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PUSH AND PULL

Much about Leinster House is accidental. Even its use as the primary venue of Irish politics was an accident. When Ireland won independence in 1921, the country had no ready-made venue for its new parliament to sit; the building was rented from the Royal Dublin Society simply so that the octagonal lecture theatre could be repurposed as a seated chamber for Dáil Éireann. Even more accidentally, the building was literally the home of one Irish politician in the past: Leinster House (and Kildare Street) are named after the Fitzgerald family, the Earls of Kildare and later the Dukes of Leinster. While the Fitzgeralds were mostly based in Carton House outside Maynooth, Leinster House was the urban residence they used when the Irish parliament was in session at nearby College Green, in what is now a Bank of Ireland. Its illustrious owners were not convinced about its ability to fire the synapses. ‘Leinster House,’ Lord Edward Fitzgerald once wrote, ‘does not inspire the brightest ideas.’ (The US President John F. Kennedy recited this line, apparently jokingly, when he addressed a joint sitting of the Dáil and Seanad in 1963. The remark having caused some inadvertent upset to his hosts, either Kennedy or his Irish counterpart Eamon de Valera had the sentence clipped from the official videotape of the speech.)

Depending on who you ask, Edward Fitzgerald was either not cut out for politics, or a soothsayer who realised very early that the mansion on Merrion Square was perhaps not the workplace most conducive to the conception of big ideas. For better or worse, however, it is where those ideas are supposed to find their genesis.

‘The first time you get into the Dáil chamber,’ one TD recalls, ‘you’re struck by the shape of it. The ceiling is much taller than you think, but the floor is much flatter, and the furniture is all wooden. The acoustics are woeful: if there’s any kind of murmuring, or heckling, it can actually be really hard to hear someone on the other side of the chamber.

‘Which, in fairness, does make you wonder if we’re really working in the best possible place.’

Those who enter politics are either pulled, or pushed, into it. While almost all are in the game in pursuit of what they see as the betterment of Ireland, everyone’s path is different. Some feel compelled into the public realm by a sincerely held cause, becoming figureheads for that cause and sent to Leinster House as the ambassador of their movement. Others are motivated by a personal grievance and, in engaging with the system as citizens, find themselves stimulated b