Seanad Dodges Bullet, State Remains Critical

Abolishing the Seanad should have been as easy as knocking the head off a thistle. The thing does nothing. Even the anti-abolition side in the referendum campaign acknowledged that much (apart from a single, bizarre instance of groupthink, more of which anon). And even though all the No advocates trumpeted reform, reform, reform at every turn, reform was never an option. The sovereign people were asked to vote on whether the Seanad was to stay or to go. Nothing else.

So were the people hoodwinked by this talk of reform, whose chances are about the same as Ireland qualifying for the World Cup – possible, certainly, but by no means probable? Or did something else happen?

Your faithful correspondent has two theories about this. The first is that the Seanad was saved because the Yes side made such a tremendous hames of their campaign. Referenda are adversarial contests, like trials in courts of law. If you want to make a case, you don’t spare the blade – you go straight for the jugular.

It was suggested at the start of the summer that if the Government did want to shoot down the Seanad, it had to make the case that the Seanad was a rabid dog that must be shot for the safety of the community. Scaremongering? Of course, but certainly how referenda have been fought here in the past – hello divorce, goodbye Daddy, vote no to Lisbon/Nice to avoid being conscripted into the pan-European army, vote yes to Lisbon/Nice or else have the Albanians holding telethons to feed the starving Irish, and all the rest of it. Dirty of course, but politics is a dirty game.

What did we get instead? The world’s most watery excuse, that the abolition of the Seanad would save €20 million per year. In ten days’ time, the nation will be looking at steering a €3.5 billion budget “adjustment” through the houses of the Oireachtas. €20 million is 0.0057% of €3.5 billion, five thousandths of one per cent. Doesn’t seem like a lot in the bigger picture.

Did the Government then hammer the Seanad as useless, a drain on scarce resources, a dead weight in the body politic? No, it did not. A meme developed during the campaign that great additions had been made to Irish public life by Senators like Gordon Wilson, Mary Robinson, David Norris and WB Yeats. And this was accepted across the board, instead of being attacked in every instance.

Gordon Wilson’s great moment of forgiveness occurred in a TV interview, not the Seanad chamber. Mary Robinson jacked in her job as First Citizen of the sovereign Irish nation to trade up to the UN, treating the highest office in the land as nothing more than a stepping stone, a back to climb upon on her way to higher ground. (Robbo was also the victim of a truly vicious yet strangely endearing autobiography review by her one-time compatriot Mary Kenny in the Spectator magazine last year). And Norris could have been dismissed by simply playing VT of his extraordinary and disgraceful attack on Regina Doherty at the start of the campaign over and over again.

None of this is very nice and almost none of it is even fair but again, we’re playing politics here. This is how the game is played.

WB Yeats is the most interesting of the four Senatorial icons, but again the Yes side failed to point out that there is virtually no similarity between the Free State Senate of which Yeats was a member and the modern Seanad, of which both Richard Bruton and Labour’s chief (if not only) Yes advocate, Alex White, were members.

And this is perhaps what was the final nail in the Yes coffin. It was impossible, in the end, to figure out just where the Seanad ended and the rest of the body politic began. What made the Seanad so much worse than the county councils below it or the Dáil above it?

The Seanad has sixty seats. Three are for Trinity Senators who talk among and are admired by themselves, and are utterly irrelevant to anyone else. Three are for NUI Senators, who have been a mixed bag between teachers’ union hacks, wannabe Trinity Senators and Rónán Mullen.

There are eleven Taoiseach nominees, most of whom are party hacks or those to whom the Government party owes a favour. And then there are the forty-three others, county-councillors elected by other county-councillors in a tightly closed and confined bubble where a single preference in the twelfth county can be the difference between success and failure.

Political paths go from the council to the Dáil. Some councillors stop off on the Seanad, either on their way up or as a safety net from not having made the leap to the Dáil. It is one-half nursery and one-half nursing home. Nothing else. All this talk about scrutiny and safety valves is blather.

And it’s blather because the majority of Ireland’s laws are now made in either Brussels or Berlin. Gavin Reilly, the excellent political correspondent at Today FM, reckons "over 500 EU-related statutory instruments signed by ministers without parliamentary input," which then begs the question of what exactly it is the Dáil does.

And this is the second reason the Seanad hasn’t been abolished. The people didn’t see the point of abolishing the Seanad because they felt it would change nothing.

The people, based on the result of this referendum, the turnout of recent referenda, and the extraordinary prevalence of independents as viable Dáil candidates suggests that the people have almost given up on the very notion of governing their affairs, and are reasonably content to let faceless mandarins in the EU run the shop.

