How could they not know they had broken a law of their own making?

IT has long been argued that the best government is the one that governs least, just as the best referee is the one who imposes himself least on a game.

Anyone who doubts that has only to look at the conduct of our current Government, which has sought to justify its existence by passing new laws without regard to the consequences.

Under Charlie McCreevy our tax system has become so convoluted that more and more people have to hire accountants to help them with their tax returns. Ask some of the established accountants and they will tell you that the Government has so complicated the system that they have had to hire extra staff just to prepare the returns, because they are no longer able to do so themselves.

Some people may think that this is good for employment, but that is a false sense of economics. It adds a needless cost, which undermines our uncompetitiveness and contributes to inflation.

The politicians brought in extra work for themselves by imposing election spending limits in the name of democracy no less.

This week we had the disclosure that all but two members of the Government broke the spending limits during last year’s general election campaign.

We are told that this was accidental because it was only just before polling day that they realised that the real cost of their free telephone and mailing privileges should be counted as part of their election expenditure.

If our ministers, the people who introduced the legislation in the first place, are so stupid that they did not realise what they were doing, then they are too stupid to be in government.

And if they flouted the law with reckless abandon, then they don’t belong in politics, much less in government.

They not only lied shamelessly in their bid for re-election, but most of them violated the law and now they have the contemptible gall to try to excuse their behaviour on the grounds of their ignorance. The principle that ignorance of a law is no excuse for violating it has been established for centuries. This is not because everyone is presumed to know all the laws but because, if ignorance were accepted as an excuse, it would mean that most laws would be unenforceable because violators would claim ignorance and this would be virtually impossible to disprove. The bulk of the members of this Government are not only contending that they did not know what they were doing during the last campaign, but they are also saying that they did not know what they were doing when they drafted and enacted the legislation. Imagine the task of trying to disprove the ignorance of this crowd.

In recent decades, various political crises have been excused on the grounds of ignorance. Nobody warned Jack Lynch about the Arms Crisis, even though we now know that at least three people did tell him.

Charlie Haughey supposedly knew nothing about the telephone tapping, even though Seán Doherty had told him earlier. Neither did he know that people were giving him millions of pounds, or that he got any money from Ben Dunne, even though Ben had personally handed him £210,000 and Haughey actually discussed the whole thing with Dunne’s lawyer, Noel Smyth.

When Albert Reynolds and company fell in 1994, they too claimed ignorance. Charlie McCreevy actually said at the time that they were guilty of “collective Cabinet stupidity”.

How should one characterise Bertie Ahern’s behaviour in signing blank cheques for Charlie Haughey, who used them to pay for the likes of his Charvet shirts?

If Bertie was so cavalier with his own money it would be one thing, but it was State money, part of the leadership fund intended to pay legitimate political expenses. It wasn’t as if people had not been raising serious questions about Haughey’s use of State money going back to 1969 when he supplied the funds to purchase the weapons involved in the Arms Crisis, or when he funded the newspaper, Voice of the North, contrary to an explicit instruction from then Taoiseach Jack Lynch.

Yet despite all the unanswered questions, Bertie still signed the blank cheques. Now the Government is protesting its ignorance of what was happening to the economy last year when they made lavish election promises that they have since conveniently abandoned.

Charlie McCreevy was so politically reckless as to put in writing that “no cutbacks whatsoever are being planned, secretly or otherwise”, after he had already circulated two different letters to various departments calling on them to make cuts.

Most of the ministers were told to make cuts, so they knew that the statement assuring the Opposition that there were no cuts planned, secretly or otherwise, was a monumental lie.

Now they persist in insulting our intelligence by arguing that they did not try to deceive the electorate.

John O’Donoghue has the record in having overspent by almost €29,000 but that is really farcical in relation to real election spending.

He was already instrumental in securing the transfer of the headquarters of the Legal Aid Board to his hometown of Caherciveen.

Nobody should suggest for one minute that Caherciveen should be denied a government department, but the process should be transparent and fair, and should be seen to be in the national interest. In that instance the whole thing stank of cynical political opportunism. If every minister were entitled to move a board or a department to his hometown or constituency, we could end up with a chaotic civil service.

Not content with moving the Legal Aid Board to his constituency, O’Donoghue was instrumental in the allocation of over €480,000 for the unprecedented Summer Fest in Killarney last year. What was the real purpose of that grant? To promote tourism, to promote Fianna Fáil in Kerry South, or to promote John O’Donoghue’s political image?

If it was to promote Fianna Fáil, it was a failure because the party failed to regain the seat that it had held for decades. If it was to promote tourism, it was a waste of money, because he had to furnish another €350,000 for this year’s Summer Fest.

Maybe it has enhanced O’Donoghue’s political image in his constituency, but it has done so at the cost of his standing in the rest of the nation, because anyone can hold a party on somebody else’s money. His image enhancement is as superficial as Bertie’s make-up. All this extravagance is against the backdrop of the broken promises, savage health cuts and the rampant inflation which is running at twice the EU average. The Government’s protestations that we are really doing well economically are as phoney as their election promises.

We are losing our competitiveness and this Government has lost the moral standing to provide the necessary leadership.

For a Government that has behaved with such reckless extravagance to call on people to tighten their belts is reminiscent of Haughey’s infamous broadcast in 1980 saying that we were living beyond our means, while he was the worst culprit of all. We need leadership, not hypocritical prescriptions from a motley crew who have plundered the country and squandered the chances of a lifetime.