Members of the Oireachtas Have Nothing to Feel Smug About

It was around about the same time that UK prime minister Theresa May was in front of a baying House of Common. The contrast between this respectful celebration of 100 years of unbroken parliamentary democracy here [sic] and the shambles in London was not lost on the Dublin audience.

Irish Times, Tue, Jan 22, 2019.

It is the nature of the politician to be blessed with an above-average amount of self-regard. An adamantine hide is necessary in a life where you submit yourself to public judgement at least once every five years. However; the notion of the current members of the Oireachtas stiffening with pride at the thought that they are the finest of parliamentarians, not like those knuckle-dragging Tans across the way, is too much for even the most ravenous of goats to stomach.

One hundred years after the first sitting of Dáil Éireann, Ireland is a state where the Gardaí have merrily ignored 7,900 crimes, some of them very serious, over the past seven years. Nobody knows why these crimes have been ignored, but the GRA, the Garda Representative Association, has made it quite clear that however it happened it wasn't their boys' fault. It may turn out that dog ate each and every one of their notebooks. It’s what Mr S Holmes used to refer to as a three-pipe problem.

This is the same police force who were discovered to have made up breathalyser tests, bullied whistleblowers out of the force and saw the last two Garda Commissioners and the last two Ministers for Justice resign under never-really-fully-explained circumstances. The police exist to enforce the law; what does the law currently mean to the police? It seems to them as a midge on a summer’s evening on the mountain; bothersome, but not really to be taken seriously.

The situation is so worrying a man could end up in hospital as a result. Except that were he foolish enough to do so he might be better of going straight to the graveyard with his wooden overcoat on, such is the state of the Health Service.

The current Minister for Health is - nominally, theoretically - in charge of a Health Service that is unable to diagnose cervical cancer and over-estimates the price of the new children's hospital by one billion Euro, and counting. That's not the price of the thing, remember; that's how much the original estimate differs from the current estimate, and it's gone up, rather than down.

How much is a billion Euro? It's enough to buy every single residential house in the town of Ballina, with about half of those in Castlebar thrown in as well. It's a lot of money, and yet the current Minister for Health, famously "mad as hell" about the cervical crisis, seems completely content to sign off on this bill, no matter how many more billions it goes up to. Don't forget either that this new hospital will not deliver one extra bed compared to the number of children’s beds currently available. Details!

One wonders what the Minister for Finance, Paschal Donohoe, thinks of all this. Paschal is one of the leading politicians in the country. He had enough nous to know that, as he himself could never become leader, his allying himself closely with Leo Varadkar once Varadkar made his run would make him the next-best thing. When appointed Minister for Finance, the cognoscenti thought of those many media performances where he smothered criticism of Fine Gael in the manner of a conscientious huntsman drowning surplus beagles, and thought: here is the man to keep an iron grip on the public finances.

If only. The Irish Fiscal Advisory Council responded to last year's budget by accusing the government of repeating the mistakes of the past - over-heating an already-overheated economy, thus guaranteeing that the country will be once again on its uppers when the tide goes out again, as it inevitably must.

There is an irony in this as the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council was set specifically to perform this very task. One of the reasons identified for the crash of 2008 was that a "support the green jersey" policy blinded officials to their duty of telling the economic truth as it is, rather than as people wanted it to be. Thus when things went splat!!, there was no rainy-day money at all. Not behind the couch, not under the bed, not buried in the garden in a biscuit tin.

And now, ten years later, we're doing it all again. The ambulance drivers struck yesterday. A nurses' strike is guaranteed. The teachers can't be far away from having the Art class studying Placarding 101. There's that monstrous, growing bill for the Children's Hospital collapsing into the weight of its own gravity like a fiscal black hole, set to swallow every single thing around it. And that's not even counting the six hundred million lids that the Health department was over budget last year, and for which money was found from .. well. We never do find out where this miracle money comes from, do we?

