While I have you here

The Galway Races, the Fianna Fáil tent and the disappearing places where politicians and people once simply met.

There is a particular kind of conversation that used to be commonplace in Irish politics.

It happened at the church gate. At the mart. Outside the GAA clubhouse. At agricultural shows, funerals, festivals and race meetings.

It usually began with five words.

“While I have you here…”

What followed might be about a medical card. A dangerous bend in the road. A son who couldn't get planning permission. A school extension. A neighbour waiting for a hospital appointment.

There was no appointment. No email trail. No constituency clinic. No communications strategy.

The constituent had simply encountered the politician.

And for more than a century, few places provided more opportunities for that kind of encounter than the Galway Races.

Ballybrit was never merely about horses.

From its beginning in 1869, when an extraordinary 40,000 people reportedly attended the opening meeting, it was a gathering place. Politics was present at its creation too: the first chairman of the stewards was Lord St Lawrence, then MP for Galway.

Over time, Race Week became one of those great collisions of Irish life.

Farmers and financiers. Publicans and priests. Builders and bookmakers. Journalists and jockeys. Councillors, TDs, Ministers and the people who elected them.

They came for the racing.

But they also came to meet one another.

And politicians went because people went.

That distinction matters.

Then came the tent

The Fianna Fáil tent at the Galway Races has become shorthand for something else entirely.

It evokes the Celtic Tiger, political fundraising, developers, bankers, corporate hospitality and a culture in which access to political power appeared rather too easily available to those who could afford it.

By the time Fianna Fáil abandoned its Galway Races fundraising tent in 2008, it had attracted intense attention for some 15 years. Even within the party, there was recognition of what it had come to represent. Dermot Ahern later said he had never really supported it because it “sent out all the wrong signals”.

He was right.

Nobody should mourn the Galway Tent.

A democracy should be uncomfortable with any suggestion that wealth can purchase privileged proximity to power. Political access cannot become another hospitality package.

But perhaps, in recoiling from what the tent represented, we became suspicious of something adjacent to it.

Politicians being where people are.

And those are not the same thing.

The problem wasn't proximity

The problem with the Galway Tent was not that politicians and citizens met at the races.

It was that some citizens appeared to have better access than others.

That distinction matters because the democratic answer to privileged access should never have been less access.

It should have been more equal access.

Yet somewhere in the years that followed, informal political contact itself began to acquire a faintly disreputable air.

A Minister in a corporate box?

Who invited them?

A politician at the races?

Who's paying?

A photograph with a businessman?

What does he want?

These are legitimate questions. Irish political history gave us good reason to ask them.

Transparency matters.

But something else happened at roughly the same time.

Politics moved online.

And the nature of political presence began to change.

From presence to proof of presence

Today a politician can communicate with thousands of constituents without ever meeting one of them.

Facebook. Instagram. X. Bluesky. Email newsletters. Videos from Leinster House. Carefully photographed constituency visits.

The politician has never been more visible.

But visibility and proximity are not the same thing.

A politician goes to an event.

A photograph is taken.

The photograph is posted.

Great to be at…

Delighted to meet…

Wonderful to support…

The digital evidence of attendance becomes almost as important as the attendance itself.

Which raises an uncomfortable question.

Have we replaced political presence with proof of political presence?

Because the most valuable encounter may have happened ten minutes earlier, off camera, when somebody caught that politician by the elbow and said:

“While I have you here…”

There is no photograph of that.

No engagement metric.

No content.

Just politics.

The disappearing accidental encounter

This matters far beyond Ballybrit.

Ireland once had an extraordinary infrastructure of accidental political encounter.

The church gate. The mart. The local shop. The pub. The GAA match. The agricultural show. The funeral. The races.

Some of those spaces are disappearing. Others remain, but our behaviour within them has changed.

At the same time, our formal mechanisms of political contact have multiplied.

You can email your TD at midnight. Comment beneath a Facebook post. Fill in an online form. Attend a constituency clinic. Send a direct message.

Technologically, Irish politicians may be more accessible than at any point in history.

And yet politics can sometimes feel more managed.

We have become more accessible technologically and less accessible accidentally.

That may be one of the quieter changes in Irish democracy.

An accessibility worth protecting

There is another reason to think carefully about this.

For generations, Ireland has taken a certain pride in the extraordinary physical accessibility of its politicians.

In how many countries could you turn a corner at a market and find the Taoiseach standing behind a fish stall?

Or find a Minister at the local match, a TD at the mart, a councillor at the funeral, and simply walk up and speak to them?

There is something profoundly democratic about that.

There is also something increasingly vulnerable about it.

Threats and intimidation directed at politicians have become a more serious part of public life. Security concerns cannot simply be dismissed as the price of elected office. Nor should any politician be expected to put themselves at risk in order to demonstrate their accessibility.

That creates a difficult tension.

Because the instinctive response to danger is distance.

More barriers. More controlled environments. More managed appearances. More security between the elected and the electorate.

Some of that may be unavoidable.

But we should recognise what is lost when it happens.

The easy physical accessibility of Irish politicians has never merely been a quaint feature of a small country. It has been part of our democratic culture.

We should protect the politician.

But, where we can, we should also protect the tradition.

Ballybrit without the tent

Which brings us back to Galway.

More than 150 years after that first meeting, Ballybrit remains one of Ireland's great gathering places.

The politicians still come.

So do their constituents.

Perhaps that is something we should value rather than regard automatically with suspicion.

Not the private tent.

Not the purchased table.

Not the carefully curated room in which money buys proximity.

The opposite.

The politician walking through the crowd.

Standing at the rail.

Having a cup of tea.

Meeting the person they expected to meet and twenty people they didn't.

Listening to the complaint that wasn't on the briefing note.

Being available to the interruption.

Because democracy needs formal institutions.

It needs Dáil Éireann and the Seanad. It needs committees and constituency offices, registers of interests, ethics legislation and transparent political funding.

It increasingly needs sensible protections for the people who serve in those institutions too.

But democracy also needs human contact.

It needs places where the represented encounter the representative without an appointment.

The lesson of the Fianna Fáil tent was never that politicians shouldn't go where people gather.

It was that no citizen should need a corporate invitation to get close to political power.

Perhaps the democratic answer isn't fewer politicians at Ballybrit.

Perhaps it is politicians at Ballybrit with no tent at all.

Because sometimes democracy begins with nothing more complicated than somebody catching your elbow in a crowd and saying:

“While I have you here…”