Michael O'Leary has a valid point

Business people can't take a career break when they become TD's. From the perspective of their business, career and future income they risk a huge amount. Teachers risk nothing. They just move from one form of State employment to another.
The salary is also way too low to attract high calibre people who would otherwise be managing or running a businesses.
 
According to a teacher on the radio this morning, teachers can take a career break of up to 5 years and so keep their job if they lose their Dáil seat.
 
I cannot understand how this is such a big story - and why FG haven't simply dismissed O'Leary's comments or laughed them off. If this becomes an election issue we've lost our minds...

Are the teachers and their unions all that fragile and sensitive? (Perhaps they are - during Covid we had one of the longest schools shutdowns in the World - twice as long as some other European countries. Time and time again teachers unions wanted schools to remain closed because they "weren't safe" demanding mask mandates for young children, more ventilation etc.)
 
It seems almost compulsory now for when a teacher is made permanent that they take a "break" and head off to the middle east or Australia for a couple of years now knowing they have a perm job to return to. Utter joke.
 
Howth Head said:
Are the teachers and their unions all that fragile and sensitive?
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Yes. Probably only nurses are more fragile but both seem to need the constant validation of people they've never met. If a politician doesn't preface every comment about teachers or nurses with words like wonderful, selfless or heroic then they are rounded upon. O'Leary's point that our parliament should more accurately reflect a cross section of Irish society would be uncontentious if he'd used Publicans or Lawyers as his example.
 
If 19 are teachers (12%) then 141 (88%) are not.

A quick scan of the Members Interests register (Dail 2023) show about 60 (37.5%) TD's own Land/Property. Do we infer this will skew their decision making regarding property ?

Register of Members' Interests

Members of the Houses of the Oireachtas are required to make an annual statement of their registrable interests.
www.oireachtas.ie

ps The Healy-Raes interests are worth a look... !
 
redstar said:
If 19 are teachers (12%) then 141 (88%) are not.

A quick scan of the Members Interests register (Dail 2023) show about 60 (37.5%) TD's own Land/Property. Do we infer this will skew their decision making regarding property ?
Click to expand...
Some people never stop talking about this.

A disproportionate number of TDs are increasingly from a legal background - this makes sense as a primary role of TDs is formulating the law.
But I agree that state employed teachers are disproportionately represented in the Dail and we could do with a better mix.
 
Four cabinet members are former teachers. Two of the last five Taoisigh have been teachers.

Ireland's electoral system is very teacher-friendly. They have lots of spare hours to dedicate the building their reputation. If you are teaching 20 years you become personally known to thousands of voters.

In the constituency where I grew up the only GE24 candidate I have ever met is a teacher from my old primary school. I haven't spoken to him in 25 years but I suspect he remembers who I am and who my parents are.
 
Over-representation of teachers (and certain other professions) in Dáil Éireann isn't a new thing; it has been the case since more or less forever.

But perhaps this shouldn't surprise us. If you accept that being a politician is a lifestyle that calls for certain qualities and offer certain experiences or rewards, then it stands to reason that some professions — those which call for similar qualities and/or offer similar experience and rewards — will end up being over-represented. Teachers tend to be good communicators; they enjoy, or are good at, or at least are experienced at, communicationg on a group level as well as an individual level; they tend to be curious about/interested in the world; they tend to be "people persons"; it's a profession that enjoys a fair degree of social esteem, is considered to be beneficial to the community, and is not considered to be motivated by greed. All of this will tend either to make them more likely to become involved in politics or more likely to be successful in attracting votes or both.

You could embark on a similar analysis to work out why, say, lawyers are over-represented. There'll be a different set of characteristics involved but the basics will be similar; the nature of lawyering will mean that lawyers are more likely to have characteristics that either draw them to politics or give them a competitive edge in the practice of politics or both.

This isn't a problem unless you think it's a problem, and if you think it's a problem you need to able to say why. What, exactly, is the evil that results from having too many teachers in Leinster House? If you want to change it, you're going to have to change the nature of politics so that teachers are less drawn to it or so that the qualities teachers tend to have no longer contribute to political success, which is a fairly drastic thing to do, so you need a very good case for doing it.

It's probably better to think in terms of who is under-represented in electoral politics, and what problems does that lead to, and what changes would we have to make to improve the participation of these groups?

I'm not convinced, incidentally, by Brendan's initial assertion that "there are too few business people" in the Dáil. In the current Dáil, 10 TDs identify themselves as business/business owner/business manager or something of the kind. Another 6 are accountants, a profession which requires some understanding of/engagement with the running of a business. And a good number of others identify themselves with specific businesses, including agricultural consultant, car dealership, auctioneer, company director, retail business owner, small business owner, newspaper business managing director. Others don't own a business but work in the management of a business — co-op manager, publishing company manager, logistics manager, sales and marketing. Plus, of course, some of the 6 solicitors and most of the 8 farmers will be the owners of a small (or not so small) legal practice or farming enterprise. I think it's safe to say that the businesspeople in Dáil Éireann comfortably outnumber the teachers.
 
TomEdison said:
What, exactly, is the evil that results from having too many teachers in Leinster House?
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It's not evil but if you want someone to solve a problem where balancing the books and market forces are key considerations then I think it's fair to say that teachers are less likely to have the required skill set. They are State employees who never have to worry about getting paid or productivity or output or costs or any of the other things that are everyday considerations for people running small businesses. They have, in general, never really left the education system, just moved from one end of the classroom to the other, so how could they?

That said I don't think there are too many teachers in the Dail.
 
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