What Are, Aren't, and Should Be Major Issues in the Election

Saturday will be, we are told, a "change" election, after which things will never be the same again. This is not the country’s first "change" election. The post-bailout 2011 election was a change election. So was the 1997 Deep Bertie election, and the Spring Tide election of 1992, and the Rise of the PDs in 1987. We could go on back to the 1920s, always finding the repeating pattern of things changing in order that they may remain the same, like in that Italian novel.

The PDs won fourteen seats in 1987. The Labour Party won more than twice as many in 1992. Those are historical elections now; is it possible that it is the children of those who voted PD in 1987 and Labour in 1992 who are now going to vote Green and/or Sinn Féin?

For a country that so enjoys an election, we seem unusually poor at documenting and/or analysing our politics. Why have we had so many change elections in the past thirty years?

Some people are claiming that that the Fianna Fáil/Fine Gael duopoly is finally over. They said that in 1987 too. Like the life of novelist Mark Twain or the fate of the Irish language, reports of the duopoly’s demise have been premature before.

Why, though? Why is that? Why are there these sudden lurches among the electorate, from the right-wing PDs to the softish-left social democrats of Labour to the – to borrow a phrase from Seán Lemass about the origins of his own party – slightly-constitutional Shinners?

Don’t forget, there is nobody more surprised at this Shinner surge – if it is a surge, and not another false dawn – than the Shinners themselves. Up until ten days ago, Sinn Féin were about consolidating the seats they hold, and trying to shore up leaks. Now they’re getting their ears boxed in the media for not running enough candidates, when one month ago it looked like they might be running too many.

It’s a cliche of politics to talk about a gap between the elected and the elected, between the people and the elite. But my goodness, we had a Dáil declaring a climate emergency at the same time as rural Ireland was getting ready to picket meat factories and hold up traffic in Dublin over the destruction of a way of life that some feel the Green Party are only interesting in accelerating.

There used to be a tradition of match-making in Ireland. Were any matched couples such strangers to each other as the current elected and the current electorate?

What even is it that we do when do we go to vote? It’s not something that we really document. The weight of scholarly work on Irish politics seems to have been a series of laments and jeremiads about how awful it was that Irish politics did not operate along a left-right divide, thus shaming Irish academics when they attended conferences (in such socialist states as East Germany, Cuba and the USSR, funnily enough). Would it not have made more sense to document politics as they were, rather than as academics would have had them be?

Are we better at understanding Irish politics now, or worse? Where is the great study, for instance, in the rise of the Independents in recent years? Nineteen independents were elected to the 32nd Dáil. There’s a good chance that number will be higher after Saturday and whenever the Tipperary election is finally held.

What does a vote for an independent say about that independent’s voters’ views on how the country should be governed? Why does a TD who was voted unfit for office by his fellow parliamentarians continue to top the poll in his own constituency?

Whose job is it to tease these issues out? It is the media’s job to tease these issues out. Why don’t the media tease these issues out? The media defence is that these issues are not teased out because the public isn’t interested in teasing them out – that the public likes sausages but cares little about how sausages are made.

To which there are two responses. The first is that distinguishing between the public interest and what the public is interested in is meant to be a cardinal concern of a responsible media, not least when the primary media outlet, RTÉ, is a public-service broadcaster.

The other response is that the media has no problem in the world in featuring issues about which the public could care less, the recent climate emergency business being a case in point. Which is more important? Why not devote even half of the resources devoted to climate issues to electoral reform issues? It doesn’t make sense.

And here’s what makes least sense of all. This is another change election. The most seismic election in the history of this, or any other, state was in 2011.

Fianna Fáil, the party that ruled the state from three of every four years of the state’s existence, went from seventy-one seats to twenty as an outraged and furious electorate blamed them for everything that had gone wrong in the country since the 2008 global financial crash.

And now, nine years later, Fianna Fáil will be back in power. They won’t have seventy-one seats, but they look good for sixty, give or take. How has that happened? Was the crash as bad as it was made out to be? If it wasn’t, why did the people get the impression that it was?

Either the media made fools of themselves by saying the crash was going to be far worse than it was, or else Ireland, that dear little island of green, has pulled off a bigger economic miracle than West Germany pulled off in the 1950s. Which is it? How did it happen? Who is to praise? Who is to blame? And where do I go to read about it?

You may think the answers to these questions – just how bad was the crash? How did we recover? Have we recovered at all, or are we simply on the batter again and there’s an even worse hangover waiting around the turn? - would be front and centre in the election campaign, with politicians and pundits making cases pro and con different interpretations of recent history.

