Colorful Kerry man keeps tinge of wit in Irish politics

GLENCAR, Ireland -- When Charles J. Haughey, the silky voiced, elegantly attired, and perpetually embattled former prime minister of Ireland, died last month, many pundits suggested that an era of colorful politics went into the ground with him.

Those pundits obviously don't get out of Dublin much, and they certainly don't come down to County Kerry in Ireland's southwest, where Jackie Healy-Rae is proof-positive that the colorful Irish politician is not extinct. At 75, Jackie is the oldest member of the Dáil, Ireland's parliament. He is also its greatest character.

Once, when a fellow politician rose during a debate to propose that gondolas be put on the lakes of Killarney to attract more tourism, Jackie jumped up to object, noting, ``Sure, but who would feed them?"

Another time, a smart-aleck, urbane reporter looked sneeringly at Jackie's omnipresent green wool cap and asked whether he ever took it off.

``I do," Jackie replied. ``I do."

``Would you take your cap off to scratch your head?" the woman asked him.

``Would you," Jackie retorted, without missing a beat, ``take your dress off to scratch your (expletive)?"

Then there was the time he was sitting in his pub in Kilgarvan when his cellphone rang. He immediately demanded of the caller, ``How'd you know I was here?"

Reminded of these lines recently as he walked around the Glencar Cattle Show and Carnival, a small country festival in an idyllic town at the top of the Ring of Kerry, Jackie stopped in his tracks and cocked his head ever so slightly, as farmers do when cars speed past them on rural roads.

``Ah," he said, smiling, ``that's great stuff, all together, innit?"

Still, Jackie is the first to admit he is part of a dying breed. As Ireland's economic fortunes have risen, so have politicians' view of themselves. The Dáil, to which Jackie was first elected in 1997, used to be a place that didn't take itself so seriously, he says.

``The boys up there now think they walk on water," Jackie says, waving a hand dismissively.

Actually, if you go to his website -- www.jackiehealyrae.com -- there is a photograph that shows him appearing to walk across the surface of one of the famous lakes of Killarney.

Jackie is well-loved in Kerry because he reflects so many of its people and traditions. He has been a farmer, a publican, a mechanic, a musician, a sportsman, and a contractor.

Donal Hickey, Jackie's biographer, says Jackie is a farmer at heart. He likes nothing more than tinkering with and driving tractors around the family farm. Jackie was good at hurling, Ireland's national game, and has a rapport with ordinary people because he is one of them, says Hickey, author of ``The Mighty Healy-Rae."

``He's a rural man, a country man," Hickey said. ``He speaks in plain language. He's as much a showman as a politician. Most politicians today are suited people, with great ambitions. I think they lack the human touch that Jackie has."

Once, Hickey recalled, Jackie was canvassing for votes at a local farming show and came across a man lying under a truck, covered in grease.

Jackie shook the man's dirty hand, telling him, ``There's nothing like a man with a good smell of diesel off him."

The man promised to vote for him.

Jackie was one of six children. Unlike his college-educated political peers, he left school at 13, after his father became disabled, and worked the farm. Like many in his generation, he immigrated to the United States, spending a brief stint in New York in 1953 before moving back, homesick. He had the foresight to buy one of the first tractors in Kilgarvan -- most farmers still used horses -- and by 1969 had made enough money to buy a pub, where he would often play his saxophone.

A few years after he bought the pub, Jackie got elected to the Kerry County Council. When a city-slicker reporter once asked Jackie who voted for him, Jackie replied, ``The people who eat their dinner in the middle of the day."

But there are some, especially in Dublin, who look down on Jackie. Writing in The Irish Times, columnist Kevin Myers dismissed Jackie as ``the stage-Irish buffoon who is a mere shillelagh away from comic perfection."

Myers contends that Jackie's populist image camouflages a less wholesome reality, an era of backroom politics that some say died along with Haughey, one of whose legacies as the country's prime minister in the 1980s and 1990s is a string of inquiries investigating widespread corruption.

``Jackie Healy-Rae personifies the world of the secret deal, the hand slapped on the stairway, the meeting for the purpose of a free and frank exchange of opinions, at which everything is decided well in advance," Myers observed.

Jackie, Myers wrote, ``is a sketch, a circus show, with his postage stamp of hair coiled in a pomade of greasy rattans around his skull, his endless leering chuckle, his slightly simian gait that would have brought ecstatic cries from the Punch cartoonist, and of course, the famous headgear, last seen on an Irish scalp in `The Quiet Man.' "

Jackie's constituents find those remarks insulting and typical of people who know nothing of their ways. Many regard Jackie as a character, not a caricature, and they say he represents them well.

``In Dublin, Jackie is looked at as something of a buffoon, which I think is a gross injustice to him as a person," Hickey said. ``Here in Kerry, he's respected as a self-made man, someone who had to take a lot of responsibility when he was very young. Jackie couldn't get elected in Dublin. But there is a gap between city people and rural people in Ireland. The way Jackie is regarded in different parts of Ireland reflects that gap."

Eunice Keefe, 78, who like several hundred other locals turned out for the cattle show on a recent Sunday afternoon, said she contacted Jackie a few years ago, looking to get into subsidized housing.

``He was very fair," said Keefe, sitting on a stone wall with Teddy, her dog, a Shiba Inu. ``He offered me a place near Kilgarvan, but I didn't like it. He was honest. He told me I'd find a house quicker on my own than by getting on the council list. He was right."

Even Myers, a withering critic, acknowledges that ``politics in Kerry is all about the delivery of services" and that Jackie delivers. The well-paved roads of Kerry are the envy of many other counties. Jackie is one of the pols credited with getting the government money to keep those roads so smooth that, as Myers said, ``you could iron silk knickers on them." Jackie's critics point out that his son Danny, a contractor, has profited handsomely from those paving contracts. Jackie says his Danny, who also runs the pub that bears Jackie's name, wins contracts because he has the most competitive bids.

Getting a straight answer from Jackie Healy-Rae is sort of like getting directions from a South Kerry farmer. Asked his age, he replies, ``I'll never see 60 again." But he works a crowd like anything but a septuagenarian.

``He has the energy of a man half his age," said Tim O'Sullivan, a close friend who has been at Jackie's side for every campaign since 1974, when Jackie was first elected to the Kerry County Council as a representative of Fianna Fáil, Ireland's largest party.

Jackie quit the party in 1997 when it refused to support his candidacy for the Dáil. Some Fianna Fáil bigwigs weren't enamored with the idea of Jackie being the party's standard bearer in Kerry. Jackie ran as an independent and confounded the experts by winning. Jackie says there is no secret to his longevity in politics.

``I don't tell people what they want to hear, I tell them the truth," he said.

Still, he doesn't like the sober tone that has taken over the more raucous politics of his youth.

``It's a different ballgame altogether," he said at the cattle show. ``A lot of these fellows take themselves too seriously. They don't laugh."

Jackie has been accused of many things, but taking himself too seriously is not one of them. He says he will seek reelection to the Dáil next year. After that, he hopes his son Michael will succeed him. Both Michael and Danny are members of the County Council.

He doesn't think his sons will have as much fun as he did.

``Sure," Jackie said, holding his arms out so that he could hug what he calls the wide earthly world, ``what good is politics if you can't meet the people and have a bit of the banter?"