Nothing adds up as TDs missing in inaction

NOT for the first time the numbers just did not add up in the Dáil.

Given that the deputies were freshly back from their well deserved three-week Easter break after putting in six days’ hard graft at the tail-end of March following their mere two-week long vacation for St Patrick’s Day, you might have been forgiven for believing the TDs would be eager to re-engage in the grand ideological battle of ideas.

But, no, just 34% managed to drag themselves into the chamber for Leader’s Questions – the main showpiece parliamentary event of the week – some 11% more were missing, lost in the Continental volcanic dust, which left the majority – 55% – just missing in inaction.

But then they probably had better things to do than engage in the cut and thrust of democracy – those lucrative expenses forms don’t just write themselves, you know.

We had reached day 110 of the year, which, excluding weekends and bank holidays, saw the rest of us put in some 74 days’ work – but not our hard-pressed deputies, who have only managed 33 days on the job in that time period.

Which, given that each of the 166 TDs costs this virtually bankrupt state some €250,000 a year what with wages, office costs and expenses, means we have so far forked out €2,500 per sitting day, per TD, for the privilege of watching more than half of them boycott the chamber.

But then what’s splurging out €415,000 per sitting day on our Dáil deputies when the Government benches deploy that time so productively? A case in point came when the Taoiseach used his Leader’s Questions platform to defend the €1.5m top-up pumped into Bank of Ireland boss Richie Boucher’s pension fund – a neat little way of crashing the supposed salary cap in these allegedly straightened times.

But it was all nonsense, according to the Taoiseach – and he knows a thing or two about figures, remember this is the man whose numerical skills saw him explode the boom and deflate the bust with breathtaking ease.

The €1.5m wasn’t going straight to Richie, it was going into the general pension fund, the Taoiseach assured, which may be technically correct, but rather stunningly misses the point that Mr Boucher is the big winner in all this and the top-up does indeed smash the Government’s alleged pay and benefits ceiling.

Does Mr Cowen really expect us to believe that dear old Richie is not going to get any awful lot richer because of this?

The opposition saw it as part of a much wider attempt to muddy the waters over what was going on in the bailed-out banking sector – and, more importantly, what had led us to the brink of national bankruptcy.

Labour’s Eamon Gilmore drew parallels between the Government’s fawning attitude to the now toxic loan repository that is Irish Nationwide and the ministerial indulgence of scandal-splattered Anglo Irish’s notorious Golden Circle.

A vicious circle is round and dangerous, but a Golden Circle is dangerous and, seemingly, round our necks for decades to come as the taxpayer pumps €2bn a year for the next decade to keep the Anglo Bank of the Living Dead Alive.

Extraordinarily, Anglo was included in the bank guarantee scheme on the Great Night of Panic – September 29, 2008 – without any paper trail being left as to why it was saved, according to the Taoiseach.

Such a claim regarding such a massive deployment of taxpayers’ money to such an unstable bank is incredible and unbelievable – as it lacks credibility and defies belief.

But then nothing really adds up in the current Dáil.