*Barry O’Donovan (RAB). Photograph: John Mangan
LAST TO enter the battlefield for the General Election in Clare, Barry O’Donovan (RAB) has said governing parties are not serious about wanting to fix the housing crisis.
He will be Rábharta’s first ever candidate to run in Clare. The party is a splinter group of the Greens which was established after the Programme for Government was agreed, Barry has been a member sicne June 2021.
On his reasons for entering the fray, the Limerick native explained, “I’m running because there is nobody else, I’ve said this to many people in the past if you don’t feel there’s anyone you can vote for, then go yourself. So many people say ‘oh, I’ve no don’t I have no interest in politics, I wouldn’t vote for any of them’ and I’ve said to people for years when then go yourself, put yourself forward, this is supposed to be about choosing, they’ll speak for you or with your voice. There’s all these things that are about representative democracy. It’s not a great situation, but if you’re not happy for someone else to represent, you’re going to offer to represent yourself and represent other people”.
“Things are not going in a good direction and that’s it, nobody’s willing to change because they’re all concerned, we don’t have houses because nobody’s willing to take a chance on doing anything that might stop house prices increasing, instead just keep it going, keep tipping along and hope that some magic fairy dust comes along and fixes all the problems. The purpose of a Government is to provide leadership and the purpose of leaders is to take difficult decisions but nobody’s willing to do that because they might not get re-elected. They might upset somebody who’s sponsoring them and I might as well call it sponsoring because at the end of the day it costs so much money to run a political party and to run an elections, you’re dependent on the sponsorship you get from the people who have money and the people who have money are quite happy with this current situation”.
A serious appetite to tackle the housing crisis does not exist among the main parties, he claimed. “Housing is still the issue, it was the issue eight years ago and it was the issue four years ago, it’s still the issue today and we can’t achieve anything else whilst people are precarious, whilst people are struggling to survive. The very, very first thing we need to sort out is housing because that will allow so many other things to fall into place. Cost of living has gone through the roof which is in large part driven by housing. People are scared and nervous, they’re worried about things. They’re worried about new people coming into the country. They’re worried about what’s happening in the country that because of housing. Housing is the key issue”.
O’Donovan said, “They don’t want to fix it. They’d like it to be fixed but they’re not going to fix it. Every time I see a poster of Simon Harris or listen to Fine Gael candidates, I think imagine if they had been in the Government for the last fifteen years, God the country would be sorted, the country would be in an amazing spot if only they’d been in Government”.
He admitted that he gave “serious thought” a year ago to mounting a more credible election campaign but has instead opted to go with a run-in of a fortnight. “Am I expecting to get elected? Probably not. Will I get to say a few things? Maybe. Will anybody listen? Probably not. Having run in the locals five years ago, I spoke to a lot of people, I probably got answers on 3,000 doors and I did reasonably well, I mean a quarter of these people gave me their first preference, I think that was very, very good, but I just I can’t afford to take a year out of my life to just stop working because, you know, like everyone else, I have to work in order to pay the bills, in order to be able to survive in this current society”.
Tuamgraney based Barry continued, “we need to prepare for for major change that’s coming down the path of us, we need to become resilient and in doing that and in building that resilience, we can actually build some of the things that society needs, like, we can build really good quality houses. We can build an awful lot of them. We can deal with the housing prices, we can deal with the with the precarity, we can deal with the difficulties people face in their everyday lives where they’re constantly on the edge of the abyss and in doing that, we can also build those houses to a very high standard so that they don’t require much energy, which then helps to address to some extent or to even to prepare for the climate crisis. I remember my mother used to be like, ‘oh, global warming will be great, it would lovely to be a bit warmer around here’ but now it doesn’t rain for a month and then it doesn’t stop raining for a month, this is chaos, we see what this country is like when it snows for 24 hours. I imagine at some point in the next few years, we’ll probably see it snow for a week or two or three weeks, at the end of which we’ll go off and buy a load of snowplough attachments for tractors and give them out to some of the farmers who generally cut the hedges in the autumn but we won’t have them in advance, so the whole country will stop and then you will see people fighting for sliced pans.