You would be wrong. These have not been issues in the campaign. At all. And it’s going to be change elections all the way to the horizon and the nation going around in ever-decreasing circles until we start asking ourselves these questions, and paying attention to the answers.

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?

On Pride in the Nation


The Times Ireland published a column on Saturday in which Caroline O'Donoghue declared that, for the first time in her life, she is proud to be Irish. Your correspondent is damned if he can see why.


Right now the nation is blessed with a government that is looked down upon by other governments held together with baling twine, UHU glue and three rusty nails. The current government relies for its survival on Deputy Michael Lowry, TD, a deputy found guilty of incorrect tax returns this year and against whom a motion of censure was passed in 2011. Not what you'd call moral authority, as such.

The reason the government had to go cap in hand to Deputy Lowry in the first place is because it found itself one member short when Deputy Denis Naughten jumped before he was pushed over a number of undeclared dinners he enjoyed with one David McCourt, who represents the only bidder left standing in the "competition" to win the licence to rollout the National Broadband Plan.

Deputy Naughten received not-at-all common cross-party support for his principled decision to resign but, as Gavin Jennings pointed out on Morning Ireland on Friday, it is not at all clear why exactly Naughten had to go.

On the face of it, Denis Naughten had to go because had lunch with someone involved in a bidding process over which Naughten himself had the final decision. But the fact Naughten had lunched at least once with Mr McCourt was already known to An Taoiseach and in the public domain. So what, then, is the dining tipping point? At what point does a Minister become compromised?

Is she fine if she has two dinners, but damned after three? At what point in the third dinner does the bell toll? First bite? Last slug of brandy, last pull of the cigar? Or just at the point where the big pot of spuds is placed on the table, with the steam rising off them and everyone ready to reach in and grab?

The answer is, of course, that there is no point. There are no standards in Irish politics. There are only circumstances.

If the wind is behind you, you may do what you damn-well please. If it's not, you have to tread very carefully, for you will be as damned for permitting the building of the halting site as you will be for stopping it.

You have to tread so carefully, in fact, that the best thing to do is to close the door of the Ministerial office, put the feet up and sleep peacefully until the next election and/or reshuffle, whichever comes first, and it's time for some other silly bastard juggle live hand grenades. At least you've got the pension sorted.

The absence of standards in Irish public life is equally visible in the Presidential election. Firstly, in the quality of the candidates, which is of the póinín variety - that type of miserable potato more often thrown out to the chickens than offered to feed the family.

It is secondly reflected in the media's inability to make head nor tail of the campaign, other than writing thinky-thought pieces beating the breast about the media's poor job in holding Michael D to the gas last time out, and promising to go harder this time - without actually going so far as to go harder, as such. All things considered, with prejudice to none.

And speaking of the First Citizen, An tUachtarán has decried black media coverage of his Presidency - being a poet, "black media" is Michael D's own coinage of "fake news," the pet term of one of his fellow Presidents - at his campaign launch. At no stage are the white media ever so base as to list what these horrid rumour are, or even ask him directly to answer them. That wouldn't be cricket.

However, when you spend as much time in the gutter as your correspondent, you get to hear a few things. Unless there is a rumour out there that has not come to the low haunts frequented by Spailpíní Fhánacha, Michael D has nothing to fear. It's not like he's done anything illegal or jeopardized the state. If the full story were to come out, it may not even cost him the election. If anything, it might even win him more votes.

And that's because nobody knows what "proper" behaviour is in Irish politics, because nobody has ever seen it, or expects to.

Ireland is not a democracy. It is a feudal system where chieftains gather to squabble over beads and trinkets to bring home to their own gullible followers, while making out like so many bandits themselves and laughing all the way to the bank. If this is the Ireland you're proud of you can have it. I myself am sick to my teeth of it, and I mourn all the blood it cost to build so base a state.

Seán Fitzpatrick Trial Collapses - Irish Media Lets the Nation Down

To an institution, the Irish media made the wrong call yesterday. Everybody – Morning Ireland, all the papers, Newstalk and the rest – saw the Manchester bombing as the most important story of the day. It wasn’t. Not in Ireland.

The collapse of the Seán Fitzpatrick trial was the more important story from an Irish perspective, and the across-the-board failure to cover that properly is another erosion of the public’s faith in the institutions of the state – an erosion that can lead to the washing away of the state entirely if it’s not addressed.

