*Eddie Punch (IND). Photograph: John Mangan
THERE’S MORE to Ireland than Dublin remains the message of Eddie Punch (II) as he pitches up another election campaign.
20,751 first preferences went his way for the European election in Ireland South as Eddie was eliminated on the fourteenth count. He was the tenth candidate left standing in a constituency which elected five people including former Clare TD, Michael McNamara (IND).
Europe was never intended as a warm-up for a Dáil Éireann bid, he admitted. “I’d love to tell you there was a huge strategic plan but there wasn’t really, after the Europeans I wasn’t sure what I’d do and whether I’d go back to some sort of representative organisation and similar work to what I’d be doing for years or whether I’d look for a role in some sort of representative or lobbying group at an EU level, there was a few options and I suppose the fact that this has come after the other is probably a factor in this, I know a lot of people said to me I did well enough in the Europeans for a first-time candidate, I had built a profile and shur I had a few posters left at home doing nothing”.
Reflecting on his attempts in Ireland South, he recalled the European election as “colossal. The first lesson is you would want a year to prepare for a European election unless you had a huge high profile and were a long-standing politician maybe but for someone like me you would want a year to prepare for it. The second thing you’d learn is you can be hitting everything in spots and not achieving anything in depth, it is not easy. It is great to have learnings but to implement them after is another matter, the Europeans were a huge project management effort so you would either throw a lot of money at it in a short space of time or spend a year preparing at it, I didn’t have either”.
Media coverage of elections in Ireland was criticised by the Cratloe farmer. “We cover elections badly in this country, there was no virtually no media debate, there was more debate around the Limerick Mayoral Election than there was about the Ireland South Constituency, that is more a criticism of RTÉ and our national media, I found it surprising when you’d be in the midst of it, you had virtually no chance to have any debate or put your message across any way on RTÉ or the main newspapers, that feeds into for the European elections the celebrity candidate phenomenon because it is not a competition of ideas or what you stand for, it is simply the most famous and you can see that in the results, we have a jockey, a Rose of Tralee winner and a Eurovision presenter all elected and it is not clear to me what any of them stand for or what they are about.
“You have to be honest, I stood and I had a clear idea that I wanted to be in the Agriculture committee of the European parliament and that is what I knew about, I attended many of their meetings and I knew that is where decisions were made which impact on farmers right across the Ireland South constituency, none of the five elected MEPs from Ireland South have gone near the agricultural committee, I think that should have been explored more”.
Running as an Independent Ireland candidate, Eddie explained that you’re still effectively an independent but with a banner behind you. “If you get to the Dáil as an Independent and this is also in the European Parliament ultimately you have to work with other people and you can be more effective if you have a collaboration with some other people, it is not a party in the sense of what Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael bring to the table, I don’t have a team of canvassers, my canvassers are my own, my campaign is practically my own, I get a little bit of help from a guy who does social media and video but there is no money out of it for me from Independent Ireland, anyway they are from the point of view they don’t qualify for the Government funding of parties so from the funding point of view they are three single TDs trying to arrange an alliance, they are trying to style it as a party but it is not a party in the conventional sense and it is not a party in the financial sense either.
“If we get ten TDs elected which I think is possible then it is a bloc to negotiate a Programme for Government or alternatively it is a bloc to be a coherent opposition, there is a lot of sense that there has been very little effective opposition from the current Dáil, people talk about the scandals in Sinn Féin but the question I hear people asking is what opposition do I have, without an effective opposition the Government ultimately becomes complacent”.
His chances of becoming one of the ten TDs predicted appeared to be greater prior to the addition of Cllr Joe Cooney (FG) into the field. “Joe Cooney’s entry into the field has upset the headspace of all candidates but ultimately it slightly changes the dynamics from the point of view that It slightly strengthens Fine Gael’s hand but also on the other hand if you look at it Clare generally returns at least one of the four from outside the conventional parties or the Fianna Fáil Fine Gael bracket we’ll say. It’s been a long long time since there’s been two Fine Gael and two Fianna Fáil, I think it happened once back in the 1980s if memory serves, we’ve had all sorts of surprises in Clare. The opinion polls are almost useless when it comes to individual parties, never the less there is no opinion poll I’ve seen anywhere where Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are more than forty five or forty six percent, Clare is a bit different because there is a real hardcore vote and their councillors have swept the boards but it still doesn’t change the fact that they have four quotas between them unless all the other candidates underperform and then let’s say for argument sake I have nowhere to get transfers out of. If you look at Joe Cooney entering the race, it does change it and he will take votes I would have otherwise for sure, but he will take some votes Timmy Dooley should have got, he’ll take some votes Leonora Carey should have got, some votes Cathal Crowe should have got, so it is very unknowable”.
