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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 by learning the structures of systems and where to push for change. Some work for years knocking on doors, running in every available election, ultimately hoping to break the dam and win a seat. Others are approached with an invitation to run.

The paths into politics are many, and merely being of civic mind does not always guarantee getting there. Wanting to enter politics, and actually choosing to pursue a political career, are two very different things.

What makes them do it? The pay might be good, but the job security is woeful, and the working conditions are often punitive. Many are constantly looking over their shoulders wondering when the next election will be, or fretting about the need to fundraise so that there is adequate cash in the bank for the fight whenever it comes. Many with ministries are wondering if they can hang on; many without are wondering if a promotion might ever come their way.

Sometimes, as the author was surprised to learn in the course of interviews for this book, even ministers themselves are yearning for a way out, drained by the job yet terrified of admitting - after climbing so high up the ladder - that they no longer want to be there.

Even some TDs from political families never intended to be there at all. Marc MacSharry of Sligo is the youngest of the six children of Ray MacSharry, who spent a quarter of a century in public life as a TD, minister, tánaiste, MEP and European Commissioner. But if any of the six were to follow their father into political life, it seemed more likely it would be the eldest, Heather Ann, who went into business and became a distinguished figure on several major corporate and financial boards. Marc served on Fianna Fáil's national youth committee during his college years but never considered it as a full-time profession, in part because Fianna Fáil already held a relatively 'safe' seat in Sligo town.

After going into business as a meat exporter, he was eventually pulled into politics when he was approached by Chambers Ireland, the nationwide umbrella group of chambers of commerce. The 2002 Seanad elections were approaching, and the group was entitled to nominate a candidate. MacSharry was chief executive of the chamber of commerce in Sligo town and was asked if he'd consider putting his name forward. Within weeks he'd been elected to the Seanad and went on to spend over two decades in Leinster House as a senator and then TD.

'Sometimes it pisses you off,' he says, 'when you're listening to this nepotism bullshit that people talk about in politics - nobody hands anybody any seat, ever. And being somebody's son or nephew can be a liability, believe it or not. So, you know, maybe at a very early age I was saying, "God, I wouldn't mind doing what my dad is doing," or whatever, but that's not the way the career went. So it happened sort of organically, and almost by accident.'

Not everyone would share MacSharry's view that a family history in politics is a liability. Name recognition for politicians is an enormous asset; most are of the belief that simply having the reputation of being 'a long-standing public rep in this area' is an inherent boost when the next election comes around. If someone has been a TD for ages, their supposition goes, a passive voter must conclude that they have been continually doing a good enough job. Having a family link to a previous office-holder, by extension, allows a new candidate to campaign with the aura of carrying the torch and the presumption that they have learned the trade at their older relative's knee.

MacSharry's own approach to politics may have been coloured by having seen the pressures placed on his own father. The highest offices had little lustre when Marc had grown up behind the scenes. Politics and politicians were so scarcely resourced at the time that TDs simply didn't have a budget to open separate constituency offices and did almost all the work from home. 'I remember clinics on a Saturday: all day Saturday, you'd have two or three hundred people queuing to see the auld fella with whatever issues that there may have been. One of my older siblings would be getting twenty pence to sit inside the front door of the house reading a book, so that they could open the door every time it rang and show people in - making people sit into one room where he was seeing people in the other.'

Nor is he convinced that, despite what many people say, politics today is any more inhospitable than in his father's day. 'This is a tough business, as is the retail business, as is the hospitality business, where hostility and abuse flow. Now, death threats and all of those things? Of course, we should be condemning them. But I do feel the difficulty of political business at the moment' - threats to politicians' personal safety, or the intensity of criticism that can be directed at them - 'is overstated.'

The reward, in MacSharry's eyes, is simply being able to improve things: to secure better infrastructure, to bring more visitors, to pursue big ideas to fruition.

Others are born nowhere near such dynastic backgrounds. Fine Gael's Noel Rock was raised in a troubled part of Finglas with plenty of social difficulty and was attracted to participative politics by realising that only national action could make meaningful inroads into urban disadvantage in areas like the one where he grew up. 'For all its flaws - and there are many - it's still the most practical way to make a real difference to your community and the only way to make a real difference to legislation,' he says. 'Having seen it from many perspectives, while there are better-paid ways to work on policy outside of politics, you will always ultimately have to engage with the political system and the systems of governance. Representative politics is where you have to be if your goal is to bring about positive change.' This meant getting involved in Young Fine Gael during his time studying in DCU, running for Dublin City Council for the first time aged 21, and working diligently to build up the party's presence in working-class areas that had not traditionally supported a mercantile, pro-enterprise party like Fine Gael. Eventually he secured a council seat in 2014, and a Dáil seat in 2016 - the first time in 20 years that Fine Gael took a seat in Dublin North-West. Politics for him was not an accidental pursuit: nobody came knocking on his door inviting him to take a seat. Winning over enough voters to get elected was the work of almost a decade.

His party colleague Brendan Griffin grew up in a household that had a keen interest in public affairs, but no major political loyalty. 'I was the ten-year-old watching Today...