Meath’s council comes under the lens of anthropologist Wilson

Report Paul Murphy
Tom Wilson has been sitting at the back of the room taking notes at monthly meetings of Meath County Council on and off for some years now. He’s not a councillor, a council official or even a reporter. In fact, he’s an anthropologist. A citizen of both the United States and the Republic of Ireland he has been engaged in two research projects, one funded by his third Fulbright Award, focuses on local government in a rural county in the Republic, in this case Meath County Council. The Fulbright is in affiliation with Maynooth University and the Department of Sociology at the National University of Ireland – Maynooth.

While he is a social anthropologist while he is in the US, Wilson becomes a professor he switched to being a professor of politics or sociology when he’s in Ireland. At Maynooth he will research local government party politics and political culture in a Midlands Irish county from 1980 to 2020. Back in the late 1970’s he conducted his doctoral research in the same area – Co Meath – on the role of farming elites in local politics.
A professor at Binghampton University in the US, Wilson was engaged in further research at a meeting of Kells Municipal District today. He was welcomed to the meeting by Cathaoirleach Cllr Sean Drew. Professor Wilson joked that the last time he had done a study of the county council it was before many of the current councillors were born 40 years, correcting that to “before some of you were born”. There had been a lot of political change in Co Meath since then, 40 years of cultural, social, political and economic change. When he attended council meetings “many moons ago” the meetings were held in the old chamber in Navan’s Railway Street.

He was asking councillors “graciously” to meet up with him for an hour to give him an insight into the council as they understand it. Cllr Drew said Tom had been at the council meetings about four years ago but had gone back to the States to finish work on a project and produce a book. There had been deaths, co-options and a number of elections in between.