Seán Fitzpatrick was the face of the Irish Economic Crash. He was chairman of Anglo-Irish Bank, the bank that lead the field in terms of funny business, and which had over-extended itself to such a degree that the Government felt it had no option but to guarantee all debts of all Irish banks in 2008.

For the past ten years, the feeling has existed that the crash was due to reckless banking practices and it seemed right and just that certain reckless bankers should pay for that. But the collapse of the Seán Fitzpatrick trial suggests that’s really not going to happen.

The reasons why the trial collapsed or whether or not the law that deals with white collar crime is fit for purpose are questions for another day. What I’m concerned with this is the media’s inability to realise the importance of this story concerning Seán Fitzpatrick and the collapse of his trial.

In trying to come to terms with how someone so very unsuited to the job is currently President of the United States of America in Monday’s New York Times, David Brooks had some fascinating things to say about the phenomenon of alienation. It was, after all, the alienated who voted for Trump – those traditional Democratic voters in Wisconsin whom Hillary Clinton could not be bothered canvassing, for instance.

Angry voters made a few things abundantly clear: that modern democratic capitalism is not working for them; that basic institutions like the family and communities are falling apart; that we have a college educated elite that has found ingenious ways to make everybody else feel invisible, that has managed to transfer wealth upward to itself, that crashes the hammer of political correctness down on anybody who does not have faculty lounge views.

Does that sound at all familiar?

Fianna Fáil suffered the most catastrophic election result in its history in 2011 as a result of the electorate’s anger at the crash and, despite a recovery in 2016, the party is still struggling to regain lost ground. The electorate, meanwhile, disenfranchised with the last government because of a Labour betrayal and a tone-deaf Fine Gael slogan, remains in hostile mood as it still struggles to understand if democracy works in this country.

That’s what makes the Seán Fitzpatrick trial so important. The nation was going to come to terms with what happened through that trial. The nation would have become more educated in how banks and the state interact, the system would be able to strengthen its regulatory powers, all sorts of good and healing things would happen.

Not only will those things not now happen, the establishment of the state – and remember always that the media is the Fourth Estate of the Establishment – doesn’t even seem to register the nature of the crisis.

People are quivering with anger over the collapse of the Seán Fitzpatrick trial. They turned on Morning Ireland yesterday morning to hear about it and all they heard about was Manchester. The papers were all Manchester, and that’s how it continued throughout the day.

Micheál Martin told the Dáil yesterday that the collapse of the trial was a damning indictment of the Office of Director of Corporate Enforcement, and the Taoiseach agreed with him. But what does that mean, really? What is the Office of the Director of Corporate Enforcement? Where is it? Who’s in charge of it? To whom does it answer?

We don’t know. The Office seems just another quango, that just exists for the sake of existing, without ever doing anything. The nearest we came to finding out what exactly the ODCE does was from RTÉ’s Orla O’Donnell’s frankly terrifying account of why the trial collapsed which gained no media traction, not even in the “National Broadcaster” itself.

If your correspondent were in charge, Ms O’Donnell’s story would the front page story on my newspaper, the first story on my radio show. Instead; silence and the shrugging of shoulders.

The media are enjoying the soap opera of the Fine Gael leadership race or else hand-wringing about when we’ll have a Labour Party progressives can believe in. In the meantime, the poor sods who get up and go to work and pay tax and send the kids to school and hope they’ll have some future look at all this and wonder: what’s going on, and why doesn’t someone do something about it?

In their alienation, the citizens of the US took a chance on Trump. In whom will the Irish place their trust when the time comes?

Tribes and Chieftains Are the Only Things That Count in Irish Politics

An article in yesterday’s Irish Times made a bold prediction about a change in direction of Irish politics:

Political leaders such as Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, Jeremy Corbyn and Donald Trump not only redefined what their party stood for but redrew the lines of political competition in their countries.
A Leo Varadkar leadership of Fine Gael potentially presents a similar realignment of the Irish political system in a way that none of the other declared or potential candidates at this point appears to offer.

There is an elephant in the room here, tapping its foot impatiently.

The elephant is the fact that there is no evidence to suggest that leadership or ideology matters a hill of beans in an Irish general election. There are no general elections in Ireland; there are forty-something local elections, depending on the constituency count, with a government being formed as an afterthought to those individual local wars.

Two things matter in Irish elections – tribes and chieftains. Anything else is either a bell or a whistle.

Discussing the presence of Jim O’Callaghan and Stephen Donnelly on the current Fianna Fáil front bench, the author makes a point based on “my experience in the UK.” Experience in the UK is as much in Irish politics as experience on Mars, the Red Planet. Irish elections are utterly different from British elections.

