Cullen’s flaws can be just glorious

MARTIN CULLEN is a flawed politician. He’s not alone in that. Many of his ministerial colleagues are too. But most of them are cute enough to recognise their flaws and their limits and hide them.

The handy old bit of put-downery that’s used against Cullen is that he’s arrogant. But that sobriquet isn’t entirely accurate. Arrogance suggests a sense of intellectual superiority, bordering on contempt. Cullen has never pretended to be that.

No, Cullen’s flaw is of a different order. It’s that he has a mule-ass stubborn streak. Cursed with a faulty political barometer, he has no sense of the storms approaching. Even when the facts are stacked impossibly against him, he has kept on waffling, arguing, admitting to no wrong.

Conversely, the flaws can sometimes be virtues. Sometimes, Cullen’s stubborn streak has also been a powerful asset. There is something of the street fighter in him that will always - invariably - emerge, especially when he has been backed into a corner.

We should have seen it coming. It must have taken all his quota of self-control to contain his rising irritation at the PDs sniping merrily away at his ‘aviation package’ for weeks on end.

The PDs in Coalition have always enjoyed the luxury of being able to be an opposition party at the same time. While PD ministers do the collective thing, the handful of TDs and senators on the backbenches are afforded the right to lob grenades. In the past, it was Michael McDowell who was the aggressor-in-chief. Lately that role has been taken up by Tom Morrissey, who feels any sentence he utters is incomplete unless the word ‘competition’ is in there somewhere.

In contrast, there’s been the usual monastic silence from the FF backbenches as the party has conceded the propaganda war to the PDs.

It must have been sooo frustrating for Cullen to have to bite his lip when he was publicly scolded by Mary Harney for making public his thinking on the future of Dublin Airport several weeks back. Especially so because the PDs have never been shy about fog-horning their thinking on the future of Dublin Airport.

The rift or split or whatever it is isn’t going to be a Government-breaker. But it’s a serious enough marital row to start us all thinking about an eventual divorce. It’s driven by the PDs’ obsession with increased privatisation of transport - Harney said at the PD conference last year that failure to liberalise transport would be a serious enough issue for her party to question its continued participation in government.

The PDs’ line on transport is a fairly straightforward one. The party hates monopolies, be they state or private ones. But it doesn’t follow that every State-owned utility or commercial company should necessarily be given a bite of the reality sandwich that is competition.

One of the things that has marked public discussion of the second terminal question has been its superficiality. Having competing airports is one thing. But the strategy of having competing terminals within the same airport structure has not been adequately parsed. Where it has happened, in the US and Canada, it hasn’t resulted in the trickle-down benefit for the consumer that has been claimed. Landing charges at the privately-run terminals at JFK are a whopping $40 (they are €5 in Dublin). In Toronto, the State was forced to buy back the private terminal. It was pointed out yesterday that the investors in Toronto made a handsome profit when they sold the terminal back.

But that isn’t the point, is it? While it was operating, airport consumers lost out heavily, facing charges that were four-times higher the two State-run terminals there. And as Cullen pointed out, the State had to buy it back at an “exorbitant cost”.

Cullen’s explosive performance in the Dáil on Thursday was a force to behold. Even his body language betrayed the vapours that were rising in him.

On the concept of competing terminals he railed: “I am concerned about how this would work when it does not anywhere in the world.

“The airport should be in State hands. I have not seen evidence from any other country to suggest otherwise.”

Blunt, bluff stuff. His outburst will cause ructions within Cabinet and he may get a firm slap on the wrist for his trouble. But that’s the thing about Martin Cullen’s flaws, isn’t it? Often, they are risible. But occasionally, like this week, they are just glorious.