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?

Bias and the National Broadcaster

At first glance, the front page story in Saturday’s Irish Independent was a delicious revelation that, for all their bien-pensant rhetoric, the Irish Labour Party are just as venal as the next party when it comes to the dirty of game of politics.

The Indo reported that there had been a spat between Fine Gael and Labour over who would represent the Government advocating a Yes vote on the Prime Time debate tomorrow night. RTÉ wanted Leo Varadkar, the first Minister in the history of the state to come out as a gay man, but there was an agreement already in place between Fine Gael and Labour that it would be two Fine Gael, one Labour over the course of three RTÉ debates. Fine Gael had already used up their quota with Frances Fitzgerald and Simon Coveney, so Alex White was going on Prime Time and that was bloody that.

Great story. Not front page news, of course, but front page news hasn’t been what it was in the Indo since Vinnie Doyle retired. And then suddenly you might stop and wonder: what is it to RTÉ who represents any particular side anyway?

The story quotes an RTÉ source as saying "Our job was to get the best people for both sides, and one would have thought that Leo was the best person on the Government side for the last debate.”

But is it really RTÉ’s job to get the best people for both sides?

A referendum debate isn’t like a run-of-the-mill news or current affairs program. The national broadcaster’s job during a referendum or election campaign is to provide a public forum for debate. It is not the national broadcaster’s job to vet the debaters as regards their suitability to speak or represent a point of view. The national broadcaster’s only job is to measure speaking times for fairness and ask as unbalanced a set of questions as can be reasonably expected.

There is no national broadcaster in the USA, but the prospect of a commercial broadcaster stepping in to advise a political party on whom it should or shouldn’t use in a particular TV debate is ludicrous.

If, during the 2008 US Presidential Election, the Republicans wanted Sarah Palin to debate against former President Bill Clinton, can you imagine someone at one of the networks saying “our job was to get the best people for both sides, and one would have thought former Governor of California Arnold Schwartzenegger the best candidate to represent the Republican side?”

It’s hard to imagine, isn’t it? That’s not really the way it works.

To bring the story back home, suppose the No side decided on a second-time lucky strategy and put Gaelic footballer Ger Brennan forward as their representative for the Prime Time debate.

Would RTÉ turn to the No side and say, “look, Ger was a very underestimated center-half back in his prime but for a debate like this, you really need to send a heavy hitter like Breda O’Brien, David Quinn or Rónán Mullen to the plate”? Or would RTÉ just say “You’re sending Ger Brennan? Well, alrighty then,” and then text their friends to stock up on popcorn?

It’s not like RTÉ’s record in these debates is particularly strong. That the RTÉ Frontline debate cost Seán Gallagher the Presidency is as sure as little green apples. The only question is if that was due to incompetency or something more sinister.

In a sighting of that rare bird, investigative journalism, Jody Corcoran joined some dots about who’s pals with whom among the players on the night of that Frontline debate three years ago, and drew up a very interesting pattern. That piece was published three years ago, in March of 2012. Nothing changed as result of his investigation, of course. Nothing ever does.

Dying Isn't a Right. It's an Obligation

The Marie Fleming case has got blanket coverage in the media in recent months, but last week saw a particular peak after the Supreme Court turned down her application. Saturday’s Irish Times carried two separate stories, one an interview with Marie Fleming’s daughter and the other with her partner, decrying the Supreme Court judgment. “The State spared no resource in denying Marie a dignified death,” is the headline on the interview with Tom Curran, Marie Fleming’s partner.

That is one way of looking at it. The other way of looking at it is to say the State spared no resource in protecting the rights of its citizens, which is exactly what the State should be doing.

All this is very tough on Marie Fleming, of course. She’s miserable and in pain and will be until she dies. Nobody disputes that, and if death came to her tomorrow, while her friends would grieve and mourn, no-one would wish it hadn’t come later. But whenever death does come, Marie Fleming will die. That is certain. It’s impossible to deny someone the right to die, because dying isn’t a right. It’s an obligation. There’s a difference.