The British House of Commons has 650 seats. There are four Independents among those 650 MPs, three of whom were elected on party tickets and either resigned or lost their party whips. The only Independent elected as an Independent in the 650 constituencies is Lady Sylvia Hermon, MP for South Down.

Dáil Éireann has 158 seats currently. Fourteen of those seats were won by Independent Candidates, possibly more depending on how exactly you count them (are the Independent Alliance or Independents 4 Change “Independent”?). This is a situation unthinkable in the British system, but it is par for the course in Ireland. Ireland has a completely different way of doing things. Completely different.

Those fourteen Independents got two hundred and fifty thousand votes in the last election. The Labour Party, worried about the “face on the poster,” changed leader after the 2014 local elections and ended up with 140,000 votes, slightly better than half that of the Independents, and with less than a third of the Independents’ seats.

So the crystal clear lesson here is that it doesn’t matter if it’s Leo Varadkar’s, Simon Coveney’s or JoJo the Dog-Faced Boy’s face on the poster. Irish elections are local elections for local people. Irish governments are formed by backroom deals on “issues” like Waterford Hospital, Stepaside Garda Station and flood barriers in Athlone, and have nothing on God’s green earth to do with “liberalism, globalism, equality of opportunity, enterprise and greater personal liberty and responsibility.”

And this is exactly the way the people like it. The system is set up to reward our lesser angels, and the current crises in the HSE, the Guards and the absence of any sort of contingency planning for Brexit is the result. The boys at home get sorted no matter what, and let the country take her chances with what’s left.

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.

32 Things - Insider Gossip v Public Service Journalism

RTÉ are currently running an online series called 32 Things Paddy Wants to Know about the upcoming general election. This series is a precise illustration of the failure of Irish political journalism to inform the electorate about how the country is run.

The first of the 32 things Paddy wants to know is who’ll get elected in Cork South Central. This isn’t politics. This is gossip. Personalities are trivial. Policies are important.

The second of the 32 things is who’ll get elected in Tipperary. Again, gossip.

The third and fourth of the 32 things are how Labour and Renua will get on. This is a who’ll bigger, the Beatles or the Stones?-type story. Gossip.

The fifth of the 32 things is how women candidates will get on. It's an ideological topic, but there's no real substance there. The quotas have given the argument a false perspective, so you end up with a cat-fight report from Dún Laoghaire Fianna Fáil. Gossip.

Sixth and seventh are how Fine Gael and Sinn Féin will get on. See third and fourth.

The eighth is who’ll get the chop when Mayo reduces from five seats to four. Gossip, gossip, gossip.

That’s not public service journalism. That’s water-cooler conversation in the Dublin 2 Beltway. Fascinating for Insiders, not worth two balls of roasted snow to Joe or Jane Citizen. Here’s what Paddy and Patricia really want to know.

