Irish politicians' favourite politicians
For RTÉ's book, The Week In Politics: Election 2011 and the 31st Dáil, the 166 members elected to Dáil Éireann were asked to name the "Politician (living or deceased) you most admire".
Out of 166 TDs, 22 did not respond with any name. The other 144 politicians provided 173 responses. Some people clearly did not attend English class the day they covered "singular versus plural nouns".
I have parsed the 173 responses. Nelson Mandela is the most popular individual, with 21 votes. Runners-up are Michael Collins (20), Seán Lemass (11), James Connolly (9), John Hume (7) and Dr Noel Browne (6). Only Mandela and Connolly received meaningful cross-party support, and only Mandela was universally popular across all four major parties and independents. Even John Hume received almost all his support from Fine Gael TDs. (Is Miriam O'Callaghan a secret Blueshirt?)
In my opinion, the most interesting selections were Chris Patten (Lucinda Creighton, FG), Julius Nyerere (Joan Burton, Lab), William Wilberforce (Pádraig Mac Lochlainn, SF) and Emily Pankhurst (Joan Collins, PBPA).
The TDs with the most interesting cross-party selections were Michael Colreavy's (SF) choosing Michael Collins (FG), Lucinda Creighton's (FG) choosing Des O'Malley (PD), and Billy Kelleher's (FF) choosing Mikhail Gorbachev (CPSU).
We can group the responses by country. Out of 173 responses, 116 of the responses were politicians based in Ireland, 23 in the United States, 21 in South Africa, 4 in India, 3 in the United Kingdom, 2 in France and 1 each in Tanzania, Burma, the Soviet Union and "everywhere".
A more informative partition is to group the responses into categories based on a guess at the reasons why TDs chose their responses.
Out of 173 responses, 50 comprised predictable admiration of party heroes from the past, mostly Michael Collins, Seán Lemass and Noel Browne. Most Taoisigh were mentioned. Remarkably, in my opinion, Éamon de Valera was not. The success of the cult of Lemass hagiography seems complete. 11 out of 17 Fianna Fáil TD who responded chose Lemass; not one chose De Valera.
21 of the most-admired politicians were non-obvious responses which would inspire me to start a conversation with the TD. How did Tom Barry become familiar with Edmund Burke? Why does Simon Coveney like Aung San Suu Kyi rather than joining the apparent Mandela consensus?
21 are declarations of affection for a lovable African militant; an additional 4 are declarations of affection for a lovable Indian anarchist. 20 responses comprise the obsession of non-US political types with the US presidency. 15 comprise affiliations with constitutional nationalism; ten with physical-force republicanism.
13 responses name a political predecessor or mentor; Jim Kemmy gets a mention from each of the three ex-Democratic Socialist Party TDs in the Dáil. 11 responses are quite obviously taken as opportunities to engage in shameless praise of one's superiors in one's party, including two shout-outs to Enda Kenny, one to Eamon Gilmore and one to Michael Noonan. Four responses are tributes to the TD's own family/political dynasty. Three are obvious attempts to steal Labour's left-wing clothes.
The most "interesting" TD is Lucinda Creighton. Two of her choices aren't at all obvious, though one is shameless pandering to John Bruton. Two out of three TDs in Donegal South West choose Nelson Mandela as their single most-admirable politician, a decent ANC majority; Pearse, on the other hand, chooses Pearse. Longford-Westmeath is the constituency with the most historically-reverent TDs; Lemass, Collins and Browne each get a mention, as does Albert Reynolds.
A special mention is due to Richard Boyd Barrett. His most-admired politician is "The anonymous heroes of every people's struggle against injustice, oppression and exploitation from the first slave revolts, to the recent Irish pensioner's medical-card protests, to the current revolutions in Egypt and the Arab world." I have coded this as "Poser" in the Excel file.
