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Foreword

Viewed from the outside Kerry politics is often entertaining, at times unruly and on occasion just a little difficult to fathom. That, unsurprisingly, provides fertile ground for myths, legends and half-truths. This book offers a view that looks far beyond such narrow confines. The result is that most precious of things, a history recalled with both unsparing detail and a light touch.

Owen O’Shea and Gordon Revington have managed to pare back the caricature version of this most engaging of subjects. The facts and the true stories, replete with glistening colour, are recorded and recalled here with no little aplomb.

It’s a history that on the face of it has some clearly identifiable foundations underpinning it. There are the families whose names have been printed on ballot papers in Kerry for several decades. Names like Spring, O’Donoghue, Healy-Rae, McEllistrim and Moynihan. There are other notable cornerstones, too, such as the six TDs from the county who have sat at the cabinet table over the course of the last century. The names Austin Stack, Fionán Lynch, John Marcus O’Sullivan, Dick Spring, John O’Donoghue and Jimmy Deenihan are stitched deep into the fabric of Kerry politics.

However, that much is, of course, obvious to those well versed on this particular topic. This book mines further and deeper to reveal something more than mere straightforward accounts of these ministers’ time in government, such as John Marcus O’Sullivan’s clash with the Catholic bishops in 1926 when he amalgamated a large number of the State’s primary schools. The bishops were fearful that it could lead to more co-education, which was ‘very undesirable’. Before that there is the work done by Austin Stack in establishing the country’s new legal system.

Scroll further on through the decades and you find there are fifty years when there is no Kerry TD at the Cabinet table. That changed in 1982 when Dick Spring was appointed Tánaiste. But it is the prospect of electoral defeat rather than political elevation that can sometimes offer the greatest insight into politics in Kerry. After surviving by a very slender margin in 1987, the then Tánaiste would speak at length about that harrowing experience and conclude that while much of his focus in the preceding years had been on national issues ‘others were down on the ground taking my votes’.

There have been some other stinging rebukes from defeated politicians. The irony that the judgement of voters was counted and weighed in sports halls, which they helped build, was also pointed out.

Those words are illustrative of the raw components that fuel Kerry politics; that need to serve the constituency, to deliver things there from ‘up in Dublin’ and, above all, to convince the electorate that you can do it better than your rivals. Ideally, too, and in a manner akin to the county’s best footballers, there should be national recognition of the perfect Kerry politician’s skills.

This book reminds us that just getting the chance to even attempt to do all that can prove arduous. There are stories of blood streaming down shirts, fingers breaking during a brawl at an after-Mass political meeting, and tales of vast quantities of alcohol being used to influence voters.

Through it all though the work of Owen O’Shea and Gordon Revington peels back the layers of a political environment that was rarely calm but one that functioned effectively. It’s something that remains noteworthy given the deep-seated bitterness sown during the Civil War. The scale of that conflict in the county was pithily described by Breandán Ó hEithir in The Begrudger’s Guide to Irish Politics when he wrote about it reaching ‘new heights of viciousness by the spring of 1923’.

When Kerry County Council returned to handling everyday business three years later, it was a forum almost exclusively dominated by men. While four women were elected to the Dáil in Kerry since the foundation of the State, it would take until 1977 before Kit Ahern became the first woman to chair the council, that same year she also won a Dáil seat in Kerry North. The difficulties facing women are summed up by the son of the late Mary O’Donoghue, who severed on the council for over twenty years up to 1985. ‘My mother often said that when she went into the council first, there were a lot of male conservatives there who found it difficult to see a woman coming in,’ Paul O’Donoghue said.

Despite this attitude, there had been some success for women candidates in the council elections in the 1920s, most notably the election of Sinn Féin’s Gobnait Ní Bhruadair in 1920. Councillor Ní Bhruadair, or Lady Albinia Lucy Brodrick, was born into a British aristocratic family but would spend most of her life in Caherdaniel and even got shot in the leg by police along the way.

If Ní Bhruadair was one of the most exotic political imports to Kerry, then there’s a multitude of people who left the county and attained high office elsewhere. The most striking adventure is unquestionably the election of Bridie Wren from Tarbert to Pakistan’s first parliament in 1973. It all gives a lie to the charge made by some that Kerry politics is perpetually inward-looking.

Read on through these pages and a complex, colourful and always captivating political world will be revealed with a refreshing authenticity.

Mícheál Lehane is Political Correspondent

with RTÉ and a native of Cahersiveen.