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Meet the Irish Tories: ‘There’s nothing wrong with wanting to have a better quality of life’

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6 months ago

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Meet the Irish Tories: ‘There’s nothing wrong with wanting to have a better quality of life’

Labour is the traditional home for Irish voters in the UK but some have pledged their loyalty
to the Conservatives, even as they face an electoral disaster

Barry Hetherington in Belfast. Photo: William Cherry / Press Eye

John Kidney was 13 when he literally wrote his own destiny. Snow had fallen on the fields at his secondary school in Co Cork and his classmates had escaped to enjoy it. As his friends made snowmen or stocked their armouries for snow-ball fights, John peeled away to carve out huge letters in the untouched white dust. The message read: FINE GAEL. It was a foregone conclusion, even then, that he would end up in conservative politics.

“It was probably unhealthy political geekery,” he admits now, speaking over the phone from his adopted hometown of Bath. After graduating, he moved from Ireland to England, first to study history and politics at Exeter University then to London, where he worked in Whitehall at the tail end of the last Labour government. (“I was very much Conservative then,” he assures me.) Now ensconced in Wiltshire, one of the UK’s most picturesque — and affluent — areas, he has finally realised that childhood snow-day dream, becoming a politician. Not for Fine Gael, but as a Tory councillor.

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