The Irish nation don’t cherish independence anymore. The founding moment of the state, the 1916 Rising, is being airbrushed into the background by this totally spurious "decade of commemoration," and nobody seems to mind. The Irish nation not only no longer knows who it is, but it no longer cares. We are on the verge of giving up, and letting the country be ruled from outside once more.

This is the real lesson about the state of democracy in Ireland in the aftermath of the failed attempt to abolish the Seanad.

No Minister - There Must be an Enquiry into the Frontline

Atticus Finch, that wisest of men, tells Scout at one stage that sometimes, to understand a man, you have to walk around in his skin a little, to try to see the world as he sees it.

As the RTÉ-twitter row bubbles along – it is a mistake to call it Gallaghergate because Seán Gallagher is only a bit player in this; the totality of the story is greater – it is interesting to flush bias from the system by changing the names of the characters.

So let’s imagine that the Presidential Election had gone differently. Let’s presume that Gallagher had never taken off, and that the original front-runner had not been derailed. We then have a Frontline where David Norris is four days from the Park, and the rest are doing their best to nobble him.

Let’s say the story that broke in the summer, about David Norris’s non-mainsteam attitude to under-age sex has broken the weekend before the Fronline, and the waters have become choppy for the front-runner. Norris must face the music on the Frontline on Monday evening with the entire show on the line.

During the Frontline, Norris is under attack from Martin McGuinness, who is unhappy with Norris’s response to an interview with Helen Lucy Burke some years ago in Magill – about the time Seán Gallagher was passing around the hat for Fianna Fáil, as it happens. McGuinness sensationally alleges that Norris has written a letter of clemency on behalf of his former partner over allegations of statutory rape.

Norris is flustered, just as he was in the summer. Although a Senator, he is not match for McGuinness the cut and thrust of big time politics and is floundering badly.

And then a tweet appears from the McGuinness4Pres account, alleging the man at the centre of the Israeli trial will be at a press conference tomorrow. Reader, do you think The Frontline would have broadcast that tweet as they did the Gallagher one? Just like that?

All this hinges around whether or not the Frontline editorial team knew that the McGuinness4Pres account was not an official Sinn Féin account. It’s rather hard to believe that, so deep into the election campaign, they didn’t know what the official Sinn Féin account was.

Think about the David Norris scenario outlined above. The only difference is the order in which facts were revealed. Last Easter, David Norris was the nation’s darling. If the story had broken later than it did, maybe he would have held on to win the Park in the end.

But if the story had broken later, and his house was caving around his ears, would RTÉ have polished him off the way they polished off Gallagher if the circumstances were the same, as outline above? There is a defence of RTÉ story saying that it wasn’t the story but Gallagher’s reaction to the story that did for him. Norris’s reaction would have been no better.

It’s important to distance Gallagher from this. It’s not about Gallagher. Gallagher is an opportunist who almost pulled off the biggest coup of his entrepreneurial career, by offering the people what they wanted even though he was running for a job that couldn’t possibly deliver on that want.

What this scandal is about is how elections are run, and whether or not Ireland is a democracy or an oligarchy, where the state broadcaster plays its vital role in ensuring that only the right kind of people are elected.

The editorial team of the Frontline decided the last election. That is a power that they are not entitled to hold, and that is why there should be an inquiry into what happened, in order to ensure that it does not happen again. Why Minister Rabbitte can’t see that is a mystery, but then the Pat Rabbitte that is driven around in his ministerial Merc is quite a different bunny from the fire and brimstone prophet of the opposition benches. God help Ireland.

David Norris and the Media

Failed Presidential candidate David Norris made a slightly petulant remark to Seán O’Rourke on Radio One late on Friday night, about his being “singled out for special treatment” in the media.

Senator Norris is quite correct in noting that he’d received special treatment but, in a coda apposite to his entire campaign, he still doesn’t realise that this special treatment was in his favour. The media did everything in their power to protect him from himself, until the task proved quite impossible in the end.

To give one concrete example: David Norris retired from the Presidential race at the start of August, and returned to it six weeks later, half-way through September. While David Norris was out of the race, he still remained an option in the opinion polls held during those six weeks. Why?

Once Gay Byrne stepped down from the race no pollsters bothered with him anymore, even though he had been a poll-topper, just as Norris had been. Nobody polled about Pat Cox once Foxy Coxy lost the Fine Gael selection convention to Gay Mitchell.

Opinion polls cost money. If Norris had second thoughts after his retirement from the race, it would have cost him serious wedge to commission a private poll to see what his standing was like in the country after the controversy broke. But he didn’t half to, because the pollsters were still including him fee gratis.