1. At the time of the crash, we were told that Ireland was sold into bondage for the next thirty years. Now the economy is growing at six per cent per annum. So – what happened to the projected 30 years of living off hot gravel? Has an economic miracle occurred? Or has nobody really known what was going on since August 2008 they’ve spent the past seven years bluffing for their lives and thanking God and Frau Merkel?
2. Six per cent growth per annum. Two per cent is ideal, isn’t it? Two point something, maybe? If the economy is growing at six per cent, doesn’t that mean it’s overheating? If it’s overheating, shouldn’t the government be trying to cool it down, rather than heat it up some more?
3. Or has the government embraced Charlie McCreevy’s belief that if you have it you should spend it?
4. Doesn’t that run against the advice of JM Keynes, who had the idea of a salting away the silver for a rainy day as a bedrock of his macro-economic policy? Weren’t we hearing about Keynes all during the crash?
5. Or when they hear “Keynes,” are Roy and Robbie the only men that come to the government’s mind?
6. I see those lads who terrorized that family in Tipperary had seventy previous convictions between them. How many previous convictions do you need until the Guards start to think you might be worth keeping an eye on?
7. If you run up twelve points on your driver’s license you’re taken off the road. How can you have multiple previous convictions and still be running around?
8. A guy with eleven previous convictions, for public order, robbery and assault, got a suspended sentence for beating the head off a girl on a bus recently. He was also recommended to do a course in anger management issues. Any idea where a citizen could do an anger management course after reading that court report?
9. Speaking of our learned friends, does anyone remember that cutting legal fees was something the Troika stressed over and over again during the time here? How’s that coming along?
10. Any plans to set up an Irish-Water-esque quango to get that show in the road?
11. Yeah. Poor example, I know, I know.
12. Remember when Enda promised a quango cull?
13. Or the report card for Ministers?
14. Whose report card are you looking forward to the most?
15. Alan “AK-47” Kelly?
16. Phil “Big Phil” Hogan?
17. Doctor James “Bottler” Reilly?
18. Heather “A Rebel I came, I’m still the same” Humphries?
19. Jan O’Sullivan, who’s so helpless she doesn’t even have a nickname?
20. Alan Shatter, who had the poor Attorney General plagued ringing her at all hours of the day and the night about the nicer points of torts, malfeasances and likewise legalease?
21. He might even have asked her about fees now and again, of course. Just to break the tension and have a laugh, like.
22. Speaking of reports, how long it’s been since Moriarty Tribunal Report came out?
23. Four years? Four-and-a-half?
24. And that’s resulted in – what, exactly?
25. And Labour are all fine with that, I suppose? Them oul’ ethics aren’t bothering them? Martyrs for the ethics, Labour. Labour used to be worse bothered with the ethics than great-aunt Maggie with the lumbago. The ethics must have cleared up after Labour got into government. Poor Maggie is still crippled, of course. 
26. And how are things looking in the North? Not too great?
27. After all these years, wouldn’t it be something if Ireland were to be finally united by politicians on both sides realising that there are enough cookies in the cookie-jar for all the boys, Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter?
28. And are we all sure there’ll be enough room in Longford for all those Syrians along with everyone else?
29. No Minister, I couldn’t name three streets in Longford either. Although I suppose Pearse and O’Connell are always good guesses.
30. Did you see where the Phoenix reckoned the next Presidential election will be between Michael D, Miriam O’Callaghan and Enda? The Lord save us.
31. Come here, Do you still have that brother beyond in Cricklewood Broadway?
32. Do you think he could put me up for a week or two until I find a job and a place to stay? I’ve had my fill of this nightmare country.

Ansbacher - Time to Publish, and Be Damned

Mary Lou McDonald may have impugned the august dignity of Dáil Éireann yesterday, but she has done the plain people of Ireland some service in doing it.

The entire political establishment has known the names on this infamous Ansbacher list for some time; now, thanks to Deputy McDonald, so do we. The plain people of Ireland, for one brief moment, are in with the In Crowd, and now know what the In Crowd knows. Or at least, some of it.

Will anything come of yesterday’s events? Who knows? If the Ansbacher list is just a list of unfounded allegations, then nothing will come of it, and all this will be quickly forgotten by history.

If the Ansbacher list is the goods on the most base corruption at the heart of Irish politics, the question then arises why Mary Lou didn’t drive the blade home and quote chapter and verse on the hows and whys of the thing?

The most likely scenario is that Mary Lou does not have the goods on these allegations, and is simply lobbing a high ball into the square, on the odds-against chance of it falling her way before being swallowed up by the full-back.

This would certainly make Mary Lou guilty of an abuse of Dáil privilege, and question her standing as a parliamentarian. But then, as the current Government cares not one whit for the Dáil, as demonstrated by its eagerness to guillotine debate and to run the country by the four-person junta that is the Economic Management Council, parliamentarian isn’t the title it once was.

It is interesting that, in this moment in history where we worship “whistle-blowers” – reader, do you remember one article that ever doubted Garda McCabe or ex-Garda Wilson, that ever wondered if these guys were just doing a dog even a biteen? No; me neither – isn’t it remarkable that nobody has sat down with Mr Ryan, the current whistle-blower, with a microphone, notebook and ballpoint pen?

The Irish libel laws are incorrectly balanced in the way they favour the establishment over the right to speak out and to question, so this makes the press a little more cautious than it ought to be. The fact that the journalism industry is currently falling apart like a three-dollar suit bought in Bangkok doesn’t help either.

But in abusing the privilege of that august chamber, Dáil Éireann, Deputy McDonald has opened a window for the journalists of Ireland to earn their corn. David Davin-Power reported on the Nine O’Clock News last night that Gerard Ryan’s report to Mary Harney is seven-hundred-pages long. So now it’s time to go through that report, and start seeing if things add up or if they don’t.

Why not publish it on-line, so we all can read it? Maybe it will be some enterprising Citizen Journalist who finally cracks the case.

Either result is fine, funnily enough. If Mr Ryan is simply an obsessive or a fantasist who can’t let this thing go, we ought to know. We ought to know for the good names of those who are currently under suspicion, and we ought to know so people aren’t completely gullible about conspiracy theories.

