One of 15 Fine Gael TDs retiring from Leinster House, the Mayo veteran reflects on the good and bad sides of modern politics
Fine Gael politician Michael Ring in his home town of Westport, Co Mayo , is retiring from politics after 45 years of public service. Photograph: Michael McLaughlinWhen 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 TDOn his return I asked Fay how he had got on. “I’m not usually a nervous passenger,” he replied.
Menopause and HRT: ‘I never had a hot flush. I was just losing myself. By 47 or 48 the weight had really come on’ 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.
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.
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.
“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.’ Work. Work. Work. Ring hated the ending of the dual mandate 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., 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.
“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.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.
“The abuse Leo 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.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.
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