Young Fine Gael

And I were sitting late at night having a drink on a train and I was giving out about a company of people voted for Bertie and doing this, that or the other with the government.

And he said, well, why don't you go and do something about it? So I went and joined Young Fine Gael in Freshers' Week and I was signed up by another past Wesley pupil.

There's a deliberate trend here.

Emma Blaine, who has subsequently gone on to be Lord Mayor of Dublin.

The progressive Democrats were floating about, kind of gave them a bit of a consideration.

But ultimately, look, people matter.

The people who are on the stand recruiting for young Fine Gael, I'm still friends with all of them today, actually.

And one of them was, as I said, a familiar face who was a couple of years ahead of me in school, who was a friend of the family.

And that's that.

And then when I joined Young Fine Gael, you know, trying to break and be a bit more, or make new friends first person I met to goes like oh yeah yeah no my roommate plays rugby with you Smashy and said it in front of the whole room and there's still people who I was in college with going like I didn't know your name was Neil until you went up on an election poster

So you weren't tempted to do the political nickname you know like Neil Smashy Richmond this Kevin Boxer Moran you know or the Peter Chap it's clear you know you weren't tempted to put that really attach that to your political identity I'm not going to say I wasn't tempted So you've thought about it a lot.

I've thought

So the chair of the branch was a friend of my parents and he was out with me the whole time.

Still comes out with me.

He's just turned 80, but he was... really good there was one or two other kind of few friends from college from young Fine Gael there was a load of young Fine Gaelers running Simon Harris was running for the first time Owen Murphy was running Barry Ward who you just mentioned was running we were all we'd all William Lavelle he used to be a president to young Fine Gael we were all running for the first time and there was loads of young people because the tide had started turning on Fianna Fáil the crash was very much on the horizon and so there was you know Fine Gael Labour there was a bit of a wave behind us and yeah the team was small but a lot of yeah like it was different like we didn't really have social media yeah I had a Facebook page but didn't use it much still at Bebo no didn't have a smartphone and like I remember the day of the count I'd run out of credit on my phone so everyone was texting me and they go like have you got elected like because we can't see it it's not on like you're on slow internet trying to find the count details the count wasn't live streamed or anything like that so it was very different I mean a lot of leaflets a lot of posters which hasn't changed

How many votes did you get in your first election?

And there is a charge in there called poisoning.

But it's very, very rarely used and it's very, very difficult to prosecute, which is why when my colleagues in Young Fine Gael came to me a number of years ago, back in 2023 in the Shannon trial, and told me the difficulties that our young people were experiencing.

I drafted a piece of legislation to have a specific standalone offence of spiking in Ireland.

And the standalone offence would cover the administering, the injecting of a substance without a person's consent in order to sedate them, harm them or sexually assault them.