Caught in a trap — Government is afraid to admit the error of its ways
And because they can’t seem to face up to the fact that they are the authors of their own misfortune, the trap will get tighter and tighter until it becomes a noose around their necks.
It’s our Government I’m talking about. They seem to believe the only things that are wrong are that the people don’t understand them, and the opposition is playing silly games.
Whenever you hear a Government minister saying “we made the right decisions, but I accept we didn’t communicate things very well”, you know they’re entirely missing the point. And we’ve heard so much of that in response to the recent opinion polls that you can sense the beginnings of a siege mentality.
Let’s examine the assertion for a minute. Was there a failure of communications? Well, hands up everyone who wasn’t expecting a tough budget. Hands up everyone who doesn’t understand the seriousness of the economic situation we’re in. Hands up everyone who doesn’t realise that something is going desperately wrong when we’re seeing the highest unemployment figures in a generation.
I thought so. There was no failure of communication. We all understood the seriousness of the problems and we were all braced for a tough budget — one that would indeed challenge our sense of patriotism.
But what the Government has yet to understand is that if tough decisions are to evoke a patriotic response, they have to be seen to be fair.
Suppose the Taoiseach had said at any time in the last couple of weeks: “I accept that some of our budgetary decisions weren’t as fair as they should have been. I’ve listened carefully to what people have to say about that, and my Government has learned a lesson from the people. We will have to do even more hard things in the interests of everyone over the next couple of years, but I’m going to work really hard to make sure that tough as they are, you will all be prepared to accept that our decisions are fair ones. That’s the principle we’re going to apply from now on.”
I’m ready to bet that if he had said that, or thought like that, his authority and standing would be a lot higher than it is. Instead we’ve had scenes in the Dáil where the Government appears to be more interested in snarling at the opposition than developing any sort of appreciation of the real mood of the people. I’ve said it before here. People are scared, and they want to see leadership. They know things have to be hard for at least a couple of years, and by and large most people are prepared to bear a bit of hardship.
They don’t want to feel there’s no good reason for it. They don’t want to feel they’re alone. They don’t want to feel that others, often better off than them, are getting away scot free.
They certainly don’t want to be lectured, day in and day out about the “budgetary parameters going forward” or listening to senior ministers repeating phrases like “at this moment in time” in every sentence.
But the Government is in a trap. They’ve persuaded themselves they cannot be seen to be wrong. OK, they’ve had to climb down on some of their budgetary decisions, but that wasn’t because they had come to appreciate there might be a better way. It was because the pressure was intolerable. And if you back down under pressure once or twice, you’re immediately surrounded by experts and commentators who tell you that whatever happens, there can be no more giving in.
According to this — the most conventional and popular of political analysis — it’s better to be tough than to be right. An admission of a mistake is an admission of weakness. And weakness is for wimps.
It is that analysis, and the trap it has created, that forced the Government into a really fundamental error of policy last week. They are absolutely and completely wrong on the issue of vaccination against cervical cancer.
I don’t agree for a moment that the decision to withdraw the funding for the vaccination programme was motivated by callousness, or that anyone in the Government wanted to sign death warrants for Irish women, and I think the use of some of that kind of language was way over the top.
But the Government was totally, completely wrong on the facts. They have authoritative, independent advice. And that advice — commissioned by the Government from the Health Information and Quality Authority – tells them they ought to introduce a programme of vaccination as soon as possible, and get it universally applied as soon as possible.
It tells them that the vaccination programme works much better than screening alone, and that it represents very good value for money. And the advice tells them it’s cheap to implement.
In fact, the real, the most telling, sign of how bad a trap the Government has locked itself into is how cheap the vaccination programme really is (even ignoring the return on the investment). As a proportion of the health budget, it is a fraction of 1% — in fact if you divide the cost of the programme by the HSE’s projected budget, you get .00076. As a proportion of overall Government spending, the sum is even more ludicrous. Putting this vaccination programme in place would cost .00015 of the Government’s spending plans.
Suppose you had €10,000 in your pocket and someone showed you the hard evidence that €1.50 — that’s all — would prevent a form of cancer that kills women. Even if you had plans to spend your €10,000 on a variety of other things, wouldn’t you give them €1.50 to achieve something like that? In fact, would it cost you a thought to do it?
SO THE Government’s stubbornness on this issue had nothing to do with money — the money involved has zero effect on the arithmetic of the budget.
And it had nothing to do with callousness or a wilful disregard for women and children’s health (especially the health of poorer women because better-off people will be able to buy the vaccine for their daughters).
No, the stubbornness was caused by the need to seem tough. Isn’t that absolutely ludicrous? We’re now in a position where our Government ministers have convinced themselves they cannot admit, under any circumstances, that they have listened with care and compassion to argument and that they are prepared to change their minds and find a better way because they have listened. The only thing that matters is to look and sound tough — like Margaret Thatcher, for instance.
It’s beyond me that a Government can persuade itself that refusing to listen, in the interests of looking tough, represents leadership.
And by the way, if that’s the mindset that they bring into the next Lisbon referendum, they will lose that, too, no matter what the opinion polls say. And if that happens, we’ll have to find ourselves a new Government.
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
