Do we not get the TDs and the political system we deserve?

The doomed attempts to force junior minister Tony Killeen to resign for doing what he was elected to do five years ago have been going on for a few weeks now.

Nora Lynch, the mother of the murder victim on whose behalf Minister Killeen made representations, has announced that she wants to make his behaviour an election issue. She says that she has no problem with the fact that Killeen wrote to the Department of Justice on behalf of the murderer Chris Cooney, but is angry that he didn't have the courtesy to ask her what she thought of such representations, or to inform her of what he was doing. Now Killeen says he will no longer make representations on behalf of prisoners.

That would be a great pity, but before we get into that, let's backtrack a bit, to the notion that making such representations are what Tony Killeen was elected to do. Surely not, some of you will be saying. Killeen, like all TDs, was elected to help run the country, to put forward ideas and proposals to make Ireland a better place, to increase our wealth and well-being, to protect us from harm, crime and illness in so far as that is practicably possible. Dáil �?ireann, to this way of thinking, is an emporium of ideas and raging debate, a seething, passionate forum for the best and the brightest to decide the future of the nation they govern.

One day, maybe. For the moment, because of the electoral system imposed on us at the foundation of the state, Irish politics is mostly a black hole for ideas and ideologies, in which national concerns take second place to local needs. All politics is local to some extent, but in Ireland, the local has been elevated to a ridiculous degree. TDs in multi-seat constituencies have to compete not just with their opponents in opposing parties but with rivals in their own parties as well. Those same party rivals don't have to be TDs. They can be local councillors who covet a stint in Leinster House and who will exploit any drop-off in the attention being paid to the constituency by Dáil deputies. The TD can be hardworking, he can be a junior minister, he can even be a minister, but any suggestion that he's taken his eye off the local ball will lead to mutterings from his rivals that he "has lost the run of himself above in Dublin".

The result is a political system based to a near-lunatic degree on serving local needs, desires and prejudices. More than Euro5m was spent last year on the salaries of people employed specifically to deal with the constituency responsibilities of junior and senior ministers. Up to 1,000 emails and letters about constituency matters are reported to be sent out each week by such ministers. Tony Killeen himself has estimated that 50,000 such items have left his office by email or post since he became junior minister.

One presumes that ministers and TDs, who are no less busy on constituency matters, and who also have paid staff working on constituency matters, would spend much less time on what has been called parish-pump politics if there was a choice. But there is no real choice. Voters, in their thousands, expect politicians to be at their beck and call, to make representations, to help them with applications for grants, schemes and benefits. No matter that most of these people should be capable of doing the work themselves: the system of nods and winks and "leave it with me, I'll look after you" is so engrained in Irish life that any TD who announced that he or she was cutting back on constituency work would be doomed to electoral defeat.

Twice in the history of the state, Irish people were asked if we wanted to end the system of proportional representation, which would have meant moving on to a single-seat constituency first-pastthe-post system such as the one that exists in Britain. Twice we said no. And although no opinion polls have been carried out on this topic for some time, you can take it that there is no support for such a change now. We have the system we want and deserve. It suits us.

This system occasionally involves making representations on behalf of the families of prisoners. Killeen is in trouble over letters he wrote on behalf of two such people, the murderer Chris Cooney and the child rapist Joseph Nugent. In the latter case, the minister told Newstalk's breakfast show a few weeks back, the representations were "humanitarian" because the prisoner had been assaulted in jail and had been ill. His family were worried about him and asked for help. Any requests made for Nugent's early release were inadvertent, Killeen said.

Let's ourselves be humanitarian and accept Killeen's contention that his only interest in Nugent was helping his family. That seems to me to be an entirely legitimate aspiration and perhaps a better use of a minister's time than enquiring about a headage grant for a local farmer, who is either entitled or not entitled to the payment. Families of prisoners are innocent people and if they have queries about the wellbeing of a relative, no matter how unsavoury a character he might be, they are entitled to ask them. Under the Irish political system, so beloved of the voters, they are entitled to ask their local TD for help.

In the case of Chris Cooney, the prisoner was already in jail for longer than the minimum period lifers are expected to serve and was at that point in his sentence when he was enjoying occasional temporary releases. Cooney's family was entitled to wonder when he would be released, as was the prisoner himself.

Killeen did what 95% of TDs would do in the same circumstances, whatever they might tell you. You might think he was foolish, and you might think he was wrong to do what he did, but you can't deny that he was operating a system that we have been happy to live with for years.

Instead of fussing over a resignation that won't happen, perhaps we should turn our attention to that unhappy fact of Irish life.