ideas can be turned around: as the former Communists and their Irish counterparts have discovered, it's possible to find themselves heading in the opposite direction to the one they originally took, but now with not a glance sideways.
So all those lefties who opposed tax cuts in Ireland through the late 1980s and into the 1990s, insisting that we needed the revenue to help the poor - they are now silent; but happily for them, their idiotic policies are forgotten. Public amnesia is the great boon for politicians, enabling them to abandon one policy for another, just as sales reps who sell BMWs one year can with a clear conscience be selling Hyundai the next.
Public manners
Yet for all their inconstancy, the distressing truth for politicians is how little they can actually achieve. As Kathy Sheridan pointed out recently in these pages, public manners in Ireland have become perfectly vile. Serving staff in Dublin in particular have perfected a style somewhere between the lazily disdainful and the aggressively lethargic. One yearns to cry: The Government should do something! Ha. The Government could more easily realign Jupiter's moons than change such conduct.
Governments can't make us smile, can't teach us manners, and can't change our diets. The country of slim young people that used to entrance visiting Americans has been replaced by a land in which teenagers have double chins, boys have breasts, and girls have bellies that could comfortably serve as 4X4 garages. And if we don't develop those curious forms of American obesity, in which suet is laid around the haunches in such thick deposits that the raw product could be commercially extracted by open-cast mining, it won't be because of anything the Government has done.
Fat is a sign of prosperity; but governments can't make a country rich: the belief that they can is the bankrupt heresy of the old left. All that governments can do is to create conditions in which prosperity is possible. Yet that requires low taxation, and low taxation means small government, and small government means politicians have less power. Like good doctors, good politicians ideally should put themselves out of business.
They don't, of course. Politicians will always invent an issue to become engaged in, merely for the sake of engagement. All those eager contenders for the leadership of the Labour Party might tell you of their burning principles, and - the dears - for a moment or two, they might even believe what they say.
Endless meetings
The reality is that, like coeliacs and haemophiliacs, politicians are genetically created. Their DNA is different. The rest of us cherish our homes and hearths, our friends and our families; but politicians relish endless meetings on November nights in dark, unheated parish halls, talking to people they dislike; and for all they care, their spouses back home might just as well be having group sex with Our Lady's Choral Society.
Politicians are a species unto themselves. They should be watched with the same horrified fascination with which we might observe beetles revelling in dung, in the knowledge that someone has to do it. Whoever gets the Labour Party, they're welcome to it. Just be glad it's not you.