At any stage a poll commissioner could have told his or her pollsters to forget Norris; he’s history. But nobody did. The media left the door open for Norris’ return by providing him with tremendously useful polling data without his having to pay for it.

There is no such thing as unbiased news. It doesn’t exist. There is only a question of degree and direction of spin. For instance, if a media body condemns state-sponsored spin, it is good for the cautious citizen to wonder which spin it is they favour instead.

Media law in Ireland is such a mess that the media tends to self-police, which is not something Juvenal, of who guards the guardians fame, would approve. Self-policing manifests in different ways across different media; the Irish Times goes light on court cases involving travellers for instance, while the Sunday World can’t quite get enough of them.

But there are issues of which the media are of one mind, and do what is, in their opinion, their patriotic duty. This is the wearing of the infamous “green jersey.” The coverage of Queen’s Elizabeth’s visit is an example where everybody got with the program and nobody questioned the spin. Or at least, nobody important.

The problem with this “green jersey” stuff is that it’s not the media’s job to put the country first; it’s the media’s job to stress-test the institutions of state to ensure that the citizens know exactly what’s being done, or not done, in their name. A defense council in law has to examine every corner of the prosecution’s case and should always presume the client is innocent. The media should do the opposite, always presuming the Government is up to something and try desperately to find out what that something is.

That’s the theory. In practice, people have their own views and if they see a chance to do the country a favour by presenting their darling in as good a light as possible, that’s what they do.

The Irish media seems to have been of one mind on David Norris for years, before anybody thought of him as a Presidential candidate. John Waters outlined in the Irish Times last June the steps he himself took to save David Norris from himself when Waters was editor of Magill magazine in 2002 and Norris gave his infamous interview to Helen Lucy Burke.

Journalists hate giving interviewees sign-off on interviews. It doesn’t do much for objectivity. But both Waters and Helen Lucy Burke pleaded with Norris to amend what he said. Norris refused. The story went to print but it was never sensationalized, even though the views expressed were sensational, to say the very least.

Nobody else picked up on either because there was an understanding across all media that Norris was a National Treasure and wasn’t to be scrutinized as others are scrutinized. This tremendous regard for Norris lasted all though to September, to the extent of David Norris getting free poll data from a media that would not surrender its darling.

The Helen Lucy Burke interview with Norris wasn’t even a gaffe. It wasn’t a slip of the tongue. It was a carefully thought out philosophy of life. But still its did their best to save the National Treasure.

Eventually they couldn’t, as Norris, whatever he may think, fell because he lives in a world that is utterly different to the rest of the country. Norris’ fall wasn’t to do with letters or disability claims. It was to do with his attitude to the difference between a child and an adult.

Not everybody gets the same benefit of the doubt as Norris enjoyed. The late Brian Lenihan famously dropped a clanger when he said “we all partied” during an interview on Prime Time in November of last year. Did RTÉ do a Waters/Burke and stop the camera to say: “hold on now Brian, that’ll sound awful. We know what you’re trying to say about the excesses of the Celtic Tiger years but that phrase will dump you in the smelly. Why don’t we have another crack at it?”

No, they did not. They just thought gotcha!, ran the piece and Lenihan was monstered over a slip of a tongue while there were much bigger issues in the content of what he had to say.

Senator Norris clearly feels battered by the campaign and he certainly suffered during it. Some of the stuff in The Star was particularly wretched and that is par of the course there of course, may God have mercy on them all. But reality is that the media protected David Norris for as long they possibly could, and he would be well advised to reflect deeply on that before he writes anything hasty in his memoirs.

Gallagherism - the Magic Door to the Presidency

There are strange stirrings in the Presidential election. Michael D remains favourite to win it – he’s the old dog for the hard road and he won’t be shooting himself in the foot anytime soon. But the rise of Seán Gallagher, as reported in this morning’s Irish Times, is astonishing.

It tells us a lot about the country, and is further evidence of the distance between the political and media elite and the ordinary people of Ireland, the ordinary people who have to find a way to survive the battering of recent and coming years.

There’s no good reason Gallagher should be challenging. Only Dana has less money. Labour, Sinn Féin and Fine Gael have more troops – sorry Martin – on the ground, and Mary Davis seems to have the most resources among the independents. And yet it’s Gallagher that’s coming out on top. Why?

He’s not postering. His website is, frankly, cook. His only exposure is in the shouting matches that masquerade as debates. How in holy Hell is Gallagher capturing the people’s imaginations?