And if Mr Ryan is correct in his allegations, then we know that biggest lie of all throughout the 2011 election campaign was that not all politicians are the same. We will know they are exactly the same, and that we must find a new way of selecting politicians, the old one being clearly exposed as not fit for purpose.

The plain people of Ireland are in the slips, straining at the start. Time to turn finally open those closets, and see what comes tumbling out.

Where Does the Buck Stop in Ireland?

First published in the Western People on Monday.

Harry Truman, the thirty-third President of the United States, used to have a sign on his desk that read: “The buck stops here.” The idea was that if something went so wrong that its causality could be traced all the way back to the President, then the President would take the blame. He was the man ultimately in charge, after all.

Where does that sign sit in Ireland in 2014? Where does the buck stop? Who, exactly, is in charge? As controversy swirls around three separate debacles – the Limerick City of Culture, the pylon menace and Irish Water – the sovereign people are no wiser about who’s responsible for these messes, and have no reason to believe that they won’t happen over and over again. Which is the single most depressing part about these stories.

Ballyhea is a townland in Cork, just outside Charleville, where the locals have been protesting the bank bailout for the past three years, and mean to continue. During the Dáil debate before Christmas on the Troika’s exit, many speakers made a point of extolling the Ballyhea protest as an example of heroism in the face of oppression.

But it’s not heroic. The Ballyhea protest is a complete waste of time. Spilled milk doesn’t go back into the bottle, the toothpaste doesn’t go back in the tube, Pat McEneany will never declare the 1996 All-Ireland Final null and void and the GAA will never offer a replay. It’s over.

If people want to get busy, if people want to focus their rage at the events of the past decade or more, they have to look forward and not back. We got badly stung by the crash. Surely we can salvage something by making sure the same mistakes will never happen again?

That’s what’s so particularly depressing about the Limerick City of Culture, Eirgrid and Irish Water controversies. Because it appears that we have learned nothing at all over five years of austerity. Nothing in the wide and earthly.

The new year’s daisy chain of disaster first came to public notice when Karl Wallace, artistic director of the Limerick City of Culture, threw the rattle and quit the job, thus notifying the nation that there was a Limerick City of Culture in the first place. As the tale unfolded, it turns out that there are a number of people in charge of the Limerick City of Culture but none of them seem actually responsible for anything.

It seems Karl Wallace resigned because he didn’t like the CEO, Patricia Ryan’s, attempt to censor some rap act. As Limerick’s chief current claims to artistic fame and achievement are the shopping-bag-headed Rubber Bandits, Ms Ryan will have her work cut out if she plans to censor those buckaroos. It’ll be like having Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd on stage by the time she’s finished – silent comedians.

On a national scale, we’ll get over the Limerick City of Culture. The pylon business is more worrying, because it looks now as though it will be a major issue in the local elections. People are upset, and crafty politicians are taking their chance.

Whatever about the rights or wrongs or the pylon issue, it is a fact that rural depopulation is one of the scourges of modern Ireland. It sometimes feels like the country is being funnelled either into Dublin, where all the multi-nationals, and therefore jobs, are, or else people are packing their bags and going to the other side of the world, the further away the better.

Jobs at home would stop this, and better power supply would help create those jobs in Mayo, and in Connacht, and in the rest of rural Ireland. It took the independent state fifty years, from 1923 to 1973, to bring electricity to all parts of the twenty-six counties. For a government to turn so many rural communities against rural electrification is an achievement similar to getting Aiden O’Shea to swap football for dressage. It’s a waste of his talents, it serves no good purpose and it’s kind of tough on the horse.

And then, there is the five of trumps sitting pretty in our hand, Irish Water, the nation’s latest quango. Reader, you are probably sick of reading about it already. The top brass of Irish Water spent two days before the Environment Committee and the Public Accounts Committee, with a net result of zero. Nothing changed.

The most insightful remark of the week came from an unusually subdued Luke “Ming” Flanagan of Roscommon-South Leitrim, who remarked “it is very handy to dish all of the dirt on Irish Water as that is how things work in this country. The HSE was set up in order that we could dish the dirt on somebody else when it came to health matters. That is how the country works.”

And it’s that simple. The issue is now politically dead. Whatever you think about how Irish Water was set up, fees paid to consultants, whether or not anyone knows the difference between contractors or consultants, how contracts were awarded, cost bases, bonuses and the whole shooting match you might as well tell the dog or the cat for all the difference it’ll make. It’s business as usual in the corridors of power.