And how does the political class respond to these triplicate impending disasters, to say nothing of Brexit itself, homelessness, the narrow tax base, the flight from rural Ireland? By poncing about the Mansion House telling each other how well they would have done at Soloheadbeg or Kilmichael had Fate not decided they would be born too late, and then off to Buswells, Kehoe's, Doheny's and sundry other houses to pint the night away.

Brexit is a nightmare, but at least the British can see that there's a dirty big iceberg off the starboard bow and it could sink the whole ship. The first our politicians - and we the people, God help us, because it is us, after all, who are the ones who elect the donkeys in the first place – the first any of us will know about the iceberg is when we're clinging to a spar in the freezing Atlantic, watching the state go under once more, and asking ourselves: how the **** did that happen? It's a mystery alright, Paddy. Who could ever have seen that coming?

Due Process, and the Dogs in the Street

Whenever someone in authority in Ireland is under pressure for perceived wrong-doing, it is the done thing for whatever flack has been sent to RTÉ to defend him or her to insist that he or she is “entitled to due process, just like any other citizen.”

Where Aughrim is lost in so many of these things is that the interviewer invariably accepts this notion. But the interviewer should not. The interviewer should instruct the flack to hold it right there, and tell the flack that the creature in question isn’t entitled to “due process, like any other citizen,” because the creature in question isn’t any other citizen.

If the creature in question were any other citizen, we wouldn’t be talking about him or her on Morning Ireland or the Six-One News or whatever. We wouldn’t give a fiddle-dee-dee what was done, by who, to whom. It would be the very least of our concerns.

The reason we’re interested in the actions of public figures is because those public figures have a considerable impact on the life and well-being of the community as a whole, and because of this, public figures must be held to a higher account than private citizens. It’s a necessary stop against corruption, jobbery, cronyism and many other evils, and God knows such a notion never caught on around here at all, at all.

Reader, have you heard that “Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion?” It’s a two-thousand-year-old phrase that sums up the Romans’ attitude to people in public life. That not only must they themselves be models of probity, but those around them must be as well.

Contrast, this, then, with standards in Irish public life. For the past week, the media have been in a tailspin trying to chart who said what, to whom, and when, in regard to Garda whistleblowers and to what extent can we pin them on this. Because it’s only when pinned down that an Irish public figure will put his or her hands up and admit it’s a fair cop. Otherwise, the tradition is to say nothin’ and tough it out.

Those sagacious observers, the dogs in the street, couldn’t give an empty tin of Pedigree Chum who said what, to whom, and when. The doggies are convinced of the following facts:

• Maurice McCabe was ballaragged scandalously, and he was not, is not, nor will he be alone in that.
• The ballaragging didn’t happen by accident either. It’s not what you’d call an Act of God, like.
• The doggies don’t care how much the Garda Commissioner knew or didn’t know about it.
• The Mutt-ocracy do care that the current Garda Commissioner was brought in because of the scandal surrounding her predecessor and, rather than cleaning that up, she’s made it worse. Therefore, these debates about her stepping aside are pointless. She’s got to go. If she won’t resign, fire her and put someone else in charge, and keep firing people and appointing new ones until the screw-ups bloody stop.
• Katherine Zappone made a career from talking about children’s rights. How ironic, then, after a children’s referendum and the setting-up of a Ministry for Children, that the only thing Tusla seem to have done is played a part in a scandalous smear campaign. Goodbye, Katherine. Thanks for nothing.
• Frances Fitzgerald. What are you for, exactly, Frances? You’re for the door, that’s one thing we can settle straight away.
• Enoch Powell, that Wolverhampton wanderer and former UUP MP for South Down, once remarked that all political lives end in failure. Penny for your thoughts, Taoiseach.

