The second Pillar, which I will now describe, is the pillar of Politics.
I first got interested in politics when I was a teenager. I always remember the debates on the current affairs programmes of the time such as Seven Days, and later Today Tonight. I liked the cut and thrust (as they say) of political debate, the clever wisecracks of Ministers and Deputies as they vied for the upper hand in debates, and when I was a little older I liked reading political magazines like Magill and similar that gave an alternative left-leaning view. (I didn’t realise at the time that what I was attracted to in the debating was the competition – I wasn’t aware that little or nothing would actually change).
I clearly remember, as a teenager, having the thought that if those in Dáil Éireann really wanted the best for the country it would be better if they all worked together instead of fighting with each other. Surely they’d get more done, methought. (I’m a bit naive that way)!
I mentioned in the Introduction that magazines such as Resurgence changed my thinking at a particular time in my life. One phrase that certainly influenced me (that I had not heard up to my mid-thirties) was ‘we do not inherit the Earth from our parents; we keep it in trust for our children’, attributed to the Native American Chief Seattle.
Buoyed up by this and other thoughts that I considered a lot wiser than ‘time is money’ or ‘knowledge is power’, or ‘the early bird catches the worm’ and such sayings, I joined the Green Party/Comhaontas Glas in the mid nineteen-nineties and was a member of the Limerick Branch. The reason that I chose the Greens was that I was never a fan (nor am I still a fan) of the left–right division which I believe condemns society to a constant lose-lose with two opposing forces that are mirror images bringing out the worst in each other and feeding into the media’s need for endless conflict.
Well I never thought that being involved in the Greens would have fashioned my opinions about protection of vulnerable children but it was actually a very important part of my education in this regard.
I viewed, up close, how idealism is distorted, how energy is sucked out of creativity, and how principle and commitment to radical change metamorphoses into well-intentioned compromise that appeases forces that are totally at variance with the original ideas and ideals that one starts out with.
I also got an appreciation of how resilient the political system is to real change, how many advantages it has in promoting its own agenda, and how its norms and values drive national policies (and following from that, its practices) even though most people know that many of these practices are not achieving that much, and/or are (simply put) an awful waste of public money!
After a few years of frustration (that I could write loads about – but won’t) I left the Greens when the leadership group were discussing going into coalition with Labour and Fine Gael around 2000-2001. I was totally against this move and unfortunately when the Greens finally went into Government in 2007 with Fianna Fáil, almost 30 years of painstaking work at community level was practically wiped out in four short years.
Due to people’s worries about the global climate crisis the Greens are now on the rise again. I hope that they don’t make the same mistakes as the past.
And actually, when I think of it now, I didn’t leave the Green Party, really – I left politics, with the realisation eventually dawning on me that I did not have the skill-set that politics requires.