Gavin Cooney

THIS COLUMN INVITES you to view our dull and zestless election campaign as a profoundly positive thing. 

Look at the insanities bred by the bombast and spectacular dramas of elections elsewhere and you’ll be relieved to see our political classes are still incapable of drumming up anything even resembling showbiz. 

Sure, there has been some light name-calling in the last couple of weeks, but the country knows it is all pretty half-hearted: the vast majority of our political leaders would dissolve all of their stated enemy boundaries for the treaty of a ministerial pension. 

Regular readers will know this column has never missed an opportunity to make a sweeping statement on a subject about which it is not qualified to comment, so we’re not going to stop at social and political theory. We are putting the dull stability of our politics down to our national allergy to shamelessness. 

Trump, the Tories, Marine Le Pen…all of the West’s nascent political disruptors are united by total shamelessness; a willingness to lie and obfuscate in ways so obvious it is breathtaking. It’s much tougher to get away with that in Ireland, however, given every political figure in Ireland is subject to the tyranny of a whispering village and the terrifying weight of a neighbour’s judgement. 

It’s hard to imagine any Irish political figure, for instance, claiming the residents of a town are eating cats and dogs, given the knowledge they are never more than a week away from meeting someone from that same town. 

This is, of course, merely one manifestation of the reality that Irish national politics is effectively a local concern. Making this argument in his new book, The Revelation of Ireland, Diarmaid Ferriter points out that there were more independent members in the recently-dissolved Dáil than there were in any other Western democracy. 

An RTÉ exit poll after the 2011 General Election – which was held through the fugue of the nation’s smouldering finances – found that 37% of respondents said that their main priority was that their TD would look after the needs of the constituency. 

Ferriter also quotes a study which estimates that a TD spends 53% of their time on constituency work and 37% of their time on national, legislative work.

This, he explains, is down to the rules of the game. Only Ireland, Malta and Tasmania use the system of a single transferable vote in multi-seat constituencies, which transforms keeping one’s seat into a kind of Hunger Games: if you don’t look after the needs of your local area, then the voters will find someone else who will. 

The consequence of this is that Ireland has rarely been a home for grand, ideological debates. Plainly, we are not France. Instead, parties in Ireland squabble for the right to manage the country’s finances, rather than argue the case for their mass redistribution. 

All of these insights will be intuitively understood by anyone who pays attention to Irish sport because in the politician’s ceaseless battle to appease their constituents, sport is a well-worn tool. Politicians continue to get in front of cameras and deploy graphic designers on social media, solely to stress just how instrumental they were in delivering a sports capital grant for anything in their constituency. 

Where Patrick Kavanagh made his Iliad out of local rows, our finest political minds have made 4G floodlit pitches. 

Things have happily improved in recent years, but in the late ’90s and across the noughties, there was a disturbing link between the amounts dished out in sports capital grants and the constituency from which the minister of sport hailed. 

This trend erupted into a public controversy when then-minister Shane Ross hailed his own role in delivering €150,000 of taxpayer money to resurface the hockey pitch of a private school in his constituency. 

The excessive localism of sports policy led to precisely what you might imagine: an ad hoc, uneven patchwork of facilities biased towards sports who had the political clout to lobby their local representative and the expertise to go through an arduous application process. There was also a social inequality baked into the process, with sports clubs needing to either own their facility or have signed a long-term lease to be eligible for a sports grant. 

Hence there are now gleaming facilities in sparsely-populated rural areas, and a desperate shortage of playing fields in cities, particularly between Dublin’s canals. 

This was all possible because this country did not treat sport in any serious, overarching way, to the point that Ireland went a decade without a national sports policy until Shane Ross’ department issued one in 2018. 

This, it seems, has helped to precipitate change. 

That plan focused attention on promoting participation in sport, and Sport Ireland, along with other relevant bodies, have done genuinely transformative work in the last few years in Ireland with the development of walkways around the country, including those engirdling GAA pitches. 

This election campaign has offered further proof that Ireland is growing up in its attitude to sport, viewing it as something beyond a handy glass to break in case of re-election. 

Premier Sports broke new ground on Monday night by enlisting Matt Cooper to host a televised debate among political parties solely on the subject of sports policies, and while everyone will have their own quibbles with the programme, its basic existence is a kind of miracle by our own standards. 

Here we are now, on national television, debating the merits and flaws of the betting levy and the horse and greyhound fund; the inequalities and biases of the sports capital programme; and the general purpose of sports investment. 

The biggest beneficiaries of our more holistic view of sport and its funding appear to the FAI. As Will Clarke of the FAI points out, only the Labour party mentioned football in their 2020 election manifesto, whereas all of Labour, Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, Sinn Féin and People Before Profit include the sport in their 2024 manifestos. 

This is partly a result of the FAI getting their act together and playing by the established rules of the game, empowering lobbying from the doorstep all the way to Leinster House. But is partly, too, the consequence of this creeping treatment of sport as a serious thing that is worthy of debate and interrogation on a macro level. For when you look at things in the round, decades of under-investment in the country’s largest participation sport becomes pretty obvious. 

Something is slowly changing here, and all for the better.