Cloak of invisibility hides Labour’s broken promises
In the manner of one of those Wicked Whispers, gossip-page teases: Which prominent Labour minister has taken to referring to Eamon Gilmore’s fondness for his “Harry Potter cloak of invisibility”?
Not that Gilmore should really mind as he insists there is no lingering challenge to his leadership. Which will be news to the many elected members of his party who believe Joan Burton is positioning herself to try and topple him — a situation first revealed in this column in January which has now gained widespread currency.
But then Gilmore and fairy stories are nothing new — just take a look at a dusty old copy of Labour’s election manifesto.
When pushing that wonderfully fantastical tale of education spending, social fairness, and telling the Germans just where they could stick their austerity sausage, Gilmore did a drive-by reading of The Gruffalo to a group of eight to 10-year-olds in Navan in what was one of the more touching campaign moments I covered.
They grow up quick in Navan, and they grow up streetwise, as shown by the way 9-year-old Timmy listened to the soon-to-be-Tánaiste politely and then demanded: “How do we know you are not lying, because all the parties like Fianna Fáil said the same things?”
Ah, the good old days when Fianna Fáil was still the benchmark for political betrayal in such young minds before Labour’s unburned bondholders and Fine Gael’s promise of not another cent going to Anglo vomited themselves out of the Coalition lie machine.
Classmate Precious, also nine, saw the main chance and announced: “We will vote for you if you can give us a new school.”
“Why do other schools have grass and not us?” demanded an agitated eight-year-old as the rest of the pupils nodded wildly and cheered in agreement. Gilmore moved to calm the uproar by pleading that while he couldn’t promise to build everybody a new school, Labour would be making education a key priority — Timmy didn’t look convinced.
But Michael, 9, went in for the kill, asking that if they did get a new school; could Gilmore make sure it had a “disco room and a jungle gym”. The cuteness of the scene was soured by the knowledge that the recessionary, run-down reality was the only one these children had known.
Born in the boom, growing in a country struggling in the slump — their young heads were already filled with worries for their unemployed parents and the knowledge they themselves were being educated in inadequate conditions — welcome to welfare line Ireland.
Conor, 10, asked about Labour’s jobs plan because “my dad was fired from a windowframes manufacturer two years ago”. Gilmore had only popped into the children’s corner of the bookstore to read to the dozen or so kids from The Gruffalo and get a nice little photo-op — instead he got a lesson in what life looked like through the young eyes of the children of the bailout generation.
With Anglo — the bank that ate Ireland — and the promissory note “deal” merely post-dating the payback, it seems that bank, or “dead, criminal organisation” as independent TD Stephen Donnelly dubbed it, will be feeding off what’s left of the carcass of the nation’s economy for years to come, and the bitter truth is that Precious, Conor, and their wide-eyed pals will still be paying off its bills when they have children of their own.
Gilmore tried to ease Conor’s concerns about his dad being fired by telling him: “There is a future in windows” — but how can there be when the Coalition has failed to open the doors to job creation?
Instead of the promised jobs “budget” we got a wimpy little “initiative” that managed to produce just 5,000 work placements.
Instead of making education a priority, a Labour education minister, Ruairi Quinn, has cut hundreds of teachers from schools in the most socially disadvantaged parts of the country — and would have shed hundreds more with the support of his sheepish lobby-fodder backbenchers if pressure from Sinn Féin had not shamed the self-proclaimed education party into a hasty climbdown.
And as the so-called People’s Party gathers in Galway for its victory conference amid placard-waving protesters, Frankfurt once again tightens the screw as the ECB ridicules the vote-catching idea we would do things Labour’s way and insists with logic worthy of Alice Through The Looking Glass that Ireland must not be allowed extra help with its unsustainable debts because that would make it look like the unsustainable debts were unsustainable. So on the grim fairy hurtles to default or disaster, whichever arrives first.
At least the Galway limelight means Gilmore must slip off his Harry Potter cloak of invisibility — the mysterious item the once ubiquitous opposition leader has disappeared behind since failing to rise to the challenge of taking a key economic portfolio.
Luckily for colleagues, Gilmore’s cloak of invisibility can be passed around the Cabinet as Justice Minister Alan Shatter tries it on to wriggle out of answering awkward questions regarding meetings he may or may not have had with the disgraced deputy Michael Lowry, who was ruled to have acted in a corrupt manner by the Moriarty Tribunal.
Outraged at the injustice of the justice minister being asked to open his diary, Shatter went off like a rocket, ranting about McCarthyite witch hunts and implying that if he answered the perfectly simple question it could imperil possible prosecutions, which is so wrongheaded you are left wondering if he is fit to be minister for justice at all.
But the Tánaiste will need his cloak of invisibility back after Galway so kids like Timmy and the rest of the IMF generation that has clearly seen too much, too young, for its own good can forget that he was the man who read them The Gruffalo and made all those promises.
True, due to Fianna Fáil-fuelled economic collapse and subsequent famine in funding, Gilmore is really Harry Pot-less — but those remembering his fine-sounding election promises will just view him as The Bluffalo.
