30th Dáil dissolves in a legacy of despair

THE elegant state rooms of Leinster House will be forever haunted by the echoes of their last goodbyes.

The 30th Dáil seared its way into the national consciousness as no other has since the first revolutionary gathering of 1919, and its immediate successor.

Those two Dáils met amidst the rubble of bloody war, yet forged the spirit of nationhood.

The outgoing Dáil dissolved amidst the rubble of economic collapse and leaves a legacy of despair.

Brian Cowen gave a deeply sombre farewell in which he pleaded for forgiveness for his tumultuous time in office, but in reality the nation will only ever look back on it — and him — with anger.

For once, the dignified Dr Jekyll part of his complex political personality held sway and kept the aggressive Mr Hyde element at bay.

As he slumped back into his seat, Mary Coughlan rose and led a standing ovation to him from FF and the Greens. The Tánaiste then wiped a tear from her eye as she sat down, the applause tapering away around her.

But outside the chamber few will shed a tear for the passing of this government, and well over half the FF TDs and all six Greens must have realised they were clapping themselves not only out of office, but also out of the Dáil.

Enda Kenny’s response was overlong and overwrought, failing to find its level as either statesmanlike or battle cry. As he branded the departing administration the “worst Government in the history of the state,” Mr Cowen stared angrily at the ceiling, as the FG leader berated him for delivering the country into the hands of foreigners, the Taoiseach focused on a spot in the floor. His wife and daughters watching with tense expressions from the visitors’ gallery, Mr Cowen must have been thinking: “At least I won’t have to put up with this anymore...”

But if Mr Kenny’s contribution was blatantly partisan, Labour’s Eamon Gilmore’s was shamelessly so, as he laid into FF and Fine Gael as different sides of the same (devalued) IMF coin of the “Celtic Tory consensus”.

After noting the Taoiseach would always be tainted by his closeness to the “sinking, stinking banks”, the Red Baron of Rage wanted to end on a high and so bilingually cited a poem stating: “Let us leave our winter behind, spring is here.”

Hopefully, he was not invoking the spirit of Dick Spring, the last Labour leader to enter Government, and the last one to over-play his hand and botch it all up.

Green leader John Gormley took on one of his manic hues during a curious contribution, as with one breath he insisted the next Government must lift its sights and act globally and with the next breath berated FG constituency rival Lucinda Creighton for putting up her posters early and breaking the litter laws.

Mr Gormley really is a very unusual man — the Fás restart team are going to have their work cut out finding him a placing after the election.

And with that, a resigned-looking Mr Cowen, well, resigned at the presidential residence, while Enda formally launched his campaign on the steps of FG’s swanky election HQ.

The folly of the al-fresco festivities soon dawned on party handlers as the wind gathered and two shivering female flunkies were forced to hide behind Enda’s backdrop, clinging on so it did not topple on the would-be Taoiseach. As Enda began his spiel, the drizzle turned to rain and the more he spoke, the wetter and wetter he became — not the best omen.

Mr Cowen had deliberately lingered in the chamber as the 30th Dáil emptied about him before he exited the horse-shoe shaped arena for the final time. The power already long drained form him, not even leader of his own party now, Taoiseach in name only.

On the very day the minimum wage was slashed, the ghosts of his administration’s many moments of crisis hung heavy in the air — the early, crushing, blow to his authority that was losing the Lisbon referendum, recession denial, the cack-handed emergency budgets, the failure to communicate with the nation, and, most scathing of all, the surrender of our economic sovereignty to the IMF.

The old maxim is all political careers end in failure. At least Mr Cowen managed to turn that on its head. The reality is Mr Cowen’s premiership began in failure and unravelled from there to finally end in economic disaster, national humiliation and personal ignominy.

The brutal truth is he won’t miss the 30th Dáil — and the 31st Dáil won’t miss him.