FOLLOWING REMARKS ABOUT teachers by Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary, the issue of over-representation of certain professions in the Dáil has become a topic of controversy.
Speaking at a campaign launch for Fine Gael’s outgoing Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment Peter Burke, O’Leary said that more people from the private sector were needed in the Dáil.
“The Dáil is full of teachers,” O’Leary said. “I wouldn’t generally employ a lot of teachers to go out and get things done.”
Burke has since distanced himself from the comments, while Taoiseach and Fine Gael leader Simon Harris responded to them by saying the Dáil is “meant to be reflective of society”.
Comparing figures from the Central Statistics Office (CSO) to the representation of teachers in the Dáil, it’s possible to see that although teachers are over-represented in the Dáil when compared to the general working population, they are not alone.
Nor are they the most over-represented group by profession.
The same statistics show that some of the largest occupational groups in Ireland are barely represented in the Dáil, or are not represented at all.
So in terms of the previous professions held by outgoing TDs, is the Dáil reflective of wider society, as Simon Harris wants it to be? Or are some professions greatly over-represented, with others barely being represented at all?
About halfway through the term of the outgoing Dáil, the census was conducted in Ireland asking everyone who was in the country on a given night in April what their “main job” was.
The results, released the next year, give a snapshot of what sectors of the economy the Irish workforce was spread across with categories covering public administration, social work, hospitals, IT, and education topping the list.
The occupations of TDs before they entered the Dáil, on the other hand, are a bit more tricky to collate.
However, drawing on multiple datasets, including lists published in the Irish Independent and Irish Times that assigned a previous job to every TD, mandatory ethics disclosures, public profiles and media coverage of the members of the Dáil, we can get a rough snapshot of what professions are represented in the Dáil.
It should be noted that these sets of data — the occupations of the public and those of TDs — are collected in different ways. Some ethics disclosures indicate that TDs are working multiple jobs while in office.
For example, Michael Healy-Rae lists six occupations (including his political role) in his entry on the register of interests of members, published by the Dáil.
The CSO, on the other hand, only asked for a “main” occupation for citizens resident in Ireland on census night in 2022 and assigned one category to those who responded.
It was also hard to find specifics on the job histories of some TDs.
Similarly, while the census asked what a person’s current occupation is, many of the professions attributed to TDs are not listed.
This might distort the answers given — people who are asked what their previous occupation was might not list all of their former jobs.
However, given these caveats and the imprecision of the data, are there any groups that are glaringly over- or under-represented in the Dáil?
There are 19 former teachers in the Dáil, including one who had switched careers from teaching long before taking office — amounting to almost 12% of the outgoing Dáil’s 160 TDs.
According to CSO statistics, there were 116,372 primary and secondary school teachers in Ireland in 2022.
The CSO’s 2022 figures for the working population (that is, those who had jobs on census night) was 2.32 million and the total population was 5.15 million (the total population includes children, the unemployed and the retired).
This indicates that about 5% of the working population and 2.2% of the total population were teachers.
As such, we have about a 2.36 times larger proportion of teachers in the Dáil than we see in the working population.
However, using that standard, teachers are not the most over-represented group in the Dáil.
We found that 13 TDs in the previous Dáil had worked practising law (8.1%).
While this is smaller than the number of teachers, there are also fewer legal professionals in the general population.
The CSO recorded 21,332 people working in “legal activities” in 2022, or about 0.9% of the working population. Based on this proportion, we should expect to see one or two legal professionals in the Dáil.
Instead, we see the legal profession make up a proportion 9 times larger than exists in the working population.
In the outgoing Dáil, our analysis found 13 TDs who currently or previously worked in farming, which is 8.1% of all TDs, the same as worked in law.
CSO statistics show that there were 65,412 workers in the categories of mixed and animal farming (though another 3,935 were categorised as “other agricultural activities”).
Other estimates put the number of “active farmers” higher, at 127,000 — though this may be explained by people who do some farming part-time, but have a different primary form of income.
To stay consistent and use the CSO’s figure of 65,412, this would imply farmers make up 2.8% of the workforce, implying that we are seeing 2.89 times a proportion of farmers in the Dáil than we do in the whole working population.
Delving into statistics on the careers and sources of income of politicians also give us two other occupations that often escape analysis of politician’s careers.
As The Journal had previously reported, there are about 26 TDs who rent out residential property, or 16.25% of the Dáil.
(This may also be an underestimate, as property in the names of TDs’ spouses do not need to be listed on publicly available disclosures, so there may be more who gain indirectly from rents).
However, RTB registrations from 2020, the year the outgoing Dáil took office, show that there were 163,554 registered landlords in total in Ireland, amounting to about 3.2% of the general population, or 7% of the working population.
So, while we might expect about 11 landlord TDs if the Dáil was reflective of the wider working population, we instead see a proportion 2.3 times larger.
(Despite legal requirements RTB registrations are likely to be an underestimate of the number of actual landlords.)
Going through the list of deputies, The Journal was also able to identify at least 17 TDs who could be described as “career politicians”, including the current Taoiseach, Simon Harris.
That is to say, representatives who have had jobs in political parties or in elected office since their teens or early twenties, and who do not appear to have ever had a different career.
This number may be substantially higher, as there were TDs whose work history was less clear, but also did not appear to have worked outside politics.
As the CSO does not provide figures on such careers, it is hard to put any number on how over-represented this group is.
Going through the CSO’s list of job categories, it also becomes apparent which jobs are more common among the general population, but less common among those elected to the last Dáil.
The largest category in the CSO figures for the general population was public administration workers. This would likely include many civil servants who are discouraged from party political activity.
The next highest category, workers in residential care and social work activities, make up about 4.4% of the general workforce; surprisingly, this appears to be roughly reflected in the makeup of the Dáil, as about 6 to 8 TDs likely fall in this category (3.7 to 5% of the Dáil).
However, the third-highest category, hospital activities, makes up about 3.9% of the workforce.
This appears to be underrepresented, with only two TDs (1.2% of the Dáil) having having worked in a hospital prior to being elected (including Leo Varadkar, who began his political career before he became a general practitioner).
Similarly, the fourth category, “computer programming, consultancy and related services,” accounted for about 3.8% of the overall workforce, but it is not clear that any TD has had a career primarily in this field (though one TD said that they had worked in IT, among other jobs).
There are standard explanations for why some careers are likely to see people go for office more than others.
For example, Darach Ó Séaghdha previously wrote in The Journal that teaching might be attractive for the politically ambitious as it does not prohibit political campaigning, and it also allows career breaks and gives lots of opportunity to meet locals.
Law careers tend to be over-represented in many political institutions — for example, almost a third of US congress representatives had a career in law.
Given that the Dáil is the main law-giving body in the country and involves reading and amending potential legislation, this is perhaps unsurprising.
However, CSO statistics that tell us what sectors the general population work in may also give some explanation as to why some groups are overrepresented.
While it’s only the sixth-largest sector overall, farming is the largest sector for males. About 90% of those counted as working primarily in farming were men, according to the CSO.
Similarly, more than three quarters of those working in “hospital activities” are female.
Given that only 36 TDs are women (22.5%), this gender disparity may explain part of the gaps in these occupations being represented.
IT was also the fastest growing sector, meaning that we’d expect less TDs to have had a previous job in this sector simply because there were less IT jobs in the past.
Academic research has found that public representatives tend to emphasise issues related to their previous (or ongoing) occupations, affecting how they intend to allocate money.
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