And this is what people have to think about now. Not so much for the elections this summer, but for the general election of 2015 or 2016. The mantra last time out was change, change, change. The Limerick City of Culture, Eirgrid and Irish Water stories suggest it’s all the same, same, same. What are we going to do about it?

Are we going to throw our hands up and say they’re all the same, isn’t it the Germans that are running the show anyway? Or, on the eve of the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising, will the people say, no more? We don’t care about the voting age, equal marriage or the term of the Presidency. We just want a Government that won’t waste our money. Is that so much to ask?

Tipperary North v Dublin South: Who are the Real Eejits?

Mr Michael Lowry, Teachta Dála, was not wrong when he told Dáil Éireann two weeks ago that the electorate of Tipperary North were every bit as sophisticated as any other electorate in the country. If anything, he was being coy.

The electorate of Tipperary North, and of so many other constituencies, see the electoral system as it is, and not as people would wish it to be. The disjunct between politics as they are in Ireland and politics as some people would like them to be is to be seen in its purest form in the Lowry case. It is the different between the world of what exists in fact and what exist in theory only.

In the real world, what actual censure is on Michael Lowry? None. Some people don’t like him. Some people don’t like An Spailpín Fánach either, and it wasn’t necessary to make millionaires out of senior counsels to find that out. But Michael won’t be seeing jail anytime soon. Lowry has got clean away and, if an election were held in the morning, Lowry would top the poll yet again.

That’s the reality, and that’s the reality that people in Tipperary North are voting on. It’s all very well for the commentariat or the blogosphere or three just men on the high stools in Mulligan’s witter on about democracy and standards in public office, but people who live and work in the real world are very quickly disabused of any romantic notions when they see nature red in tooth and claw. They know what works and what doesn’t, and that all else is just so much chat.

When the people of Tipperary North cast their ballots, they are casting their ballots on the electoral system as they understand it, and not as it’s presented to them on RTÉ. They are fully aware that one TD isn’t worth a chocolate fireplace when it comes to shaping the future of the state. That’s all decided elsewhere, and there is no role for a single TD on his or her own in any of this.

The voters of Dublin South – because the great unspoken assumption of Irish politically commentary is that the voters of Dublin South are the polar opposites of Tipperary North in terms of sophistication and, God between us and all harm, intelligence – may think they were voting for “change” when they voted for Peter Mathews and Shane Ross, but neither of those gentlemen will affect their electorates' lives on whit. A parish pumper, however, can, and the evidence is all around.

Because as well as knowing what a TD can’t do, the electorate also knows what he or she can do. They know that a waiting list for a hospital appointment can be shortened from six months to six days if a TD picks up a telephone. They know that issues over planning can be made go away. They know that their local TD can solve a whole load of problems and he’s only one phone call away.

The people of Tipperary North fully understand that the base role of a TD is to bypass the civil service. Does this then make the civil service redundant? Not at all; soft jobs in the civil service are also perks that can be sorted out by the local man.

This is the Irish system. This is how Ireland is governed. We trade in favours, in power, in leverage, in influence. And if a man like Michael Lowry makes a few pounds out of that himself, sure what harm? If it wasn’t him, wouldn’t it be some other buck? The faces may change, but the dealing goes on forever.

Garret Fitzgerald regularly writes in the Irish Times that the nature of the Irish electoral system is such that it plays to the worst aspects of the Irish character, and he was right. We can be a supremely generous people – the generosity of time and effort that people put into their GAA clubs is proof of that. But we are also a people who nod and wink and sort each other out.

Talk about doing away with Seanad or cutting down the numbers of state cars is a bottle of smoke. It doesn’t make any difference. Political reform means stopping and punishing TDs from trading in favours and influence and harnessing the generosity of spirit that gives the nation the GAA. But until that happens, it’s extremely difficult to blame the people of Tipperary North for voting for a man who can get their children into school and their sick into hospital, or not to wonder just what the electorate of Dublin South thought Shane Ross or Peter Matthews would achieve, exactly. Politics begins at home. Not in the Seanad.

The Moriarty Report: The Most Important Irish Political Document Since the Treaty

Yesterday’s publication of the Moriarty Tribunal report was a red letter day in the history of state. An Spailpín suspects that its publication will be like Bishop Casey’s flight in 1992; although momentous at the time, history now sees it as even more so; nothing less than the beginning of the end of the Catholic Church in Ireland.