Lack of baggage is Gallagher’s first moment of separation. People are deciding by process of elimination, and there are stronger reasons to object to Dana, Davis, Mitchell, McGuinness and Norris than they are to object to Gallagher or Michael D.

But it’s still remarkable that Gallagher is getting so much capital with so little exposure and less money. It’s can’t be just because of who he’s not. There has to be something else.

An Spailpín’s theory is that Gallagher is capturing the voters’ imagination because he says that he can create jobs as President.

It’s all very well to talk about visions and representing Ireland and the rest, but people living in the real world would sooner be able to pay the mortgage than listen to a lot of old blather about fairness, equality and respect. The Irish people have a lot of respect for the pound note. Surviving a famine leaves a pragmatic streak in the folk memory.

And this is what’s resonating for Gallagher. The country is falling to pieces. People want work. They want to pay their mortgages and have some sort of standard of life. If Gallagher says he’ll do that as first citizen, why not give him a shot? We can worry about pride at home, respect abroad later. This week we’re minding the job and paying the mortgage, thank you.

Of course, the President of Ireland can’t create jobs. Deputy Flanagan was correct in describing him or her as a person whose job is to cut ribbons. But you can’t say that in the middle of an election. You can’t say the President can’t do a damn thing, but we’re spending all this money on the election and office because we fancy a soft job up in the Park.

Gallagher can’t be attacked on the basis that he can’t do what he’s promising to do because that then means admitting the President doesn’t do a damn thing, really. That sort of admission will only make people who are still furious about what’s happened the country even more annoyed, and that level of fury is at Gas Mark 4 as it is.

Seán Gallagher has found the perfect storm and it could blow him right into the Phoenix Park. And once he’s there, what odds? He can’t create any jobs bar his own. He’ll be solid as a rock for seven years, step down, and lecture happily in America for the rest of his days.

Even though Gallagherism can’t deliver jobs, at least the people will have sent a message to the political elite that jobs are what count. Let’s hope there are ears to hear.

The People? What Have They Got to Do with It?

David Norris yesterday remarked in his concession speech that “the presidency of Ireland belongs to the people and not any party or sectional interest.” That single sentence explains exactly why he was unelectable in the first place. The poor man has no idea how this country is governed. None at all.

If Oireachas na hÉireann were compared to the human body, the Presidency would be the appendix. It performs no function but it can, on very rare occasions, go septic and kill you. As nearly happened with poor Cearrbhall Ó Dálaigh.

The Presidency is a left-over office, just as the appendix is a left-over organ. It’s the office that took over from the Governor-Generalship of the Irish Free State, which itself took over from the Lord Lieutenancy of Ireland. It doesn’t do anything. It’s an artifact. A relic. A ruin.

The notion that the office does do something is nonsense and propaganda. The Constitutional role of the Presidency hasn’t changed one little bit since Mary Robinson’s election in 1990, irrespective of the beliefs of her church. It’s locked in, nailed down, there in black and white.

The nomination process is proof positive of this. David Norris couldn’t have been more wrong in saying that the presidency belongs to the people and not any party or sectional interest. It is precisely the other way around.

This fact is clearly understood by Mary Davis and Seán Gallagher, the independents who got nominated because they saw what the system is and then worked it to easily secure their own nominations as independent – or quasi-independent – candidates. That’s what people who live in the real world do.

David Norris, for all his fine qualities, does not live in this real world. If Norris has a political antecedent in recent times, it’s George Lee. Another idealist who ignored the real world and got a dirty land when it bit him on the ankle.

The fact that Norris was so popular in the polls shows the distance that exists between Irish political structures and the nation’s understanding of them. Norris’ candidacy was hailed because he was a maverick; a maverick in the Phoenix Park means political crises for breakfast, dinner and tea. It can’t, can’t work.

So how do people have the impression that it could work? Does the nation understand how we’re governed at all?

We the People, the citizens’ assembly, looked at the political process and the best they could come up with was gender quotas – on a not-that-terribly-overwhelming 51-49 majority. Gender quotas. Dear God in Heaven. Would the nation not be much better off looking at the mechanism of government, enhancing what works and stopping what doesn’t? Would that be so hard?

In the meantime, the Presidential race rolls on without David Norris. Paddy Power’s 5/1 about Mary Davis looks very tempting. She got her nomination with ease, seems to have a war chest and most importantly of all, Mary Davis seems the least objectionable of the candidates currently in the field. In Ireland, the people who, in Pearse’s words, are august despite their chains vote for the person whom we despise the least. Put a shot of sodium pentathol in the next pint there Joe. I’m not sure I can take much more of this.