The Wild West's Lone Blueshirt

by Peter Harper

Thursday evening, and Seán Kyne, graduate of NUI, Galway and UCD, has just finished another day’s work as an agricultural consultant with the Rural Environmental Protection Scheme, a position he has held for ten years.

His job, which involves the creation of plans helping to prevent pollution, protect archaeological and man-made features as well as the natural landscape, leads him to have regular contact with rural dwellers throughout Connemara. Such contact ensures that Seán always has a keen sense of the perspectives and needs of locals and has brought him to his other job – that of Fine Gael County Councillor.

Says Seán: “I always had an interest in politics from a young age. There’s no family background, in that no one ran for election but my father, and to a lesser extent my mother would have been involved very much in Fine Gael”. ‘Go with Garrett’ went the election slogan in the early 1980s and it is this Fine Gael leader which provides Seán with his earliest memories of politics: the election posters prominently positioned outside the family home at Moycullen by his father.

“Unlike the rest of the family, seven of us entirely, the other six”, recalls Seán, “wouldn’t have had an interest in it but I sort of picked up an interest and from an early age identified that I’d like to get involved but never thought I could or would.”

But it did happen for Seán. Beginning in May 2003, Seán was asked to consider running for the party by sitting TD, Pauric McCormack. He knew he wasn’t first choice - they had asked a prominent footballer who declined – and he made clear that he would only go forward if he has the proper support behind him: “There’s no use in getting paper support”, he argues, “people can say they’ll support you but getting that support is another thing. Thankfully I had the support of the Deputy, my family and friends and relations and I just about got in.”

That was in the 2004 Local Elections which is by now, but a distant memory. The focus for councillors across the country has switched to the upcoming elections in June. Aware of the importance of hard work and of promoting oneself, Seán is unfazed by those councillors who execute election campaigns with almost military precision, saying in a somewhat bemused tone: “Some people have this great campaign plan going back a year earlier where they pin point every week, weekend and month. It certainly wasn’t like that for me. I always felt that all you can do is to try and promote yourself as best you can and do a good canvass where the aim is to try and persuade them that you’re worth a vote.”

With the 2009 Local Elections the economy will dominate – and will be the first opportunity for the public to make their views known on such controversial decisions as the Public Sector Pension Levy. When asked for his views on the Government’s programme for recovery, Seán, without hesitation, answers firmly: “What programme? Do they have a programme? They have no coherent plan … they’ve identified €2 billion worth of cuts which they probably won’t get. All that’s going to do is pay the extra dole payments that are required for the coming year for the extra hundred thousand people on the dole. That’s a figure which Brian Cowen himself has predicted.”

Unsurprisingly, Seán speaks highly of the party’s Finance Spokesman, Richard Bruton, praising him for having had the foresight to see as far back as 2002 the weakness in the foundations of our economic success and points to the ‘Benchmarking process’ as a prime example.

Reckless spending is how Seán views the behaviour of Fianna Fáil around the time of the 2002 General Election. Drawing on the Over 70s Medical Cards and the Early Childcare Supplement as examples, Seán emphasises the difficulty of taking something back once it has been introduced but emphatically believes that such notions never “crossed the minds of Fianna Fáil for they had one thing in mind in 2002 and that was buying an overall majority at whatever cost.”

The main problem now, according to Seán, is that “there’s a total lack of confidence in everything, in the economy, in the banking sector, and if you have a loss of faith and a crisis in the banking sector which is supposed to be the basis of capitalism, it creates huge problems going forward.”

“We have to control public spending”, he says, “and we must be realistic in terms of the level of earnings – there has to be a total realignment in the thinking that €500,000, or one, two or three million is a normal salary for an individual. Anyone could run a bank into the ground for €1 million never mind €3 million and that’s what’s been going on”.