When I was editor of the current affairs magazine Magill in 2000, I asked the journalist Liam Fay to write a piece about a day spent accompanying the TD Michael Ring as he did his “clinics” around Mayo.
On his return I asked Fay how he had got on. “I’m not usually a nervous passenger,” he replied. “But when you are a passenger in a car hurtling down a country boreen at breakneck speed and the driver has a mobile phone in one hand and is waving at constituents with the other, you can’t help feeling a tad nervous.”
Fay’s anecdote from nearly a quarter of a century ago has always stayed with me as a great summary of Ring and his incessant energy. The Westport man had been a TD for six years at that stage and had already forged a reputation as an indefatigable constituency worker.
The article itself focused on Ring’s campaign to get an inside toilet for an elderly woman who lived in Belmullet. He was relentless, making dozens of phone calls, railing against the council and roaring in outrage about cushy officialdom (a constant theme of his political career). Along the way he mentioned that he could get to 10 funerals on a good day.
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On July 30th this year Ring announced that he would be standing down after the next election, bringing an end to a 30-year career in the Dáil, and 45 years in representative politics.
The Westport TD is a particular type of Fine Gael politician. He was never a policy wonk or an ideologue, rather an authentic voice for rural Ireland. It is his ability to articulate for that cohort, combined with his passion, indignation and perseverance that brought him from backbencher to high office. If you are looking for a here-and-now comparator, he has been something of an Irish Tim Waltz throughout his career.
To visit Ring in Westport, you travel along the impressive new dual carriageway that bypasses Castlebar, which is seen as one of his political legacies. We meet in Ring’s office on the Quay Road above the Octagon. It’s a warren of little rooms, with dozens of photographs marking key moments in Ring’s career as a TD and a minister, including his triumphant return into Westport after his byelection victory in 1994. It shows a Mercedes driving slowly through the town in darkness, its sunroof open, and Ring standing on the back seat saluting the crowd with a clenched fist.
Pride of place goes to a framed article about his great uncle Commandant Joe Ring, a hero of the Westport Brigade during the War of Independence, who was killed in Sligo during the Civil War.
Ring is in pensive mood today. He has spent the past week replying to the hundreds of messages he has received wishing him well on his retirement. A huge pile of cards is on the desk before him. He is replying to all of them personally. Some of the messages, he admits, have left him welling up. People in Mayo are thankful to him, he says. You can see why. The shelves around him are stuffed with thousands of files, each relating to representations from constituents.
Ring is an archetypal self-made man. Born in 1953, he was one of 13 children brought up in a council home on the outskirts of Westport. His father had to go to England to work when the family was young and wired money home every week. When a new textile factory opened in the town in the late-1950s he got a job there and worked till the factory closed down, without warning, in the 1970s.
Ring says the ethic in the family was to work hard. “Work, work, work,” he says a few times when explaining his approach to things. When he left school he got a job as a bread salesman.
“I’d be going from six o’clock in the morning till six o’clock in the evening. I’d collect bread every day from Gavins, Keanes and Western Pride and deliver it fresh. It was a good business. At that time there were shops all over the place.” He had three or four people working for him by the time he shifted to auctioneering in the early 1990s.
His introduction to politics came in 1979 when Fine Gael activists Patrick Durkan (later a senator) and Jackie Gibbons persuaded him to run for the urban council in Westport. “I’d say I’d go and then I tried to pull out a day later but Durkan wouldn’t let me. I got 216 votes but I got in. Every election after that I topped the poll.”
Durkan had seen something in the young bread deliveryman. Ring took to politics like a duck to water. He hated injustice and would become visibly angry when he felt people were hard done by. He thrived on conversation, on hearing stories, and had a fantastic capacity for remembering people’s names and faces.
“I never forgot anybody’s face who ever came into my clinic though sometimes I’ll forget the name. I’ll tell them you came in to me two years ago about a medical card. I might not be able to put a first name on you but I remember you.”
He gives a run-down of his weekly schedule, which is exhausting. Clinics in Westport on a Monday. Dublin in the Dáil from Tuesday to Thursday. Back in Mayo on Thursday night for public meetings. Fridays full of clinics. Different towns and villages every week: Shrule; Kilmaine; Ballinrobe; Cong and Claremorris; Ballycroy; Bangor; Ceathrú Thaidhg; Pollathomas; Belmullet; Swinford; Ballina; Ballycastle; Crossmolina.
