The Candidates: Jack Wall TD, Labour

"It's not the other candidate who beats you, it's the people. If they don't want you, then that's it. If they don't want me, then I'll go on and do whatever God has ordained for me next."



It isn't that Jack Wall TD is expecting to lose his seat in the coming outing. He's looking to his third Dail now, and the recent opinion poll carried out for the Kildare Nationalist has him marginally heading the real poll in the summer election. But that doesn't make him complacent.

He has a philosophy rooted in his rural south Kildare social and political background. That you work for the people and the people vote for you if you do the work to their satisfaction. All politics truly is local.

It might seem strange that after a decade of the Celtic Tiger, and in an era where we've had to bring in immigrants to meet many of our worker needs, that Jack Wall's primary local concern is jobs.

But it is. Because of family life. He lives in a part of Leinster that is burgeoning with new people, but many of them have to commute daily long distance to their jobs in the Dublin area, where many of them came from.

“Quality of life must be of paramount importance,” he says. “To achieve that, a much greater amount of employment must be provided in south Kildare. To do away with commuting and give people time to be with their families and their kids.”

He’s critical of successive governments for failing to deliver decentralisation of jobs, both in industry and in the civil service. And also in the essential infrastructures, such as transport.

“Who’d have thought that we would have rail user groups in Kildare, Monasterevin and Newbridge, all trying to deal with Iarnroid Eireann to get better services so they can get home to their families earlier? We have people come out here who have never before had to deal with the fact that they work two hours away from their homes and families. Their whole lives have changed.”

He says it's ‘unbelievable’ that no new sizeable industry -- “capable of supporting a hundred or more jobs” -- has been located in south Kildare for at least 15 years.

That has led to a ‘haemorrhage’ of employment south of a line from Kilcullen across the county. “There simply hasn’t been any incentive to have industry located here, with the result that you have, for instance, people being bussed in from Mullingar, from south Kildare, to Intel and Hewlett Packard. And Kilcullen itself has never got the kind of industrial base I would like to see it have.”

Other issues close to the top of his constituents' agenda include healthcare and planning. On that latter he has a particular concern about the provision of properly planned recreational areas by developers.

“They’re just allowed put them anywhere, with no forethought. Probably the worst bit of land a developer has in his site. In residential estates you have to look at both sides; you have to have places where children can play games, and places where families can sit in safety. Both are necessary and both need to be properly thought out.”

Jack Wall has recently also highlighted the situation about Kilcullen’s garda strength, which hasn’t changed despite the fact that the town’s population has increased massively in recent years.

“It is totally out of sync. Kilcullen was always famous as an interlinked community, but there’s a whole new population there now. If you have a situation where the number of gardai in the station are not adequate to meet the needs of the community, then you have to find a way to appoint more.”

His party's policies are well outlined on the Labour Party website. But it's when somebody comes into his constituency office in Athy, or to one of his clinics in the other towns and villages of south Kildare, that Jack Wall hears what he needs to do. Those looking for help aren't so interested in policies as in what gets done.

And that's why, though well established in the national parliament for two Dails now, Jack Wall remains an old style politician, working always close to his roots. Not looking over his shoulder at the competition, but watching out for the people who'll decide whether or not he's worth returning for a third term.

Brian Byrne.

THE FULL INTERVIEW: This story is based on one of a series of Kilcullen Diary interviews with the General Election candidates in Kildare South. The interview itself is available here as a QuickTime streaming audio.