Logic, ethics, rules, fairness — yeah right. Just ask Enda

ACCORDING to some newspaper reports at the weekend, Enda spent a portion of his first year in office doing the sorts of things that TDs traditionally do: looking for stuff that (for the most part), his constituents should be entitled to anyway.

He made hundreds of representations about school grants and septic grants and passports and for one sports enthusiast constituent, enquired about tickets to the Olympics, (they are mad into the gymnastics in Mayo). Of course it’s all too easy to slag off this kind of activity, so let’s do it. There’s the obvious point that, at a time of national crisis, you would be hoping that the taoiseach of this country would be concentrating on national issues.

There’s also a commitment – made explicitly by Enda – that he wanted to move away from the previous clientelist system. TDs are supposed to be engaged in the business of framing national legislation, not as fixers for the people who voted for them.

If the Department of Education has a certain amount of money to hand out in grants, it should (theoretically) be handing it out to schools based on merit and need. Everyone should be treated the same. But if a TD can intercede and get their local school bumped up the list, then the process isn’t fair any more: it has become corrupted – and by the very people who are supposed to defend and maintain that fairness. The idea of sending our man/woman to the Dáil to get what they can for the constituency also denudes the very idea of Ireland as a country. The majority seem to arrive there not thinking of Ireland as a unitary state, but something more like the European Union, where their job is to fight for their local interests. Ireland is not one republic, but 43 – and if the TD gets the grants and the ring roads they are looking for, they will, in return, blindly vote for or against legislation which they usually haven’t read and often don’t even understand.

So, to recap: our Taoiseach is engaged in activity which undermines the proper governance of this country and our sense of statehood.

Woah: heavy.

Then again, most other TDs are doing exactly the same thing. And let’s live in the Real World here: Enda is doing exactly what his constituents want him to do. It’s not so much that Enda is a hypocrite by saying one thing and doing another. He is, rather, representing a hypocrisy engrained into our culture. As a nation, we seem to have a problem with rules; or with regarding them as fixed and inviolable. We see bankers getting away with it, and our reaction isn’t to demand that the rules be applied more rigorously, but to bend the rules ourselves.

Every week someone is blowing off about what should be taught in schools. But what about Logic? Or Ethics?