As for an election not solving anything, whatever about the doggies, your correspondent is willing to give it a try, just in case it does solve something. Maybe, after the clown cabinet of the past year and the horror-show currently unfolding in the United States, the parties might be in a mood to behave in a vaguely grown-up fashion this time and present their plans like adults speaking to adults, rather than the usual rhetoric of orderlies in a mental home telling those fellows who think they’re Martians that the flying saucer will be here tomorrow to take them all back home.

As for our, the electorate’s, part, let’s all try to stop believing in flying saucers and get real while there’s still a country left to save.

An Garda Síochána, and the Corruption Inherent in Irish Public Life

There is none righteous; no, not one.

St Paul’s Letter to the Romans, Chapter 3, Verse 10.

Well, I’ve been down so very damn long

That it looks like up to me.

Jim Morrison, Down So Long.

Government Chief Whip Regina Doherty was a guest on Today with Seán O’Rourke on RTÉ Radio One on Friday, explaining why the Government was dragging its heels on the latest episode of the Garda Whistleblower controversy. “The revelation was only made on Monday,” said Deputy Doherty. “Today is Friday.”

It is Deputy Doherty’s job to appear on radio and explain that, had an Taoiseach doused her with petrol and set her alight just before she came on air, it was great to get warmed up, what with the winter drawing in and all. But sometimes, you have to come out with your hands up and say look, there’s a worm in the apple and that’s just how it is. We need a new apple. This one just isn’t any good.

The nature of the Gardaí’s internal disciplinary procedure has been in question for years. Years. And it’s not just the whistleblowers – there is also the genuinely extraordinary story of the tremendous balls made of the investigation into the murder of Sophie Toscan du Plantier, and that happened over twenty years ago. What are these guys doing? Why are they getting away with it?

It is the done thing in functional democracies to hold people in power to a higher standard of probity than ordinary citizens. This is because great power brings great responsibility with it. The oldest example of that level of probity is Julius Caesar’s, who remarked that not only he, but his wife also, must both be above suspicion.

This is not how we roll in Ireland. In Ireland, access to power means that you are given a benefit of doubt that you by no means deserve, and a benefit of doubt that an ordinary citizen could not dream of. Nobody resigns in Ireland because they’ve done something wrong. In Ireland, a powerful person only loses his or her job when he or she is dragged kicking and screaming from it. Vide Alan Shatter, our previous minister for Justice, the nature of whose precise exit from government has never been made 100% clear.

And now he we have it repeating again. If the previous Garda Commissioner had to resign, the appointment of that previous Commissioner’s right-hand woman as the next Commissioner doesn’t exactly signal regime change. Nobody knows what’s going with these half-spoken allegations, but your correspondent is hardly alone in wanting them sorted out as soon as possible.

And what do get? Niall Collins of Fianna Fáil on Prime Time repeating “due process, due process” like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz saying there’s no place like home, each hoping to be magically taken over the rainbow.

And Deputy Collins, theoretically, isn’t even in Government. It is fashionable in Irish political commentary to describe chicanery as a particularly Fianna Fáil trait but if there is one thing our remarkably slow-witted nation should take from all this is that our political class are all the same.

Ireland’s political system is broken. It encourages us to vote for our lesser, rather than our better, angels, and continuous ramshackle government is our reward.

It is to Deputy Mick Wallace’s credit that he has been so dogged in pursuit of Garda malfeasance. If only Deputy Wallace were equally dogged in paying his taxes. Deputy Wallace’s stance on the current garda controversy does not excuse the nation for its lack of judgment in re-electing a tax dodger. He can’t do that. He has to set an example, and the pursuit of the whistleblower case doesn’t make tax-dodging excusable.

Ireland has to demand higher standards from our public representatives. My own opinion is that our proportional representation, single-transferable-vote electoral system and our libel laws that protect the strong at the expense of the weak have to be changed and even then, it will be a generation before any real change can be seen.

I pray to God to it happens but right now, looking at the contemporary Irish political scene, I might as well pray for the Irish rugby team to beat New Zealand in both Chicago and Dublin when they play at the end of the month. There’s a better chance of it happening.