In 2019, he ran for the Greens in the Killaloe Municipal District where he polled 708 first preferences. Speaking on The Electoral Chair in advance of June’s local elections, he toyed with the prospect of going forward again. “I was actually asked by a neighbour in the polling station on the day why didn’t I run and I realised I didn’t want to be a councillor. They do a lot, they do but they can’t actually do anything, so what they do is voluntary work, essentially. They paper in over the cracks, they cover the gaps, and in large part, they do it in the hope that they’ll get their name out there in order to be able to get elected, not all of them, no that’s wrong, it’s not necessarily always about getting elected, a lot of them do have a very strong social side, they have very, very strong social solidarity and they build that but they’re papering over the cracks”.
During the same podcast, he said “fairly toxic internal politics” existed within the Green Party. Speaking to The Clare Echo this week, he commented, “I think that the Greens made a really, really poor decision about going into government. I don’t think they achieved a huge amount. They achieved a little bit, but, you know, here we are just shy of five years later after the election, the principal issue of that election has still not been addressed and the principal issue of that election is key, and it was identified at the time as the key to creating the space that people could actually consider longer term problems. When you are worried about having somewhere to live, when you were worried about being able to afford to put food on the table, you’re really not concerned of whether it’s going to flood in five years’ time or not. That’s the crux of it, and that’s what they gave up”.
“I think people don’t give a damn about green politics right now, people have bigger issues, people have bigger concerns, there’s people who are comfortable enough that they will if they can, they’ll vote for green candidates they like. I’m sure they’ll get loads of preferences, but, you know what? Like, it probably won’t count”. He added, “I don’t think there’ll be a Green TD elected in Clare, I think the high watermark for a generation was reached in February 2020, I think that was the shot, and I I think there was enough of people who were upset with the outcome and really did not like the way that things played out”.
He does not expect to be too transfer friendly with Senator Roisin Garvey (GP). “I don’t know who’s going to vote for me, and I don’t know whether they’re go they would be able to vote for Roisin Garvey subsequently, I don’t know who is going to vote for Roisin Garvey and they won’t be asked to vote for me, I might ask them but I’m pretty sure”.
Barry said, “As far as I was concerned, by the time I left the Green Party after the last election, the Green Party in Clare had a very strong desire to get a voice for Clare into the Oireachtas, that was the goal and the purpose, I feel it was very much a personality driven group at that stage, it was focused around one person and achieving that person’s goals, those goals required the Green Party going into government and I did not agree with it, and I campaigned and declared against it, and I was cut out of the everything, it became it became very much a loyalty test, it was like Mar-A-Lago”.
Sunday’s protest in Shannon Airport over the US military’s use of the International Airport is an issue the Clare Green Party should be engaged with, he maintained. “That was an issue for the Clare Green Party, a major issue, but it’s not anymore. now it’s something that can get kicked down the road for six months because it’s in opportunity, there’s an election coming up to deal with this. Palestine is just a horrible nightmare situation. I mean, it’s just something that, like, there’s no willingness for anyone to care the slightest about it. People profess caring about it, but it addressing it just is such a thorny issue, but addressing it means going off against entrenched interests, it means going against the Americans, going against the Israelis, people who have great economic power and great moral powers still even for some reason and no one is willing to really take a stand on that. The same way twenty years ago, most people in this country didn’t want American troops flying through and American weapons coming through in order to persecute a war in the Middle-East, it’s happening. I remember being in Shannon in the nineties, in the early nineties, for the First Gulf War, working down there, and there were American troop flights coming through, so we’re at it 35 years, and it has not brought any benefit to the Mid-West other than some, Irish coffees being sold at the bar. You can fly pretty much anywhere in the world now because flights come from anywhere in the world and go to anywhere in the world through Shannon, but can anyone who lives in the Mid-West still get on them or do they have to go to Dublin. It’s no benefit to us”.
Barry O’Donovan
Occupation – Network engineering manager
DOB – 14/12/72
Party – Rabharta
Top priority – Housing, fairness, fair society.
