Keep an eye on Marian Agrios’s tally when votes in the local elections are counted next week. For how many votes she gets – if any – may tell us how much, within the honesty box that is the ballot booth, Ireland really cares about integrity in its politicians.
Agrios will be the phantom candidate in the Drogheda Rural electoral area – on the ballot paper, but out of the race. She quit on Tuesday after the Ditch news website revealed she had agreed to desist from objecting to a residential development in return for a €15,000 cash payment plus €15,000 worth of work on her own home. For Fine Gael, which launched her candidacy with razzmatazz last month, Agrios is the incarnation of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, haunted by her home.
The repercussions will spread far beyond Termonfeckin, where the six new houses were being built near Agrios’s house. Bad as the timing is – coinciding as it does with a Government planning Bill addressing what Simon Harris has called “spurious objections” – this scandal will amplify the mantra that Fine Gael has been in government too long.
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The free gratis enhancement of Agrios’s property revives another house doer-upper ghost from Fine Gael’s past. It is 28 years since it was revealed that the late businessman Ben Dunne funded IR£390,000 renovations to former government minister Michael Lowry’s house in Holy Cross, Co Tipperary. Lowry resigned from the cabinet. The Moriarty tribunal was established to, in part, investigate payments from Dunne to politicians. The inquiry took 13 years and cost €77 million. It concluded that Lowry’s attitude to declaring his tax liabilities had fallen “far below what could be reasonably expected from a holder of public office”; that, while a minister, he had attempted to hike the rent payable by the State-owned Telecom Éireann for its tenancy of a building owned by Dunne; and that he took had taken financial benefits worth more than €1 million from Denis O’Brien, for whom the ex-minister had “secured the winning” of a lucrative mobile phone licence from the State.
Following the tribunal’s report, an all-party motion calling on Lowry to resign as a TD was passed by Dáil Éireann on March 31st, 2011. He’s still there, enjoying a TD’s salary of €111,439 and free parking in Ireland’s most desirable car park. In the next general election after the Dáil passed the motion, 16.8 per cent of those who voted in his constituency gave Lowry their first preferences. He has consistently topped the poll in every general election since then. The consensus is that he manages to do this because he “delivers” for his constituency, largely due to the back channels his old party has kept open to him as a government-supporting Independent TD. The derisory defence of this double standard is that the cabinet cannot make him stop voting with the government.
Two months ago, Lowry was paid the final instalment of €2.88 million that the State has had to pay him for his legal costs at the tribunal. Electorally, that news is unlikely to do him any harm. After his conviction for two tax offences in 2018 relating to his refrigeration company, 14,802 of his constituents were undeterred from giving him their number one vote in the following general election.
The difference between Agrios and others with grand designs, such as Lowry, Callely and Doherty, is that she has no political leverage. An abortive first-time candidate, she will disappear as quickly as she appeared on the political scene, but she has inflicted immense damage on Fine Gael
Politicians’ fetish for getting their houses titivated free of charge is not confined to Fine Gael.
Ivor Callely resigned as a junior minister in 2005 after it was reported that a major construction company had paid for work done on his Dublin home. Subsequently, the then taoiseach Bertie Ahern appointed him to the Seanad. Seán Doherty, a former minister for justice, got a four-foot-high wall built around his house courtesy of the public purse on the spurious grounds that it was necessary for his security. Doherty certainly was not very tall but he was not that diminutive.
The mistake they all made was that they got caught. Arigos’s presumption that she would get away with it is as indicative of voters’ ambivalence about low standards in high places as it is of her own hubris. The wording of her purported “apology” on Facebook compounds her offence. “I apologise for what happened. It should not have occurred,” she said, as if some invisible third force was to blame. In its investigation into this affair, Fine Gael might examine why those who get caught can’t say: “I’m sorry for what I did. I shouldn’t have done it.”
The difference between Agrios and others with grand designs, such as Lowry, Callely and Doherty, is that she has no political leverage. An abortive first-time candidate, she will disappear as quickly as she appeared on the political scene, but she has inflicted immense damage on Fine Gael. This has less to do with unprincipled behaviour and more to do with the current housing crisis.
Home ownership is a primary measure of inequality. It signals social status. Central Bank figures published in March showed that the richest 10 per cent of households in Ireland own a third of the country’s housing asset wealth, compared with just 14 per cent owned by the 50 per cent least well-off.
The severe housing shortage and the concomitant record number of 13,866 people – 4,147 of them children – with no permanent place to live is the issue voters are raising most frequently in the elections campaign. As the party that will have been in government for 14 years by the time next year’s general election is due, Fine Gael can expect backlash from young couples trapped in exorbitant rental accommodation and parents despairing of their adult children ever being able to afford a home of their own.
If Marian Agrios has any defence, it is that her misapprehension about the acceptability of feathering her own nest reflects the tolerance – indeed the admiration – shown to politicians who have used their position to embellish their own homes. How anathema to the vision of those who founded this State, when poet Pádraic Colum’s Old Woman of the Roads prayed “for a little house – house of my own – out of the wind’s and the rain’s way”.
If that is still Ireland’s dream for its people, we voters need to pause and consider how our ambivalence about political standards and our record of electing people with a them-and-us attitude to housing is entrenching the impossibility of the dream.