Week of weirdness in the freak show of Irish politics
After Brian Cowen’s botched reshuffle stroke, the Cabinet was reduced to its constitutional minimum of just seven members and almost brought down completely by a would-be rebellion by the trio of pro-Government Independents over the Finance Bill.
Yes, self-proclaimed defenders of the people Jackie Healy Rae, Michael Lowry, and Mattie McGrath had not let out a peep at slashing pensions for the widowed, blind and disabled, but were outraged at attempts to bring tax self-assessments forward by a month.
The half-empty Cabinet caved, the rebels roared, a toppling Taoiseach fast-tracked the Finance Bill through with connivance from a compromised opposition, as Bertie bleated, Enda Kenny was dubbed a chicken and FF finally found a new leader.
Micheál Martin’s emergence as FF frontman was accompanied by an apology for the unpleasantness of the past, but it is yet to be shown what kind of bounce his rather qualified “sorry” will produce in the polls after the nation has stood back aghast watching it rip itself apart for weeks.
But in a sure-footed start, Mr Martin wrong-footed Fine Gael as they fumbled his three-way debate challenge and in so doing triggered all the old fears that Enda is a political featherweight.
But Martin himself now has four weeks to prove to the country he is more than a likeable lightweight and can drag the party back up the polls and secure a future for it by smashing down a surging Sinn Féin as the dominant opposition party in the next Dáil.
And whatever they say in public, Fine Gael and Labour will be very pleased the last piece of dirty work form the 30th Dáil — the fabled Finance Bill — was railroaded through the Oireachtas.
Though both parties were burned by the backlash from the Finance Bill as they bent over backwards to see it rushed through the Dáil despite voting against it.
The optics for the opposition were awful — they didn’t commit the murder but they helped Fianna Fáil and the Greens bury the body nonetheless.
Fine Gael and Labour said they had to do it to get rid of a wretched Government as soon as possible, but in reality it could only have staggered on for a few more weeks.
Democratically speaking, there was a strong argument for letting the collapsing coalition fall completely and then fight the immediate election on what should really be in the Finance Bill. FG agree with FF’s €6bn package of cuts and taxes, but differ strongly over which measures should be hit to provide the loot, while Labour insists anything bigger than a €4.5bn package will tip the nation back into slump.
Grim economic news from mega-cutback Britain, our largest trading partner, appeared to bear out the Labour stance as the country’s economy took a shock shrink of 0.5% in the last quarter of 2010 and is now on the brink of plunging into a double-dip recession and dragging us down as well.
The FF/Green argument for the Finance Bill was it had to be passed as a national imperative, otherwise our new gods — the IMF — would be displeased.
But after the crushing — and ultimately unsustainable — interest rates imposed on our bailout, what more could they do to punish us? The Finance Bill was essentially Ireland handing in its fiscal homework to be inspected by our masters so they do not stop the meagre pocket money we are allowed to have after we have submitted our weekly reports to the EU/IMF so they can check our banks and institutions don’t end up with their sticky fingers in the tuck-shop cookie jar again.
It’s an ugly backdrop for what every political party is talking up as the most urgent general election for at least a generation.
Though we still do not know the date of the election showdown and there is even talk in FF they might try to push the election date beyond Friday, February 25, to the final date possible on March 2.
The thinking behind it is that it would allow Mr Martin’s love-bombing to hit more targets, but in reality it would be a strategic blunder. Such a move would smack of desperately clinging onto every last second of power, trying to delay things so they could still get the jollies of the St Patrick’s Day swan song around the world, and most importantly it would also hugely annoy parents as the 25th falls during the mid-term break and going for March would just provide another childcare headache.
And then there was Bertie, the Mr-Boom-turned-Mr-Bust, caught out on camera turning himself into a figure of ridicule by wishing “someone had told him” what was going on in the banks when he was Taoiseach.
It never seemed to occur to him he was actually supposed to be in charge of the country at the time and it was his job to make sure the banks weren’t shaking the rest of us down and in doing so sowing the seeds of the surrender of our economic sovereignty to the IMF on his successor’s watch.
It seems somehow grimly fitting the final act of this Government will be to bring in the minimum wage cut on the very day the Dáil dissolves and so many ministers reach out for the €300,000 plus pensions.
The cut-in-half Cabinet meets for the last time early next week — each member now having up to three portfolios to cover due to Mr Cowen misplacing so many of them.
How does it work? Do they play a sort of ministerial musical chairs and run from seat to seat when they are talking about the different responsibilities they have been saddled with? The sight would be no more ridiculous that many that have played out in this week of weirdness.
The curtain finally falls on the 30th Dáil next Tuesday — lets hope it means the freak show Irish politics has descended into dies with it.
