The idea of a National Government gets a voice – even if its a croaky one

THE man on the radio had a funny voice. Funny peculiar, rather than funny ha ha.

It kept breaking up on him, as if he had recently developed late-onset adolescence. One minute he would be no more than a little hoarse. The next minute he would sound as if someone had laid an Axminster carpet on his voice.

He was very bothered by it and kept apologising, although the rest of us didn’t mind that much. It was fun trying to work out who he was when he was normal. It was also fun trying to anticipate when the next roll of carpet would hit him. It seemed to happen in a completely random way, like a stammer, only more so. A stammer slows the speaker down just a little. Carpet covering the speaker’s voice stops everything.

Half way through the item, it became clear the speaker experiencing the sporadic vocal carpet attacks was Eamon Ryan, who had hit the Morning Ireland airwaves to promote an initiative by the Green Party to achieve more agreement on stuff. Not so much a National Government as a general consensus, which would see Fianna Fáil, the Green Party, Fine Gael and Labour playing nicely together instead of kicking the lining out of each other.

Now, I’d have thought we already had a general consensus around two issues, the first of them being the sense that we’ve been screwed, the second being the reality that we’re broke, individually and nationally. But that wasn’t the kind of consensus our Eamon was after. His was different, like his voice. This consensus aimed at getting all of the major political parties singing off the same order paper, so to speak. (Or all sitting in the same cupboard, seen as how they now serve cups of tea in the better cupboards.) More importantly, this consensus was to address the future, rather than the past or present. If the Taoiseach had been called on to brand this particular desired harmony in Leinster House, he’d have defined it as the Going Forward Consensus.

It was strange to hear Minister Ryan fighting, because he doesn’t usually fight. He’s odd that way. He never fights, but he never caves in, either. He’s possessed of a benign notion that if he explains something to you with enough detail and positivity for long enough, you will be persuaded to go along with him. But on this occasion, he fought the good fight – with his own voice. You had to admire him, and it was the best craic I can remember in politics, recently. Given a choice between a politician suffering from congestion and one suffering random attacks on his vocal cords, any sensible person is going to go with the vocal cord attacks.

By the end of the item, the voice won. No doubt about it. No appeal to the referee was possible. There was nothing Minister Ryan could do other than apologise one more time and retire from the field. Which he did, for the rest of the day. It was fair to assume that he cycled home to bed and wrapped his throat in an old sock soaked in vinegar or honey or whatever natural remedy a Green Minster applies in such circumstances.

His colleague and party leader John Gormley gallantly took up the fight in two languages, supported by the sort of Establishment worthies who don’t usually hang around with the Greens, like the inestimable Ed Walsh from Limerick and several editorial writers. The collective message was “Enough, already, with the petty routine of normal politics. Now is the time for all good men and whatever women are left hanging around Leinster House to come to the aid of a National Government.”

The most quoted model was that of the British World War Two administration, and, of course, with Nazi armies goose-stepping across Europe in your direction, a united approach to the threat had a lot going for it. The key difference, of course, between then and now is that Ireland’s economic disaster is not a threat. It’s a reality. The Panzer divisions are already here and we’re kind of hoping the Red Cross might arrive any day now with a few aid parcels. The only question is whether it’s a local administration that does the inevitable post-surrender triage or a bunch of outsiders like the lads from the IMF.

That distinction didn’t stop those seeking a national consensus from continuing to seek it during the day, while (we presume) Eamon Ryan changed the sock around his throat and maybe tried mustard as an alternative therapeutic sock-paste. Nothing deflected them from their mission. Nothing discouraged them, either.

The Labour Party told them where to stick it. Fine Gael wouldn’t play. Brian Cowen rubbished it and then – in Michael Noonan’s great phrase – tried to unscramble his egg, the mad yolk.

I may be wrong, but I don’t think Sinn Féin said much about it, probably because, for them, a National Government represents a career opportunity better than anything else they’re likely to be offered in the short term. Let’s face it, if the main political parties were seduced into liquidising themselves into a national Government, with 150 TDs all facing much the same way, the only opposition would be presented by Sinn Féin and John Deasy, and wouldn’t that be mighty for Sinn Féin and John Deasy?

The weird thing about the whole episode was the fact that so many politicians failed to defend themselves and their day job against the tidal wave of condemnatory ridicule coming at both. Normal politics, when compared with the shining potential of a national government, was presented, all day, as being roughly as attractive as a Telex compared to a Tweet. (Go Google it, children.) Normal politics was reduced to petty point scoring and trivial routine.

I was astonished that Richard Bruton didn’t point out that three years of evidenced condemnation of Government economic policy, combined with dire and as it turns out, accurate predictions of the merry hell into which that policy would drop us, could not legitimately be scoffed at as political point scoring or terminal triviality. But Richard’s a bit like Eamon in that respect. Even when he can poke an enemy in the whats-its, he’d rather hold off and hope they’ll come to see the error of their ways without him having to be nasty to them.

At least we learned from Éamon O Cuív the precise figure on which the Government wants consensus, when he said that the real sum that must be saved in the upcoming budget is €4.3 billion. By sharing this figure, Mr O Cuív let a cat the size of a Siberian tiger out of the bag, probably because he (like Pat Carey) is worn to a thread from spending so much time on Vincent Brown’s show. The two of them step up to the Vincent plate every time, God love their self-less sense of duty.

Almost everybody else in the big political parties rejects invitations to go on that programme. Because it’s like having sex with a combine harvester. Exciting. A tad perverse. And a bit on the rough side...