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Introduction

It wasn’t just the world of sport that the renowned Kerry journalist and wordsmith, Con Houlihan, was inclined to comment on from time to time. ‘Most of our songs are merry and most of our elections are sad,’ he wrote of Kerry politics in 1973.1 Houlihan, who had made his own contribution to political debate in the county through the short-lived and locally circulated newspaper Taxpayer’s News in the late 1950s, must have been in a melancholic mood at the time of writing because elections in Kerry over the last century or so have been anything but sad. Nor have they been dreary, dull or boring. And that notion has been part of the reason this book came about – to cast light on some of the fascinating, exhilarating, sensational and often riveting electoral ups and downs of the political rollercoaster in the Kingdom over the course of the last hundred years or so.

Another well-known Kerry journalist, Katie Hannon, of RTÉ’s Prime Time, wrote that politicians are ‘a breed apart’.2 This seems to be especially true of Kerry politicians. One of the reasons for this is that they have had to shout a little louder than many of their counterparts in other counties due to the perceived belief that Dublin and the east coast are where national political priorities lie. ‘As far as I can see,’ declared the Fianna Fáil TD for Kerry South, Jack Flynn, in 1948, ‘Government ministers resident in Dublin consider Dublin as Ireland. They forget that we exist and that there are such places as Kerry.’3 Flynn gave voice to what has been a fairly persistent theme throughout Kerry politics since Dáil Éireann first came into being in 1919: a sense of peripherality, a belief that the county hasn’t had its fair share of the national pie, and the conviction that those ‘above in Dublin’, as Jackie Healy-Rae used to put it, don’t give Kerry adequate political attention and largesse. If this has been the case, it hasn’t been for want of trying on the part of Kerry deputies and senators who have represented the county over the past century with enthusiasm, vociferousness and style.

Kerry’s earliest representatives in the Oireachtas, emerging from and politicised during the revolutionary period, were ambitious for their county and their country: ‘I hope to see a Gaelic Ireland, the home of strong and happy men and women in which a thousand splendid things could be done,’ declared the first TD for East Kerry, Piaras Béaslaí during the Dáil debate on the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1922.4 Béaslaí was one of dozens who made the transition from the IRA ‘Flying Columns’ to the new parliamentary assembly. Another such TD was Stephen Fuller, who survived the infamous Ballyseedy Massacre during the Civil War. Other determined and far-seeing Kerry members of early cabinets included Fionán Lynch, who was Minister for Fisheries and Lands, and John Marcus O’Sullivan, who, as Minister for Education, established the system of vocational education in Ireland.

Coincidentally, the six Kerry deputies who have served in cabinet are connected by their involvement in political relations with our nearest neighbour. Austin Stack – the first minister from Kerry – was responsible for Home Affairs and the Dáil courts from 1919 to 1922. He accompanied Éamon de Valera to the talks with David Lloyd George which led to the Anglo-Irish Treaty negotiations, the Irish delegation to which included Fionán Lynch. Their successors in cabinet, Dick Spring and John O’Donoghue, would both play their own roles in further sensitive Anglo-Irish agreements in 1985 and 1998. From 2011, Kerry had a seat in cabinet again: former Kerry football captain, Jimmy Deenihan, who set in train the commemorations of the 1916 rebellion and the subsequent revolutionary period.

The story of the century from a political-party perspective is very much the dominance of the two main parties after the foundation of Fianna Fáil in 1926 and Fine Gael in 1933. Over the course of the century, these two parties dominated and it wasn’t until the Fianna Fáil meltdown of 2011 that the party was without a seat in Kerry. Fine Gael’s record varied, with major decreases in support and the depletion of its organisation on the ground in the middle part of the century, but the party continued to retain a foothold. Labour’s strength owed as much to the dominance of the Moynihan and Spring dynasties as it did to party allegiances, while Sinn Féin has only been a resilient feature of the political landscape in recent years, especially in Kerry North. While Clann na Poblachta and Clann na Talmhan gained council and Oireachtas representation in the 1940s and 1950s, none of the other smaller parties has ever made a breakthrough. With some notable exceptions, Independents have only succeeded in recent years, but many of those who have succeeded had previously split from Fianna Fáil. Independents have found it hard to break the dominance of the major parties; one-term Independent county councillor and former Kerry GAA great, Mick O’Connell, observed in a damning critique that if he’d known how wedded voters were to the main parties, ‘I wouldn’t have chanced it … Clinics and clientelism and bending the rules is not for me.’5

Serious matters of state aside, politics in Kerry has often been a source of good old-fashioned entertainment for voters and the press. The history of Kerry politics over the past century is full of fascinating stories of bitterness, rivalries, campaign shenanigans and personal and political rows which have fuelled pub talk and the column inches far more than the minutiae of policies and legislation. The century is also replete with remarkable electoral battles, results of national significance, several national political firsts and a steady supply of parliamentarians who have made a significant impression on the national political stage. Apart from ministers who have impacted on their various government departments, many other TDs and senators have made an impression on Irish political history – among them Dan Kiely, whose Supreme Court challenge of 2015 changed the way votes are counted in Ireland. John O’Donoghue’s fall from grace in 2009 was a seminal moment in Irish politics, as was the night in 1987 when Tánaiste Dick Spring held his Dáil seat by just four votes. Two of the four Kerry women who have sat in the Dáil won history-making by-elections – one of them, Kathleen O’Connor, was so young when elected that she wasn’t on the electoral register.

And there are plenty of similar stories which we have enjoyed bringing to light – many of them for the first time. Remarkable tales, like the councillor who was unseated for plying voters with drink, the north Kerry woman who became a politician in Pakistan, the aristocrat who was invited to Buckingham Palace as a child and went on to become the first woman elected to Kerry County Council, the ‘hanging judge’ who represented Tralee in parliament, the Kerry senator who received an apology from the BBC, the councillor who took his own council to court, the night the gardaí were called to a meeting of a Fianna Fáil cumann in north Kerry, and the Dáil candidate deselected because he wasn’t popular enough, all feature in these pages.

We hope that we have captured the excitement and tension, the rivalries and resentments, the seminal debates and discussions, and the good old-fashioned fun and games that have characterised the political cauldron in the county over the last century.

Owen O’Shea and Gordon Revington