NORMAL people don't become politicians. To enter political life is a declaration of deviancy, a statement of permanent difference from the rest of the population. The difference covers and governs their lives. All politicians start at the bottom, which means attending branch or cumann meetings, week in and week out, ingratiating yourself with party bores and boors, laughing at their jokes, and being eager with the tea. If you're lucky you get nominated to stand for the local council, and if you're elected you're committed to a life of meetings and committees five or six nights a week.
By that time you're public property. Every busybody and bore in your local community will think you have been put on this earth to share with them the bee they have in their bonnet: the pedestrian crossing which spends more time on red than green, the woman at number 31 who has painted her gutters bright purple, the brother-in-law who expects his wife - the sister, you know what I mean? - to have his tea ready by six when she's only back from work at five to. These become the staple of a politician's life.
Dysfunctional
This is the apprenticeship for statesmanship. More, and worse, must follow. Clinics, planning permissions, lobbying for medical cards, looking for exemptions for this or that: in other words, undermining the very system which they want to get to the top of. So politicians are professionally dysfunctional. What makes them get to the top of the their trade is a skill which makes them unsuited for that position when they achieve it. We may call it the Shipman Syndrome.
For, once at the top of the tree, they have to exhibit different skills entirely. Generally speaking, they manage to. The disciplines imposed by contending forces and a professional civil class, and the unbelievable, unswerving single-mindedness which takes politicians into cabinet or even higher, normally result in approximate honesty and reasonable probity. Seldom is anything great achieved; if mess is avoided, and disaster averted, that is almost cause for joy.
But the mere avoidance of failure is not the reason why politicians work seven days a week and remember the name of every crank, bore, busybody. So why do they do it? Not for money: most members of any cabinet would earn far more in law or in business, and for fewer hours, than they do in politics. They politick because they want to be at the centre of things; and more, they want to be remembered to have been in the centre of things.
The first is the vital rocketfuel for political life; the second, the desire to leave a place in popular memory and in the history books, is the maddening drug which unmoderated or unchecked can so easily lead to disaster. Politicians love to spend public money in ostensibly good causes, the better to be remembered - classically, in the De Lorean car plant in West Belfast. Squandering such money is such ways is not virtue, merely an addiction.
Irish language
Spending money in a good cause gave us Teilifis de Lorean, aka Teilifis na Gaeilge, aka TG4. Who watches it? I don't know. I know lots of people who watch TV3, which has cost us not a penny, but I know no one who watches TdeL, though we are besought to watch it regularly by advertisements promising us Spanish football and English-language films - which is not, quite, what it was established for. Will it keep the Irish language alive? No. But has it cost us lots of money? Yes: and that's the point of it.
We are trembling on the verge of a far greater folly: Stadimania. It almost passes all belief that not merely are we to have one Stadium de Lorean but two, and who knows, maybe even three: because I'm far from convinced that the IRFU wants to relocate its playing capital to an out-of-city parkway, An Babhaill Bertie, far from the restaurants and the pubs and the festivities which make Dublin such an unparalleled pleasure for visiting rugby supporters. No publicly accountable company, no private investor, would indulge this insanity for a minute.
We know the GAA would have been compelled to come to come to terms with fiscal reality and have opened the doors of Croke Park to soccer if public money - yours, mine - had not been unconditionally promised it. We know from the financially searing experiences of the new or rebuilt stadiums in Edinburgh, Cardiff, London and Sydney that modern stadiums are horrifically expensive to maintain. We know that stadiums built beyond city centres, as An Babhaill Bertie is to be, are a recipe for ruin.
Boyhood dream
A multi-stadium Dublin can come about only in an unreal world of a temporary State surfeit of funds, with one single politician realising a boyhood dream. We have a precedent for this sort of investment of other people's money in a prestige architectural statement. Martin Mansergh might care to tell the Taoiseach about the huge building programme undertaken by the Church of Ireland's Board of First Fruits in the 1820s, the relics of which dot the Irish countryside: the steeples of unroofed churches peering through stands of beech.
The maintenance of those churches exhausted the Church of Ireland in the decades which followed their construction. Barely a century after they were finished, they were being abandoned, and their instigators secretly cursed for the unmitigated damage they had done down the generations to morale, purse and parson. If this stadium folly continues, Bertie Ahern will be similarly remembered.