Saturday, December 15, 2007
THE Government was forced into a U-turn over the pay raises this week. Bertie Ahern was right to say they would get no credit for the gesture. They deserved none.
They made a dreadful mistake in accepting the pay rise in the first place, and then Poor Bertie compounded it by trying to defend the indefensible with the most pathetic display of the poor mouth ever heard in Irish politics.
Eamon de Valera was the one who provided leadership by cutting his own salary by 40% when he came to power in 1932. He only promised a "hairshirt", but that was when Fianna Fáil was stressing its rural roots and promising only frugal comfort. How things have changed since then. Charlie Haughey came along with Chavez shirts, his yacht and his racehorses and ever since the integrity of our politics has been shrouded in a ‘Celtic Mist’ with a stench of corruption that makes horse manure smell like perfume.
Enda Kenny accused that Government of being "wedded to the Taoiseach’s philosophy of getting into power and staying in power." If that was all Bertie was doing, then he would have no case to answer.
It is quite normal for any opposition to try to get into power and to stay there when they succeed. This is the essence of the democratic process. But we have a sordid tradition in which some opposition leaders tried to gain power by any means without regard to the national interest.
It began with de Valera’s phoney opposition to the 1921 Treaty, which actually incorporated the essentials that Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins were sent to negotiate.
De Valera was first to acknowledge in the Dáil the necessity to accept partition, but he then shamelessly exploited that issue to cover up his own dreadful bungling in contributing to the poisonous atmosphere that led to the civil war.
While out in the political cold, he went so far as trying to embarrass the government by opposing the Kellog-Briand Pact, which sought to outlaw war. Once he got into power in 1932, however, he tried to stay there in the democratic way by providing good government.
One Catholic country after another turned to fascism in the inter-war period — Italy, Hungary, Poland, Spain, Austria, and Portugal all turned to neo-fascist dictatorship, and the worst dictatorship of all — that of Adolf Hitler — had its power base in the Catholic state of Bavaria.
In this country, Fine Gael turned to its would-be fuhrer, Eoin O’Duffy. De Valera deserves credit for helping to preserve democracy, while so much of Catholic
Europe was going crazy. Of course, he had already set the precedent for disloyal and destructive opposition. His opponents gave him some of his own medicine. They convinced themselves that getting rid of Fianna Fáil by any means was in the national interest.
Fine Gael people blamed de Valera for the Economic War, but they were much more responsible for the whole thing. They secretly implored the British to stand up to the Long Fellow. British Chancellor of the Exchequer Neville Chamberlain privately warned cabinet colleagues that the Irish government had a good case in relation to the land annuities controversy that was supposedly behind the Economic War.
De Valera contended that Ireland did not owe the annuities to Britain. Chamberlain admitted that an international tribunal might find in de Valera’s favour, so the British refused to agree to international arbitration. Our democratic government was thus nurtured against the unfortunate backdrop in which the national interest was sacrificed to party politics.
Charlie Haughey campaigned against health cuts in 1987, but then promptly turned around and introduced even more savage cuts. Garret FitzGerald announced that Fine Gael would not undermine Haughey if he had the political courage to take the unpopular decisions that all knew were necessary.
On succeeding FitzGerald, Alan Dukes kept the promise by implementing the Tallaght Strategy, which essentially allowed Haughey to establish the foundations of the Celtic Tiger economy. But Dukes got no credit from most of those in Fine Gael who were still wedded to the "philosophy of getting into power".
Ironically, in the election of 1989 Fine Gael under Dukes actually made the greatest gains, while the biggest losers, proportionally at any rate, were the PDs. They were essentially established to keep Haughey out of power, but the first chance they got, they propped him up.
In 1992, the PDs brought down Albert Reynolds’s government and then savaged the Labour Party for going into coalition with Fianna Fáil, but five years later the PDs jumped right back into bed with Fianna Fáil. Let’s face it; the lust for power stretches right across the political spectrum.
The current controversy has nothing to do with how Bertie Ahern came to power; it’s about greed. The Government initially accepted that the Taoiseach would get an annual pay rise of 38,000 and ministers would get 25,000 extra annually. Then they had the contemptible nerve to call on everyone else to tighten their belts.
From the standpoint of leadership, this was a pathetic performance and the efforts to defend it were even worse. Poor Bertie couldn’t deny that he was already receiving more than Presidents George W Bush or President Nicolas Sarkozy, even without the 38,000 rise, but he tried to cloud the issue by bemoaning his lack of a yacht or holiday home.
"Not only do most of these people have permanent and weekend residences but they also have holiday residences," Poor Bertie said. "They have different rules where they are the beneficiaries of prolonged holidays, yachts and homes."
ONE of the Taoiseach’s strongest political assets was that he seemed like the bloke around the corner, with no apparent affectation. Power and success seemed to have had little impact on him, or at least that was the way it seemed until he kicked himself in the mouth and nearly choked on his foot. And as he might say himself, you gotta be blind or stupid not to recognise it.
Mercifully, our people are not that naive. They were incensed and it showed the opinion polls.
"We’re politicians and we have to react to the situation we are faced with," Foreign Minister Dermot Ahern argued during the week. "When we made the original decision in October, we weren’t privy to the type of exchequer figures for November, where we are short in terms of the resources we thought we would have in 2008. With the impending pay talks in the new year I think we have to show restraint," he added.
The Government is not attempting to lead; it is just trying to mislead and it thinks you are so stupid that you will be blind to what it is doing.
When Judge Brian McCracken denounced Haughey for taking money from associates, Bertie endorsed the findings. "The tribunal stresses a point I have repeatedly emphasised, that public representatives must not be under a personal financial obligation to anyone," Bertie said.
Yet he had accepted money himself, and he took the people for a proverbial ride when he went on TV and depicted the dig-out as a kind of necessity because of his marital problems. He already had £70,000 in the bank when he accepted £16,500 from friends in September, 1994. A friend in need, my arm!
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