“You might not be home on Friday until 9pm or 10pm. You could have 60 people at your clinics. They would queuing out the door. People would say to me, ‘How do you do that? I would not do it for a million euro.’
“I loved the clinics. I saw the inequality and the injustices in the way people were being treated. No disrespect to the public service but sometimes they did not do right for people. They would not have to come into me if people were doing their jobs.”
And what about the funerals, which some portray as clientilist politics at its worst? He defends them to the hilt: “When I was a minister I travelled the world and I did every city in the UK and Scotland and the US. I met Mayo people living abroad with big jobs in big companies. They would come up to me and say: ‘The last time I met you was at my father’s, or mother’s, funeral.’
“People felt it was a mark of respect. They loved their politician to go to funerals. If I could not go, I would write to them.”
Work. Work. Work. Ring hated the ending of the dual mandate (whereby TDs could also be councillors) and his colleague Phil Hogan’s abolition of urban and town councils. He thinks the town councils, in particular, were great starting points for apprentice politicians.
His relationship with former taoiseach Enda Kenny, who was also a Mayo TD, was best described by the word “frenemy”. They had healthy competition but mutual respect. When Kenny hung on by a thread in the 2002 election, Ring topped the poll.
When Kenny became taoiseach in 2011, he appointed Ring as a minister of State, firstly in tourism and sports, and then as minister of State for regional development in 2016. When Leo Varadkar became taoiseach, Ring became a senior minister, in the new Department of Rural and Community Development.
He lists his highlights: keeping sports capital funding strong during the austerity years and his involvement with launching The Gathering (the Irish diaspora were encouraged to come home for big family reunions in 2013). “I visited just about every city and town in England and Scotland to get people to come home,” he says.
He also played a part in establishing the highly successful Wild Atlantic Way. He has no doubt though that the Department or Rural and Community Development, created for him by Varadkar, represented the high point.
“I had to fight for budgets but I got them,” he says. He got money for towns and villages, libraries, rural regeneration, leader programmes, social enterprise initiatives, food hubs, walk schemes, Men’s Sheds, Tidy Towns.
“I think I did a fair good job,” is his summation.
Asked about the good side of politics, he cites the improvements to people’s lives in Mayo over 40 years. “I went into many houses in rural Ireland in the early days canvassing and people did not have running water and some had poor housing and no inside toilets. That’s all changed.”
The US and China have the world destroyed. There’s a little place like Ireland that has 5 million people, the size of Manchester, and the Greens are getting excited about it
The downside is the proliferation of online trolling and hate. “Uncontrolled social media is a problem. If the world does not do something about it, God help young children today.
“When AI increases its influence, we won’t know the truth from the lies. It’s really bad for society.
“The abuse Leo [Varadkar] got on social media was outrageous. At meetings I went to, you’d get criticised and people would let out their steam. But they were not nasty. You did not have to watch your home to see who is around.
“Young people won’t go into politics if they don’t do something about it.”
And what about his own children? His wife, Anne, has been at his side and has run his office without a salary. His daughter, Suzanne, is one of his two staff along with Maggie Lyons. “They are all brilliant,” he says.
None of his three children – Paula and Micheál are the other two – were interested in pursuing political careers: Ring believes the change in atmosphere in politics was a contributing factor.
Back on the backbenches since 2020, he has been off-message and outspoken on some key issues. He is scathingly critical of the Green Party and what he sees as its attack on rural communities. “People in rural Ireland have to buy diesel and petrol. People have to drive to work.
“There are 22 wars going on. What’s that doing to the economies of the world? The US and China have the world destroyed. There’s a little place like Ireland that has 5 million people, the size of Manchester, and they [the Greens] are getting excited about it.”
Ring also advocates a more hawkish line than his party on immigration.
“I brought it up nearly every week for two years at the parliamentary party. I could see ministers putting their eyes up to heaven. I told them exactly what would happen, they [people] would end up on the street.
“We cannot take the world in, it has been a free-for all in the past year and that’s why people are angry.”
On a personal level, he accepts that retirement might be a challenge. He bemoans the fact the Oireachtas does not provide advice to TDs who are retiring. It’s going to be a big adjustment for a politician for whom “work, work, work” has been his lifelong mantra.
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