Country is now broken as well as plain broke
Just as the Government was meant to be putting on a united front as it negotiated the terms of the country’s economic surrender to the IMF it instead chose to tear itself apart.
Brian Cowen finally appeared in public seven hours and 21 minutes after the crisis had detonated and once again hurtled Ireland across the international buzz wires and rolling news TV screens for all the wrong reasons.
There he was on the red carpet at Government Buildings after an emergency meeting with his Fianna Fáil cabinet colleagues — in political terms it was very much their Last Super after they believed John “Judas” Gormley had betrayed them.
The body language between the Taoiseach and Brian Lenihan was even worse than it had been the night before when they pretended they had just not led the nation to humiliation and failure.
Lenihan was noticeably distant from the Taoiseach to his right, his hands folded behind his back as Cowen once again mismanaged a crisis and proved he has zero emotional intelligence and even less strategic political ability.
After driving the country to disaster by living on borrowed money, Cowen was determined to live on borrowed time as well, despite his party and administration unravelling around him with dizzying speed.
Cowen insisted he would push on with the budget “for the national interest” even though 83% of the nation wants him to go.
It is a budget he cannot get through unless Fine Gael decides to abstain and the Blueshirts made it clear they would not be playing that game. They know if they do they are just throwing more seats to Labour. So Cowen has merely delayed the inevitable — and extended the nation’s agony — for the sake of his own political vanity. And all the while the world looks on aghast at this basket case farce of a Government.
Cowen promised an election in the new year, but was vague on specifics, before insisting that “no one had pushed him into it” — showing, once again, his counter-factual relationship with the truth which did so much to make the country despise him that little bit more last week when voters felt blatantly lied to over the IMF fiasco.
The FF ministers flanked Cowen in a macabre scene which made the Addams Family look like the height of normality as the sense of fear and loathing permeated the air. Had a secret deal been done to ditch the Taoiseach at Christmas and hand Fianna Fáil over to someone who could at least lead the party to a mere wipe-out rather than the fully fledged meltdown that awaits them under Cowen?
Whatever had been cobbled together, the ministers appeared as shocked as everyone else that Mr Gormley had finally grown a backbone.
Gone the days when we joked: what have Mr Gormley and a caterpillar got in common? Answer: They are both green and spineless.
FF (or IMFF as they will be known in the coming election) expressed shock that the Greens could decide to collapse the Government in secret on Saturday and sit in the cabinet on Sunday night without uttering a word that they intended to pull the plug the following morning.
Treachery! Dirty tricks! Betrayal! FF exclaimed — and yes it was all those things — FF had clearly taught its junior partners the dark arts well over their three and a half years of contemptuous cohabitation.
Fianna Fáil had always viewed them as little more than children, and so was that a deliberately pointed riposte when Paul “Go-Go” Gogarty showed up at the Greens hastily announced kiss-off press conference with his 18-month- old daughter Daisy?
Her attendance was certainly distracting, especially as junior minister Ciarán Cuffe kept making goo-goo faces at Go-Go’s Daisy while Mr Gormley was passing death sentence on the Government just a few feet to their left.
The sneaky Greens had only given the now tottering Taoiseach 31 minutes’ notice of their decision to walk away in the new year. Cowen had clearly not bothered to tell his finance minister the news (are the rumours true, are they barely speaking?) and so Mr Lenihan was left twisting in the wind as he blithely said everything was just tickety-boo in the cabinet despite the Greens having just scrambled for the emergency exit.
Yes, it should have been an embarrassing moment for Mr Lenihan, but then neither he, nor Cowen, actually do embarrassment. Hence their inability to take responsibility, or offer a crumb of apology for putting the country at the mercy of foreign governments and foreign money lenders.
After the Greens dropped their little November Surprise, Ever-Ready Eamon Gilmore was the first to march out onto the Leinster House plinth demanding a general election.
Mr Gilmore was briefly outshone by the antics of a man shouting obscenities from the other side of near-by railings.
Early fears that the bewildered looking figure might be Enda Kenny bemoaning the fact giddy Gilmore had stolen his thunder once again, thankfully turned out to be unfounded.
Enda was in fact stuck in deepest Mayo at the time and nowhere to be seen for most of the day. Hopefully, he didn’t spend the missing hours hyperventilating in a darkened room going: “Oh! My! God! I might actually be Taoiseach after all! What the hell do I do now?”
Unusually, the rest of Fine Gael did not do what they normally would when power suddenly appears within their grasp — namely launch a leadership heave and once again scuttle any hope they had of government. The stakes were too high, it was Enda or nothing — and Enda was better than nothing.
As gardaí beat back protesters from gates of Leinster House, the Government staggered on — Cowen and Lenihan looking for all the world like two drunks desperately trying not to smash headlong into the ground.
And now they have the nerve to produce their four-year economic “recovery” plan tomorrow — a four-year plan from a Government that is unlikely to last another four weeks. What typical arrogance.
Mr Gilmore argued the budget date was now an irrelevance as its importance had been to assure the markets Ireland could still handle its economic affairs — now economic control has been surrendered to the IMF, what was the point of going through the motions?
Would it not be better to get the election out of the way and finally usher in a Government that actually had a mandate to deal with the gravest crisis in the history of the state?
But the cabinet was locked in its usual default position, somewhere between delusion and denial, and limped on — dragging a bewildered, demoralised nation with it.
So, has Cowen actually achieved anything in his 31 months in power?
Well, at least he has turned that old cliche that all political careers end in failure on its head — Cowen’s Premiership began in failure with the Lisbon debacle, followed by recession denial, followed by the string of cack-handed emergency budgets, followed by the IMF overlordship — it finally ends not just in failure but also in chaos and disaster.
A bankrupt Taoiseach of a bankrupt nation.
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