Cowen should let us decide now who will replace him in the bunker

ABOUT a year ago a viral video swept the internet, parodying Taoiseach Brian Cowen’s handling of the country.

It involved a scene from the magnificent German movie Downfall, which portrayed the fall of Berlin at the conclusion of the Second World War and the end of the Third Reich. The viral involved putting subtitles of Cowen speaking over a scene of an actor playing Adolf Hitler, in his bunker, losing the plot as he fought against his inevitable destruction.

It was grossly unfair somehow to link Cowen to a mass murderer of course: his mistakes are not crimes. But it was humorous and it conveyed a point: even when it is obvious that it is over for those in power they do what they can to hang on. Now we have an updated ‘Downfall II’ skit again on Cowen as a demented Hitler put up on YouTube.

There is most definitely an air of final days about this Government and some of Cowen’s comments in recent days have begun to verge on the ludicrous as he clings on. One of the worst was in the Dáil this week when he accused those in the opposition who “exaggerate the weaknesses of the economy” of “driving down national morale”.

This was reminiscent of the ridiculousness of his predecessor Bertie Ahern talking about “cribbers and moaners and whingers” and wondering aloud why those who were subsequently proven entirely correct didn’t just go off and kill themselves. But that’s what happens when you hunker down in the bunker for too long and when your public support, as measured by successive polls, is heading towards single digits.

Reacting to a jibe from Labour’s Pat Rabbitte that the Dáil now resembled the “last days of the Roman empire” and that the Taoiseach was doing awful damage to the morale of people, Cowen fell back on the line that the Government was doing its national duty by bringing forward a four-year economic plan and a budget that would be essential to the country, and that nobody else would be able to do that.

And to emphasise his point Cowen told Rabbitte that “if the deputy believes, in the context of the scale of the challenges that face us at present, that a further election based on the divergence of policy that is emerging on the other side of the House would give us an outcome that would provide certainty, he is a better man than me”.

You would almost have to admire his chutzpah. He does have a certain point in highlighting the different approaches to the current economic crisis that Fine Gael and Labour have taken, but when it comes to it they will form a government. And in any event their decisions will be circumscribed by what the European Commission tells them. But there is something incredible about the party that led successive governments that blew the boom — and which then made things worse with the bank guarantee — refusing to concede power and insisting that it must be the one to put a four-year plan for recovery in place. Given the ineptitude shown to date, how can the public have confidence in this lot suddenly knowing how to do all the right things?

For two years now government ministers and backbenchers have been telling us “now is not the time for an election”. Things apparently were too serious for the “instability” that a campaign would cause. It would spook the international money markets and hurt our ability to borrow.

Well, those same markets are fairly unconvinced by our Government as it is. The announced doubling of the intended reduction of the exchequer deficit has been greeted by a consistent upward trend in the yield on existing government 10-year bonds and now on shorter term bonds as well. This is proof the markets don’t believe the Government. Surely, we need a new government they can believe when it says it will be able to repay its debts — and that has the mandate of the people.

The Government continues to have the necessary support in the Dáil to win votes, thanks to the support of independent TDs like Jackie Healy Rae and Michael Lowry. As a result of striking deals with those TDs with your money, the Government has the legal right to remain in power until it is beaten in a vote in the Dáil on something like the budget.

But with rights come responsibilities. The Government has lost its moral authority to lead because of the manner in which it is clinging to power; its cynical approach to holding the by-elections emphasised that.

It is baffling that we still have the same people in political power. The bosses of most of the banks are gone, the Central Bank and Financial Regulator have new bosses and even the Department of Finance had a change of top civil servant, even if that was due more to his reaching the retirement age. The cuts have not been deep enough in any of those responsible institutions, the top men being merely token sacrifices, but public confidence would have been impossible to keep had those men remained in charge.

If this was appropriate to them, and I would argue strongly that it was, then surely the same logic should be applied to Brian Lenihan and his government colleagues: if you fail badly, even though motivated by the best of intentions, then surely you too should go? There is a strong counter-argument that it has reached the stage where it is almost irrelevant as to who is in power. While EU commissioner Olli Rehn was at pains to emphasise during his Dublin visit that the Government remains in charge of deciding what will be done with the budget, it is clear his own officials are in situ in the Department of Finance overseeing the whole thing. Whoever is in notional power here will follow the dictates from those sources and be left to manage only the details.

BUT those details remain important because we are being left to make certain, if limited, choices. If the people are to support the awful measures that will be implemented they must have some confidence in those who are telling them what they must do. This is why it may actually be better to have an election now rather than in the new year.

If we wait to have an election then a mood of hopelessness and despair might accompany the election campaign, turning it very ugly indeed. A new government should not be constrained by the decisions made for it before it gets into office.

There is a window of opportunity. The Government has made much of the fact that it will not have to return to the bond markets to borrow until the second quarter of next year. In some respects the current bond yields are not crucial because we are not trying to borrow. What they tell us is that there is no confidence in the Government’s strategy. A new government, if installed quickly, would be in a better position to negotiate with lenders and the ECB, with the weight of public support behind it.

The electorate must have confidence in those who are nominally in charge, if only to help the nation’s mood. After all, a government does much more than just run or ruin an economy. Given its record on economic matters how can anyone have faith in those who have been in power to get other things right? If this Government was more concerned with the national interest than its own position it would have done the honourable thing before now and called a general election.

The Last Word with Matt Cooper is broadcast Monday to Friday, 4.30pm to 7pm. His book, Who Really Runs Ireland?, has been shortlisted for non-fiction book of the year at the Irish Book Awards.