Gavan Reilly: A tie can reveal more than just a TD’s dress sense

I’ll warn you in advance that the following analysis might seem highly superficial. That’s because, in truth, it is.

But sometimes the superficial can be telling too, and in my defence my job involves watching more of the proceedings in Leinster House than could possibly be good for a person.

So, here goes nothing: I think you can read an awful lot by the fact that, for the past six months, Sinn Féin’s David Cullinane has started regularly wearing a tie. And I think he’s not the only one in the main opposition party to have started doing so.

There’s a good benchmark for this. The Oireachtas health committee meets every Wednesday morning so you can easily leaf through videos of its previous sittings.

At every hearing of 2023, he’s had a tie on. For almost every hearing before that – right up until last Christmas – he chose the same open-necked shirt option that most other left-leaning TDs like to pursue.

So what’s to be read into this? A better question is, what does a TD hope to achieve by eschewing ‘classic’ business dress and showing up in a smart suit but no necktie? By modern standards the controversy caused by Tony Gregory’s fashion choices in the 1980s is baffling, but the sentiment remains the same: ties are a signal of the business class and of establishment thinking, and I’m not one of them.

In that lens it makes sense for the likes of a Cullinane to go without – and, in your mind’s eye, at first instinct you’ve never seen him wear one.

The first impression matters – you just don’t picture the likes of him or Eoin Ó Broin in a full business suit, tie included. Which is why, if you start wearing them now, the first impression of the general public still lingers, but the beancounters watching Sinn Féin more closely before the next election will see him dressing for the big job he wants