Cowen isn’t up to it and the Government should go

IN relation to recent polls, pointing now with some consistency towards deep unease about the Government out here in the real world, what is at issue is not popularity, but confidence.

Does this Government know what it is at? Brian Cowen is very able, but he is not able for this job at this time. The evidence has been piling up for at least four years.

To take just one item: he missed what all practical politicians must have seen as a once-off golden opportunity when he formed his own Government to reshuffle Mary Harney out of Health to almost anywhere else. Fair? Gentle? Loyal? Maybe not entirely so, but exactly what a hard-headed politician on top of his game would have done.

Decisive? But he did not do so. This is part of a pattern only too horribly evident. And it is we who must pay the price for indecision hiding behind bluster and ballyhoo.

Contrary to the lectures from on high, we poor ignorant peasants out here know full well we are in very big trouble. It is our jobs, our pensions, our homes, our standard of living, the future of our children and grandchildren that’s at stake. We may not have the details and we may not yet be willing to face up fully to some of the harsher necessities.

But we do know very well that we are in the middle of nothing less than a fullscale war for the survival of our national community. Specifically for an Ireland in which we could choose to live, work — and raise our children and grandchildren. But the ship of state is rudderless. And we know that.

This failed Government must go now. Waiting for Mr Cowen to get himself and his shambles of a cabinet together is not just futile — it is fatal. Every minute wasted now means a month or even six months or a year of extra grief in the eventual fightback further down the line. The failure of both Haughey in 1980 and the FG/Labour coalition at the end of 1982 to act quickly and decisively bequeathed us a decade of misery.

A general election is not necessary. 1994 provides a clear constitutionally-correct precedent. Other countries do this all the time. The very last thing we need now is the Government collapsing and a minimum of three (more likely five or six) weeks of the political chaos and hysteria of a general election, with only a clutch of caretaker lame ducks quacking at the helm.

A moment of real greatness now faces the fewer than 90 TDs who make up the Government’s dwindling majority. By pulling the plug now in a controlled manner, they can give the country a new government with a clear desk. Not within weeks but within days.

Not an easy decision for career politicians and life-long loyal party members. But they are the only people (apart from Cowen himself) who can ‘sack’ this Government. Put in a new one. And maybe give us all a fighting chance to come together as a nation. Better this than to wait in fear — and growing disunity — for what now seems an inevitable collapse into an uncontrollable crisis in which, incidentally, those TDs’ beloved seats would assuredly disappear. Perhaps forever.

Maurice O’Connell

Fenit

Tralee

Co Kerry