with Stephen Meyler

#RepealThe8th #IQA

HARD GRAFT

Democratic politics don’t come cheap. Everywhere people try to persuade citizens to elect their party or to change a fundamental part of a constitution, money has to change hands. We expect our politicians to accept funding from all sorts of dodgy business interests, ideologically motivated organisations, and even the national purse. There are, of course, rules and regulations about who can fund political activity and by how much, to prevent for example, a billionaire who hates gays from skewing a liberalisation of the law. We are usually unsurprised when politicians bend or break these funding rules.

Here in Ireland, we have a special source of funding for political activity in rich Irish-Americans, or the diaspora, as they have been more romantically labelled in recent decades. They are migrants who’ve made good in a few years in the US, as well as descendants of Famine-era survivors of coffin ships and Ellis Island. Some want to help the forces in the homeland outraged by the persistence of Victorian-era laws, while others are attached to visions of a green and peasant land that only ever existed in Hollywood or postcards.