Paradoxically it is the failure of Willie O'Dea's advocacy for Limerick that makes the city so dependent on him, writes FINTAN O'TOOLE
IN ALL the talk about Willie O’Dea over the last week, one question has scarcely been asked – why did almost 20,000 people vote for him in the 2007 general election? Answering that question gives us some idea of the depth of the problems in Irish political culture.
We know, at least, where the answer does not lie. It is not Willie’s irresistible charm, which teams of intrepid explorers have so far failed to locate. It is not the allure of his sexy moustache. And it is not his inner nobility.
If Willie were the captain of the Titanic, he would have been the first man in the lifeboat, dressed in bonnet and frock. He was, after all, quite prepared to see a journalist lose his job in order to save his own skin. (If Mike Dwane of the Limerick Leaderhad, as Willie implied, invented the smear that created all the trouble, no media outlet would employ him.) He even suggested in his last-ditch interview with Seán O'Rourke that he would consider naming the garda who allegedly gave him the false information – another potential sacking to save his own job.
So, what is it about Willie that makes him so extraordinarily successful in Limerick? Here we get to the heart of the paradox that is Fianna Fáil. It is not the success of Willie O’Dea’s advocacy for Limerick that makes the city so dependent on him. It is its failure. The relationship between the ultimate clientelist politician and his clients depends on the continuation of powerlessness. Instead of being punished for Limerick’s underdevelopment, O’Dea has thrived on it. The worse the city’s problems, the greater its need of a supposed champion.
I do not wish to indulge in the crude caricatures of Limerick as Stab City. The proportion of the Limerick workforce in professional occupations is higher than the national average. It has an innovative university on a magnificent campus and a very good third-level educational infrastructure. There is a thriving, sophisticated, beautiful middle-class Limerick.
But there is also the Limerick that is a national disgrace, that, for all Willie O’Dea’s supposed prowess as its political champion, benefited least from the boom and has been hurt most brutally by the recession.
Of the 18,900 houses in the city area, 8,000 were built as social housing. Even at the height of the boom, Moyross and Southill had an unemployment rate five times the national average and were among the most disadvantaged areas in the State. (In 2005, just 16 per cent of Limerick City Council’s tenants were in paid employment and youth unemployment stood at 62 per cent.) About a third of the houses in Moyross and half of those in Southill are effectively unfit for human habitation – so much so that John Fitzgerald, in his report on regeneration in Limerick, reckoned that they were beyond repair.
The drug problem in Moyross, O’Malley Park, Ballinacurra/ Weston and St Mary’s Park, both in terms of addiction and of the vicious gangs that feed off it, is worse than anywhere else in Ireland. Intimidation and constant, low-level threats of violence have made life hard for the vast majority of decent people trying to raise good families. A third of those over 65 in O’Dea’s constituency have a disability – way above the national average. There is also a significantly higher proportion of single-parent families.
The boom passed most of these people by. Even property mania did not take off in Limerick’s estates – people who put everything they had into buying their council houses got nothing back on their investment. Uniquely in Ireland, commercial rents in Limerick city centre remained substantially lower than those in the suburbs – a pattern more typical of devastated American cities like Baltimore.
John Fitzgerald, who was hardly an innocent abroad after his years as Dublin city manager, found conditions in the Limerick estates “quite shocking” and described the overall quality of life as “extremely poor”.
As “Mister Limerick”, therefore, Willie O’Dea has been a spectacular failure. The State that he embodies has not produced the goods for those of his constituents who most depend on it. The Fitzgerald report pointed out, damningly, that “it would be hard to conclude that public funding is achieving an acceptable, let alone optimum, level of direct benefits to the communities concerned”.
Time and again, Willie O’Dea, for all his local bluster, failed to deliver for those communities. The function of his moustache has always been to prevent anyone seeing that he is talking through both sides of his mouth at once. Just a few days before he was overtaken by the scandal that did for him, O’Dea was letting it be known, in his usual sidling manner, that the desperately needed regeneration programme for the city will not be delivered.
And yet O’Dea will probably get his 20,000 votes again. Our political culture is such that the worse things get, the more we look for a fixer to do us a few little favours. The more powerless we feel, the more we cling to those who keep us that way.