After a wasted week in politics — it’s time to focus on the issues that matter

SO, that’s over, then. Enda won.

And you read it first, by a long way, in the Irish Examiner.

I told you he would win last Monday, when the heave was still a twinkle in Richard Bruton’s eye, and certainly well before the whole thing had taken shape. In fact what I said was “if Enda fights and wins, it will do him no end of good in the opinion polls.

We all love to see a leader with his back to the wall, fighting for survival. Especially if he starts that fight as an underdog, and comes out on top. I’m certain he will fight, and I’m reasonably certain he’ll win. If that happens, he will for sure emerge as the enhanced leader of a damaged party”.

I must say it’s nice to see other political commentators agreeing (in the aftermath) that the outcome has been broadly good for democracy.

The whole thing has certainly taught me one thing — if anyone is ever thinking about mounting a coup against me, I hope it’s the same crowd that tried to take Enda out. In the end of the day, you wouldn’t send any of them out to buy sweets, would you? But anyway, it’s over. We can, I hope, get back to normal politics, at least for the couple of weeks that are left of this Dáil before it takes its long (far too long) summer break. Even in that few weeks, there is an enormous amount of work for an opposition to do.

In that sense, the FG heave, although it might have provided entertainment, was actually a waste of a week in real political terms. For example, we all (as citizens in despair) had to sit through the motions of a Dáil confidence motion in the government at the same time as the Fine Gael heave was going on. The confidence motion was sparked off by two reports into the management of the banking crisis. These reports were envisaged as preliminary — that means there is a lot more to come, even if Patrick Honohan, Governor of the Central Bank, feels there are no more questions to be answered.

But wouldn’t it have been so much better if the reports themselves had been properly debated and discussed, rather than forming the backdrop for what was, in effect, a meaningless confidence motion? Because preliminary or not, the reports are devastating. It would be possible to quote endlessly from them — I’ve seldom seen reports, for instance, where the footnotes are every bit as damaging as the contents. But I thought Pat Rabbitte summed it up pretty well when he spoke in the Dáil.

“There is no point trying to rewrite the banking reports,” he said.

“They could scarcely be more critical of the irresponsibility and inaction of the government. The failure of the regulatory system was total and seemed to have official acquiescence. (The reports) pointed out that ‘no other country had introduced a blanket, system-side, guarantee’ and makes plain that ‘the inclusion of subordinate debt in the guarantee is not easy to defend against criticism’.”

Rabbitte understands these technicalities better than most. But the key sentences from the reports were written in language that even us poor laymen could follow. Honohan said: “Macroeconomic and budgetary policies contributed significantly to the economic overheating... This helped create a climate of public opinion which was led to believe that the party could last forever.”

And the other report was equally devastating. “Fiscal policy, bank governance and financial supervision left the economy vulnerable to a deep crisis, with costly and extended social fallout”.

Whatever about the politics, even the economics, it’s the social fallout I care about. In my lifetime, nothing has been more shameful than the casual way in which the already paltry allowances paid to carers and disabilities were cut in the last budget. Those cuts were accompanied by a virtual shrug — we have to cut people who have almost nothing, in the interests of the economy.

In fact, what the two banking reports tell us it that those cuts — worse than anything in our social and political history — were made as a direct result of bad fiscal policy, lousy bank governance, and financial supervision that was so awful it was virtually corrupt.

That’s what real politics — and real media coverage — ought to be about. You would have to cut down an entire forest to produce the newsprint needed to cover the Fine Gael heave. You wouldn’t have needed more than a few twigs to deal with the media reaction to those cuts in disability and carers allowances, made as a direct consequence of the homemade “economic overheating” that Patrick Honohan wrote about.

So let’s get back to real politics, for God’s sake. We need the kind of politics that Eamon Gilmore was talking about in the confidence debate when he said: “We need a fresh start and fresh hope. We need a Government focused on three core tasks — creating jobs, reforming the way this country is governed and bringing fairness into the management of our affairs. … We need a government that understands what is happening in the global economy and how Ireland can prosper within it.

We need a government that gets the idea that jobs and growth will not come from a hands-off, light touch approach but from offering leadership and direction and from rolling up its sleeves …”

Ireland is a country that is now grappling with a range of social problems. Vulnerable children and families — I could write three columns about the mess we’ve made of that issue. The rising cost of unemployment (and I mean the social cost — the alienation, the despair, the emigration). Mental health — we keep talking about scandals in this area, and go round in endless circles because of the lack of political priority it gets. The desperate and urgent need for regeneration, and the betrayal of communities by the abandonment of promises.

I could go on. Any of them is enough to make you angry, but what makes you despair is the pretence that government actually gives a damn about social issues. Oh, we’re prepared to introduce urgent legislation all right — about head shops, for example (because they’re a hot public issue). And before the end of this month, according to a recent press release from the Minister for Health, the Government is going to be asked to approve really urgent legislation. Really, really urgent legislation. Massively urgent. To control the use of sunbeds.

We can’t finalise the legislation to put child protection guidelines on a statutory basis. We can’t bring forward the promised and needed legislation on vetting, to prevent potentially dangerous people from working with children. We can’t produce the much-promised bill to reform the law on sexual offences, even though everyone agrees the present situation is a disaster waiting to happen.

But we can take up government time, and subsequently Dáil time, to change the law so that the proprietors of sunbeds can be told they’re only to be used by adults, and the adults must be told they may be dangerous if used to excess.

It makes distracting and meaningless heaves seem almost sensible, doesn’t it?