A right is something you can choose not to exercise. For Marie Fleming to be denied the right to die is impossible. We all going to die. Even if the State wanted to deny Marie Fleming that “right”, it couldn’t. The single fundamental, undeniable truth about life is that it ends.

What the Marie Fleming case is about is whether or not someone has the right to decide how, when and where they’re going to die, and that’s a completely different thing. It doesn’t fit a headline as neatly as “right to die,” of course, and neither does it give the commentariat a chance to show the endless depths of its compassion. But as the question of whether or not a person has the right to choose the circumstances of their own death is the issue, let’s look at it for a while.

There are two points at issue here. The first is whether or not someone should decide when his or her own life ends, rather than let nature take its inevitable course. If you accept that notion – and it’s a big if – the next question is then to decide on what basis that decision is made.

If you are of the opinion that a person should be able to decide how, when and why his or her life should end, that means you are in favour of suicide as a practice. The ancient Romans and Greeks had no issue with it, the Japanese – it’s far from unprecedented.

But you’re opening a profound can of worms when you go down that route. You are saying that there are some pains in the world that are worse than the pain of death, than the pain of not being alive any more. You are reducing the taboo on suicide by making it acceptable in some cases, which will then become more and more cases as the taboo and stigma wears off. And this isn’t a good thing.

That there is nothing so bad in this world that you should leave it by doing violence unto yourself is, or should be, a fundamental truth. That is hard luck on those in similar predicaments to Marie Fleming, but the greater good is very much more important.

Besides. If society does accept that notion that there are things in the world that cannot be borne and that self-destruction is a better alternative to that pain, it is then faced with the thorny problem of how to decide what those things that cannot be borne are.

And this is even more dangerous that an acceptance of suicide because what it does is quantify the right to life. The right to life is currently an absolute – the life of the Taoiseach or President is as important as the life of the homeless person who slept rough in the doorways of Georgian Dublin last night and will again tonight. The quality of their lives are completely different of course, but they have an equal right to life under the law.

Legislation that would change that right means that just being human and alive will no longer be enough. Your life will have to have a certain quality, judged against a certain series of parameters. If your life dips below this quality, it will be the inevitable judgment of society that it’s time you were shuffling off and not be lingering, depressing your healthy and well fellow citizens.

Advocates of euthanasia would be (rightly) horrified at this, and argue that the choosing of when, where and how to die is entirely a private matter. But that’s not true. If that were true, there would be no such thing as society.

But there is such a thing a society, and there are rules about how a person can or can’t act in society, rules that exist for the protection of the society in general to the sometime inconvenience of the individual. Besides; it’s no longer a private matter if you are no longer capable of suicide and need assistance, which is where we came in with the Marie Fleming case in the first place.

It’s a very complex issue. Philosophical progress on the nature of what it is to be human has not kept pace with scientific progress. We have advanced scientifically while regressing philosophically – ours is an age that treasures youth, even though we now live longer than ever, and the longer we live the further away youth, our culture’s utmost treasure, gets from us.

We now have people living longer and longer in an age for which only being young matters. There is no great sign of joined-up thinking there, but a bridge will have to built, and by smarter people than your correspondent.

It won’t happen in time for Marie Fleming, and that’s tough. But it would be tougher on everyone if the right to life were put on a sliding scale because of misplaced compassion in a debate that is much more complex than is being portrayed in the media.

FOCAL SCOIR: I’ve been talking about suicide and I am all too fully aware of what a problem it is in Ireland at the moment. I would sooner sound precious than be irresponsible so here goes: If you’re not feeling great, the Samaritans’ number is 1850 60 60 90, and the website is http://www.samaritans.org. Call them, even if it’s only to talk about football. Sometimes, five minutes can be all it takes for clouds to break and things to look better. Nobody will think you’ll stupid – wouldn’t they much prefer to chat with someone thoughtful like yourself than do regular office stuff, or listen to a lot of yak from the HR department? You’ll be doing them a favour when you call, if anything. Let the black dog go chase parked cars. Make the call.