What Lessons Can We Learn from Shattergate?

The best thing to come out of the recent brouhaha involving penalty points, Minister for Justice Alan Shatter and those strange bedfellows, “ethics” and “probity,” is that we, the sovereign people, have been provided with a forensic walk-through of how the body politic works. The whole thing has been a case study in what’s important, what isn’t, why some things happen and why some things don’t in the state.

The worst thing about the recent brouhaha is that we, the sovereign people, are now sure beyond reasonable doubt that the institution of the state is a house of mirrors, and cries to high heaven for reform.

Firstly, we’ve been confirmed in a belief that the standard of civic debate in this country isn’t very high. A school of red herrings have swam past over the past twelve days, obscuring the central point of the “scandal,” which is this: is it a resigning matter if a Minister for Justice uses confidential material to which he or she only has access by virtue of his or her position as Minister for Justice to make an ad hominem attack on a political opponent?

That’s the central issue. Did Alan Shatter do wrong in using information about Mick Wallace to which Alan Shatter had privileged access due to his ministerial position?

Whether Alan Shatter bought a dud watch, wrote a dirty book, got pulled by the cops leaving the Dáil or is currently reforming the Department of Justice like a latter-day Martin Luther doesn’t matter. But despite this, the opposition has been all over the shop in their criticism of him. Not least Fianna Fáil’s Justice spokesman, Niall Collins, who has been like a child who got a present of a tin drum when it wasn’t even his birthday and keeps banging the thing constantly for days. Days.

One of the reasons that debate isn’t focused on whether or not Alan Shatter misused his office is that nobody in Ireland is all that terribly sure of what constitutes an actual political scandal. In Britain, the faintest hint of impropriety sees you shown the door although, in fairness to our former rulers, they usually go before they’re pushed.

Our fellas don’t go before they’re pushed. It was a brass neck that got them elected in the first place, and it’s not until the noose tightens around that same brass neck will they give up a damn thing.

Hence, Alan Shatter’s rather stunned reaction to the idea that he had a question to answer in the first place. “Is this a joke?” Shatter asked a reporter when the reported asked Shatter if he should consider his position. He’s a minister in a government with a well-whipped 58-seat majority. He doesn’t have to consider a damn thing, actually.

But, it did look bad so, with extreme bad grace, Alan Shatter made a speech to the Dáil that saw the thing get its second wind and journalists scurry to find out if this was an actual scandal after all, just like the grown-ups have.

It’s interesting, also, to note how much of the coverage focuses on Alan Shatter’s perceived arrogance. That Shatter, in his two years as Minister for Justice, has moved a raft of acts through the parliament and into law figures little in the coverage – the current writer is only aware of it having read it in a profile in the Phoenix, as an aside in a long feature detailing just what a pain in the neck the man is.

But this ability to get stuff done doesn’t count for anything. Shatter the man is inclined to look down on journalists – hard to imagine, but true – and don’t think the journalists care for it.

Either way, the matter is now over. Yesterday’s Sunday Times reported that there is no file to which a mischievous Mattie McGrath referred in the Dáil last week, which means either there actually isn’t a file or else the guards have been somehow got on message. It will be interesting to see if industrial relations between the Gardaí and the minister get better or worse in the next few months.

As for the substantial issue, Alan Shatter should have resigned. It was a gross misuse of power to use confidential information to score a cheap political point. Mick Wallace is a disappointment as a parliamentarian – one could posit that the only difference between Wallace and a clown in the circus is that the clown will at least wear a suit to work – but that’s not the point. If a Minister for Justice – any minister – can access and then use sensitive information then someday some Minister will use it against any of us. And that’s the definition of a police state.

But that’s not how politics rolls in Ireland. In Ireland, it takes more than a whiff or sulphur before it’s time for you to consider your position. You need to be caught with one hand in the cookie jar, the other holding a smoking gun, a hip pocket full of brown envelopes and a lifelong membership card for Opus Dei clenched in your teeth before it comes to that. And even then, with a fifty-seat majority, squeezing out a tear or two for Dobbo on the six o’clock news might do it. God knows, it’s worked before.

Have We Learned Anything in the Past Five Years?

Des Geraghty, late of the Workers’ Party, Democratic Left and SIPTU, said something in passing when reviewing the papers on The Week inPolitics yesterday that should have made the nation stop and take notice. Presenter Seán O’Rourke asked Des about Cyprus. Des replied that “unfortunately for Cyprus, it’s the latest part in the on-running saga about the Eurozone. The crisis seems to shift from country apart from our own.”

Apart from our own. At the start of the Eurozone Crisis, which itself is a subset of of the worldwide Great Recession, Ireland was identified as one of the countries most at risk of economic collapse, the so-called PIIGS – Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain (it’s only last week that anyone outside of either Cyprus or Greece found out that Cyprus was even part of the Eurozone, of course). If the crisis is, as Geraghty says, shifting from country to country apart from our own, does that mean that our country might have – gasp – done something right? Might have weathered the storm? Might yet take her place among the nations of the Earth?

You would think, after the long hard years of austerity and Morgan Kelly prophecies and IMFs and Troikas and the rest of it that there would be some sort of national holiday declared. That the Taoiseach would address the nation with this happy news, that the nation is at safe harbour once again.