Nothing was ever the same again after Bishop Casey’s fall, and neither shall it be after the publication of Moriarty. Whether the repercussions will be good or bad is up to ourselves; if we react quickly we can still save the country. If not…

What is the Significance of the Moriarty Report?
It is this: the case is now proven that corruption in Irish public life is by no means exclusive to one political party. The very institutions of the state are set up as such that corruption is the path of least resistance and the route to quickest results.

A whisper here, an introduction there. A phone call on a Sunday morning. A round of golf. A day at the races. Great things discussed. We could do wonders, if only. Is that all that’s holding you up? Leave it with me; I’ll see what I can do. We’ll never forget you; we’ll remember you in Paradise. Here’s something for your trouble.

None of the nods and the winks mean much in themselves. Together, they’re red rotten and stink to high Heaven. They mean that merit doesn’t win out, but that the Golden Circle shines brightly and eternally.

Why is This So Bad?
It’s bad because we’re up to our eyes in debt and are currently on our two knees before the rest of Europe giving them the poor mouth about our debt. And we’re giving them the poor mouth while paying our public servants above the European average across the board. These same public servants who are bypassed by sweetheart deals worth billions to vested interests.

Why are we paying the public servants so much again? To do what? What is the point? What results are you getting for all that money that you say you haven’t got? When the Germans ask why we don’t regulate our own affairs and save money that way, how will we reply?

What Can We Do?
We must change the way the country is governed. Changing the way the country is governed is not wishy-washy old blather about doing away with the Seanad, which is like taking off the corner-forward when you’re getting hammered in a game of football. The problems arise long before it gets up to the men inside. If people aren’t talking specifics, and coming out with a lot hot air about “real change now” now, as expertly skewered here, forget them.

An Spailpín would suggest a root and branch reform of local government. Do away with county councils, and use either provincial or super-constituency based regional areas for local government issues. Having the bins collected doesn’t require a meeting of the Jedi high council.

Reform the libel laws, so the press may operate freely. Reform the press ownership laws, so that all are held equally open to account. Punish those who abuse press freedoms; freedom of speech is too precious to let it be abused.

End the multi-seat constituencies, thus lessening the localism and clientelism in Irish politics (politics will always be local, but it need not be outrageously so). Pass new laws where those seeking to peddle political power and favours are prosecuted enthusiastically and punished severely. The only way to clear up a mess is to spare neither brush, bleach nor elbow grease. It’s time to get serious.

What If We Don’t Get Serious?
You’d think the worst case option would be that we would be no worse off, but we would be. The debt is the issue. Not just Irish debt, but the fissures that have opened all across the Eurozone as part of the global financial crisis.

The Euro was a German idea, and the Germans are now beginning to realise that maybe Europe wasn’t ready to be German in how they regulate their money. So, being realists and practical and so very, very German, they will set about seeing how to deal with that. And they will do it without hand-wringing or calling Joe Duffy or wondering why people don’t take to the streets. They’ll just get on with it, and leave sentiment far behind.

A two-tier Europe is the obvious solution. The countries who can be trusted to balance their books move ahead. The countries who are more inclined towards cheating and playing fast ones and being equally mendacious and dumb will get pushed slowly, slowly to the edge. And if they fall off, what harm? The contagion has already been limited, and the positive contribution was slight. The project moves on without them.

Are Our Politicians Capable of Seeing How Bad the Crisis Is?
The TG4 debate was seen as one of the high points of the election. An Spailpín found it depressing, and for this reason: when the leaders debated the Fine Gael proposal about the future of the language as a Leaving Cert subject, the debate was reduced to whether or not landladies in the Gaeltacht would lose income.

This is Irish politics. No vision. No big picture thinking. Irish is an important issue, as it has to do with the national identity and our very claims for being an independent nation in the first place. And instead it’s twisted, like all things are twisted, into an exercise in squeezing out another thirty or forty votes. The politicians dish out this rubbish, the nation laps it up and so the whole rigmarole goes on.

Not any more. Europe is watching, wondering when they’re getting their money back, and if the Irish are actually capable of self-governance at all. The Government, and the Irish political system’s reaction to Moriarty, which makes the craven reality of Irish politics clear, is the biggest decision facing an Irish government since Independence.

It’s up to us to decide if the country will turn a corner and be relied on to act responsibly in our public life, or are we to be feckless and hopeless poor (with a filthy rich elite of 5-8% of country – our own gentry, as Breandán Ó hEithir put it) for ever?

This is our choice. We are still a sovereign people, who still govern ourselves and can decided how we can to be governed. What are we going to do?

Political Reform now. And may God take pity on Ireland.