Though not a seasoned politician, Eddie maintained he his familiarity of Oireachtas hearings puts him on bar with some of his opponents. “Experience matters, I’ve been in a lot of Oireachtas hearings as a witness as opposed to a questioner, I know the Oireachtas committee procedure pretty well having survived a lot of those hearings. I’ve been in Brussels and I know how EU legislation works coming down to the Dáil, I’ve presented to Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael to all the parties and they all have a special meeting room of their own, I’ve experience in terms of the actual process of decision making and policy making, I’ve had to work with civil servants through lobbying with ICSA which means I understand the minds of civil servants on almost any piece of policy and legislation which essentially is what will DPER think which is jargon for public expenditure, I understand all of that stuff, I know how evidence counts when it comes to proposing either policy or in some cases legislation, experience and some expertise is not a word I want to talk about with myself but I haven’t been twenty five years at this to not know how a lot of this stuff works at Dáil Éireann level”.
An awareness of tactics from civil servants is very important, he said. “I think Clare needs a strong Independent voice, lots of counties outside of Dublin have discovered for a long time that having at least one good independent for the county is really important towards fighting for a fair share for whatever the county, I’m saying a fair share for Clare”.
Brendan O’Regan’s innovation leading to the formation of Shannon Airport, the Shannon Duty Free and the Shannon Free Zone was also cited by Punch. “In the last ten to twenty years that has been slowly eroded, it started with the end of the Shannon stopover which was quirky but that then became the stepping stone towards taking Aer Lingus routes out of Shannon, it became a stepping stone to more and more traffic being diverted through Dublin, meanwhile Shannon suddenly got relegated to a stopover for the US forces coming through Iraq, then the Shannon Airport Authority was split up and Shannon Development closed down, there was a lot of different moves which happened which ultimately have not served our area well, today we have the scenario that Dublin Airport has the cap lifted so the 32 million passengers is now likely to increase, we get about four to five percent of the passenger traffic but I think of it in terms of connectivity, there is no connectivity to Europe from Shannon, we have no connectivity to Amsterdam, Brussels, none of the main German cities like Frankfurt, Munich or Berlin, only a little bit to Paris and that is hugely disadvantageous to us in terms of inward investment, building businesses here, the choice of location for foreign direct investment”.
No connectivity to Brussels puts the Mid-West at a disadvantage because it makes it more difficult for an EU commissioner to visit the area, Eddie said. “We had a Government focused on the green agenda for the last five years, Eamon Ryan has been talking about renewable energy since the cows came home, I was always aware of the fact that he was doing this thing on anaerobic digestion which is one point, the second point is I met the Shannon Estuary Taskforce and I understand they are frustrated because nothing has happened with the DMaps off the Atlantic Coast which is a stepping stone to major transformation of this region but nothing has happened. A few weeks before the election, Eamon Ryan’s deputy Ossian Smyth said he was doing it in 2025 but he won’t be the Minister in 2025, there is a sense that because it is not off the coast of Dublin that the urgency is almost non-existent”.
He added, “I think the job of a TD is not to be focused all the time on sticking plasters but on looking for and working with people for bigger long-term vision and solutions, I know it sounds in some respects like ‘you may say I’m a dreamer’ but I think it has to be like that, that is what it should be, I’m not a career politician, I’m not really interested in staying there for fifteen years to get re-elected and to fix the potholes back in wherever, I’d prefer to fix no pothole but to get a huge upgrade of the road from Ennis to Kilrush because that is obviously important if we were to do something with Moneypoint, if we were to get atlantic energy, if we were to get data centres on the west coast, data centres are more feasible”.
Data centres such as what was planned for Ennis are welcomed by Eddie. “The problem with it of course is we don’t have the capability of supplying the electricity but that is a problem we need to solve. If you want to give him up your Facebook and cloud computing then you can talk about data centres, there’s lots of data centres gone into Dublin exerting pressure on the grid, there isn’t any doubt about that but the whole lot has to be looked at in the joined-up thinking, energy off the Atlantic Coast solves the problems with data centres, it makes it a no-brainer, while you do that you’re making a case for increasing the connectivity of Shannon, the demand for Shannon goes up if you have all of this innovation going on in the Atlantic coast and you have all this electricity going in, I know this is not going to be fixed in the next Dáil but we need to be moving towards that. John Moran is Mayor of Limerick now, sometimes he is saying stuff for Limerick that we want in Clare but as a bigger picture guy he is talking about the need for a counter-hold to Dublin and I think that is important”.
On why he left the ICSA where he was general secretary for politics, he commented, “Twenty five years lobbying government and politicians and eventually getting frustrated that lots of them are not that ambitious for agriculture, they’re not that knowledgeable for agriculture, I’ve taken it as far as I can take it, I think I can make a contribution at this level”.
If this election bid doesn’t work out, his plan is to “eat some seabass in Kuşadası in Turkey and drink some nice wine”.
Eddie Punch
Occupation – Farmer, former CEO of ICSA
DOB – 14/08/68
Party – Independent Ireland
Top priority – A fair share for Clare in health, tourism, small business, infrastructure and our Airport