Of course, a reason not to do that would be that Ireland may not be in safe harbour at all. So much unexpected doom has descended from clear blue skies in the past five years that the Taoiseach would be forgiven for taking nothing for granted. But that said, Cyprus has been an object lesson in what happens when you try to bluff the financial world’s royal flush with your miserable pair of fives. You get whomped, and whomped good.

And how could it be any other way? People talk about right and wrong in these things. There is no right or wrong in financial markets. There is only capital – who’s got it, and who wants it. Nothing else.

The government, both this one and the last one, recognised that from the start and got with the program. That is why you’re reading this at your leisure now, rather than queuing at an ATM for your daily ration of what was once your own money.

The tragedy for the nation is that the nation doesn’t know this. As far as the nation is concerned, Angela Merkel is the worst oul' wagon since Maggie Thatcher, we’re all slaves to Europe and musha, I don’t know what we’re going to do at all.

There is a fundamental disconnect with how politics is conducted in this country and how its perceived by the electorate – the people who mandate the politicians to conduct the politics in the first place. We elect politicians to fix drains and get harangue low grade and underpaid civil servants to get pensions for people who don’t deserve them. When it comes to global economic catastrophe, having one over on a county manager somewhere doesn’t really cut it.

This week sees the Meath East by-election, where the favourite to be elected is the twenty-six year old daughter of the man who’s tragic death caused the by-election in the first place. She is surely doing her duty by her lights, but it’s a lot to ask of anyone who’s been through that trauma to just step up like nothing happened. Meanwhile, the other candidates are usual suspects, with the exception of a Captain Birds-Eye lookalike who makes Mick Wallace look like Pericles of Athens.

After the crash we were told things would never be the same again. Things are exactly the same again. The world has changed. Ireland has gone through the valley of darkness and come out the other side, but the people haven’t really noticed. And two years on from the Moriarty Tribunal, it’s very much business as usual behind the closed doors of Irish public life.

Has the Irish Electorate Given Up on Governance?

Nate Silver’s triumph of the number-cruncher's art in the US Presidential election last month makes everyone interested in politics look on polls with a more gimlet eye, but even the great Silver himself would wear out the keys on his calculator trying to parse what’s going to happen in Ireland come the next election. The prospect of a look at one of the Minister for Health’s famous logarithms would be a source of delight to any statistician of course, but the rest would be pretty much bedlam, everywhere Silver looked.

The Sunday Business Post released a poll yesterday that saw Fine Gael support crumble, Fianna Fáil continue their slow (but inexorable) rise, and support flock to the Independents. There has been speculation that the fall in Fine Gael support arises from the horrors of the Savita Halappanavar case, but that doesn’t quite fit the case.

Like the rest of the parties, Fine Gael are split on the issue of abortion. The extent of the split depends on just what legislation is proposed, and it seems a leap to say that the fall in Fine Gael support is because of Fine Gael’s position on abortion. They don’t have a position – that’s the point. Some of them shilly, some of them shally, but there is no one Fine Gael position on the issue. We have to look further to find out why Fine Gael have lost support.

One extraordinary thing about the poll, and about the current Dáil, is strength of support of the Independents. It’s extraordinary for this reason – a vote for an Independent in the current situation is a vote for something other than governance.

Which means that when a voter votes for an Independent, she is not voting for a government. She has prioritized something else above governance. What that something is depends on the individual candidate. Is there a commonality at all between Shane Ross, Mattie McGrath and Mick Wallace? It’s hard to see it.

The Independents currently in the Dáil may be understood as loosely left, but that doesn’t sum up them all. You couldn’t accuse Mr Michael Lowry, Independent TD for Tipperary North, of being anti-business, for instance. So even though we group Independents together for convenience, what defines them is what they’re not rather than what they are. As a collective, they’re all over the spectrum.

But what is interesting is that the Independent voter has decided that governance is secondary, and that’s significant and worrying. All politics is local, as Tip O’Neill liked to remark, but the question now arises if Irish politics crossed a Rubicon where voters have given up on the idea of governance entirely?

We heard a lot before the election about how Ireland had lost her sovereignty because of the bank bailout. Did the voters believe it? Is that the evidence of the current Dáil and, on the evidence of current polling, the next?

Has the Irish nation now given up completely on the idea of an independent Irish parliament that legislates for an independent Irish nation? Pat Rabbitte was eager to tell Claire Byrne on Saturday that the Government must absolutely do what the Troika tells them. Is the nation taking the Minister at his word, and deciding that, if they can’t have a government, maybe they can have someone to kick up a fuss when their local hospital is closed or when the rats overrun the local school? Does the nation settle for a TD who will fight for the parish, and isn’t that fussed about who’s Taoiseach because who’s Taoiseach doesn’t really matter at all?

If this week’s budget passes – and the many leaks that have occurred suggest that the Government is determined to test the water, just in case – Ireland will have completed 85% of the Austerity Program. It’s stung and will sting for some time yet, but there haven’t been any Morgan Kelly style riots in the streets. Ireland has taken her medicine.

So the question then is will Ireland return to electing governments once the Troika have moved on and normality is restored, or is faith in the system broken forever? Or, even more worrying, what if the whole thing has all been a cod?

Just how sovereign was Ireland, really? How much can a country with few indigenous resources and that is heavily reliant on foreign investment – the majority of which is still from the former colonial ruler, ninety years after independence – ever be truly “free”?