Harney on a limb: Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose

NOW that women’s boxing is to feature in the Olympics, if the girls with the padded gloves are short of equipment, they should ring Batt O’Keeffe. He has the punchbag thing down pat.

Batt may be the most sophisticated member of the entire cabinet when it comes to dealing with media, particularly when it comes to coping with interviewer rants. He treats infuriated interrogators with a warm earnest kindness that drives them nuts. It’s like they’re a toddler lying on the floor of the supermarket, banging their heels and screaming. He waits for them to complete the tantrum, then verbally nods at some aspect of their proposition and whispers his way to a better place. He doesn’t fight. Doesn’t get nasty. Just absorbs incoming blows, punchbag fashion, acknowledges ambient pain and gets right back to whatever he was announcing in the first place.

Batt O’Keeffe personifies one wing of the problem the opposition face, coming into the autumn. We tend to forget, because the Taoiseach and Tánaiste are so inept on TV, how very good the rest of them are. Some of them, like Dermot Ahern and Noel Dempsey were always good. Some have got markedly better than good in the last 18 months. Micheál Martin used to spend an awful lot of time in the warm shallows of a TV programme, trying not to splash anybody with what might be thought of as contentiousness. Now he actively seeks enough depth to get a turn of speed going and doesn’t care who gets sideswiped. Mary Hanafin, who used to get snappy under pressure (with inevitable resultant snideries about her being a schoolmarm) seems to have abandoned tetchiness. Brendan Smith keeps his head down, Pat Carey has copyrighted a mix of resignation and resolution that exhausts even Vincent Browne, and the diligent Willie O’Dea, like death, never takes a holiday.

This summer, Mary Harney doesn’t seem to have taken much of a holiday, either. As the pharmacists found to their cost. There she is, planted in the ugliest (and reputedly sickest) building in Dublin, sans colleagues, sans party, sans brand, sans public approval. Sans everything. The pharmacists, logically, must have figured they were on to a winner. What they missed was the minister’s willingness to personify the truth of that old song: “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” Mary has nothing left to lose, and the freedom it gives her is phenomenal. (This is in sharp contrast to the Green Ministers, who have everything to lose, no matter which way they go.) Mary Harney was never short of courage and her driven monologue has left track marks on a lot of media interviewers down the years, but the battle with the pharmacists was quintessential Harney, in its demonstration of her willingness to weather media and public opprobrium in the belief that the other side would blink first. The other side did more than blink. It scrunched up its eyes like a child trying to wish away a wasp. (You know the look that says “If I can’t see it, it can’t see me”?)

Batt O’Keeffe is a relative newcomer among these veterans, but his soft-voiced relentless detail is like a gentler version of that Edgar Alan Poe story. You feel you’re being slowly bricked into a wall, but given hot chocolate to drink while the brickie gets the cement nice and smooth and you have the consolation of knowing that the last thing you’ll see is his great hair.

Despite Batt’s brickwork, the current consensus is that the Government is in rag order. Couldn’t be in raggier order, in fact. Flitthers, they’re in. The rest of the world is going to have a recession that’s like a mild swine flu, while Ireland’s going to get Bubonic Plague, and the Government are the fleas delivering the illness, leaping off the rats (developers) with whom they synergistically travelled until the rats began to look a bit dawny. Add Colm McCarthy to NAMA and what you get is the tombstone for the good years. For the next decade, if not longer, we’re going to see, not a temporary little arrangement whereby we’re not quite as rich as we were, but a permanent reduction in living standards which will make us feel we’ve betrayed our kids by giving them expectations which can’t be delivered on.

So, when Enda, Eamon and the lads come dancing back, tanned and ripped after their healthy summer holidays, it’s going to be easy peasy, lemon squeasy. Right? Wrong. This is going to be a tough autumn for the opposition, not least because of the outside chance of a general election, which in theory they should want, since they stand a good chance of winning it, but which in reality they should fend off like Saint Augustine praying to be sexually pure – but just not right now, please God.

If the opposition were to win a general election in the next 12 months, they put their heads and hands into the stocks designed by the Government. New faces to throw things at – same reasons for throwing things.

They’d be stuck with NAMA, whether they like it or not. And, whether we like it or not, NAMA and related complications require four billion to come out of the economy this year, next year and probably the year after, with immediate, obvious and in some cases shocking implications for every family. This year, the dog or cat is getting fed yellow-pack food, as opposed to the luxury brand they were used to. Next year, they may get fed the budgie.

It’s not just that the opposition are between a rock and a hard place. They’re between a quarry-full of rocks and a wall of China length of hard place. They can’t continue to do the “We told you” thing, although, give Richard Bruton his due, he did. As, before his political re-incarnation, did Furious George. But we’ve been there and are bored with that.

They can’t just tinker at the edges of NAMA, because that will make them look weak, but to come up with a credible and radically different alternative doesn’t look realistic. They can’t do hump-the-begrudgers attack, lest it send the wrong messages to the ECB. They can’t do much of anything until after Lisbon, lest it goes down for a second time and they get blamed. They can’t make those cringe-making cliches, “light at the end of the tunnel” and “green shoots” come alive because the minute Fine Gael starts to stand up, say, its new health plans, the Labour Party will feel it has to reinforce its brand by raising doubts about them.

For Enda Kenny, the challenge is unique. And uniquely troubling. This is a time when an opportunistic pounce could get him into the Taoiseach’s office, and right satisfying that would be, as the cap on a long career. Except that an opportunistic pounce would get Fine Gael and Labour one short swing on the roundabout. And nobody knows better than Enda Kenny that breaking the Fianna Fáil hegemony requires more than that.

It requires two successful stretches in Government Buildings. How to do it is the billion dollar question.