Sir, – Your newspaper carried an opinion piece by Oliver Callan headlined "Could Trumpism take off here? Yes, it already has" (Opinion & Analysis, February 10th).
I find it hard to understand how somebody can write an “opinion” about a person that they have never met, but Oliver Callan proceeds to do just that.
Leaving aside for a moment his comments about myself and my brother Danny, I take great exception to his comments about our late father, Jackie Healy-Rae, RIP, and his funeral, to which thousands of people turned up to pay their last respects. Unfortunately my father is no longer around to stand up for his good record as a public representative for over 40 years. He proceeds to liken our reverence for our late father to Donald Trump’s “obsessive view” of his late father, Fred. Well, if holding your father in high regard is a crime, sure go ahead and shoot me now, Mr Callan.
He states that I “inherited the Kerry South seat in 2011”. Well, I am sorry but politics does not work like that; there is no such thing as “inheriting” a political seat. I put myself forward for the general election in 2011 in the same way as all of the other candidates, and the good people of South Kerry saw fit to elect me as one of their representatives in Dáil Éireann.
He talks about Brexit and immigrants but he fails to mention that I, as chairman of the Joint Oireachtas Committee on European Affairs, together with other members of the committee, were in Brussels last week for talks on what Brexit will mean for Ireland. The delegation attended 14 meetings in two days and we met, among others, Michel Barnier, chief negotiator for the European Commission; Guy Verhofstadt, European Parliament representative on Brexit; Phil Hogan, European Commissioner for Agriculture and Rural Development; Emily O’Reilly, European Ombudsman; and Declan Kelleher, permanent representative of Ireland to the European Union.
Under the heading “Freeloaders”, Oliver Callan refers to expenses “clocked up” by us in March 2016 when the Dáil only sat for two days.
What he fails to mention is that during this period, we were in Dublin, morning, noon and night, playing our part in the negotiations on the formation of a new government and the finalisation of the programme for government which arose out of those negotiations.
He states that “you cannot condemn those who elect the Healy-Raes”. Well I am sure that the 30,369 people in Kerry who gave us their first-preference votes in 2016 will breathe a sigh of relief and will be delighted to hear that they are not going to be “condemned” for exercising their democratic vote.
He says “let’s be glad that this most nuclear of families” doesn’t have any launch codes. Rest assured, we don’t have any weapons of mass destruction or launch codes in Kerry; we don’t need them. You are more than welcome to visit the “Deep South” at any stage to check it out.
I have never met Oliver Callan so I would not dare to venture or voice any “opinion” regarding him. He is described as “an Irish vocal and performance satirist and impressionist”, and as far as I know he is quite successful in his chosen field. I wish him every good luck in his future career. – Yours, etc,
MICHAEL
HEALY-RAE TD,
Kilgarvan,
Co Kerry.
A chara,– I really enjoyed Oliver Callan’s comparison of victory of Donald Trump and the raise of the Healy-Rae empire.
It appears that Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are to the US what Kerry is to Ireland.
These three states gave President Trump the 79,646 votes he required to win the election, coincidently the total valid poll in Kerry was 79,746 in 2016.
Indeed it could be argued that the only reason Donald Trump won the 2017 US presidential election is because 79,646 voters from Kerry flew to the US to vote, leaving 100 people at home to mind the children.
In this era of “alternative facts”, there is obviously no need to provide any supporting evidence. – Is mise,
DERMOT O’ROURKE,
Lucan,
Co Dublin.