It will take a lot longer than 100 days to fix the mess we’re in

SO, 100 days in, how is the new government doing?

Maybe more important, how are we doing? I

t’s a silly measure in one way, this 100 days thing.

We’ve just come through years and years of economic mismanagement, driven by an ideology that sowed the seeds of its own destruction. It’s impossible to turn that around in three months — it might even be impossible to describe fully what happened.

And yet the critics and commentators are lining up to give the government a right old savaging. T

o read some of it, you’d swear they had been in office for three years rather than three months. It can only be a matter of days before Vince Brown dusts down one of the articles about “the worst government in the history of the state” that he has written about every previous government in the history of the state.

If ministers have any sense (and I’m guessing they do) they’ll read it all, sigh deeply, and get on with the job.

This kind of commentary, which takes no account whatever about the intractability of the problems, has almost no value.

If it causes people to start losing their nerves, that’s a pretty poor reflection on the people involved.

They need to remember that it’s not just 100 days since the start of this Dáil — it’s also 1,700 days away from its end. They need to remember something else too. We’ve just been through a surreal period of ideological and political mismanagement that was genuinely unparalleled. We have just seen off the actual worst government in the history of the state.

It was a government that came to office indifferent to any form of regulation, and grew more hostile to the whole idea of regulation as it went on. That last government, don’t forget, didn’t just ignore the need for regulation in the financial sector, it set about crushing regulation in the social sector. It silenced Combat Poverty and effectively silenced the Equality Tribunal, among many other bodies. And it was inevitable with them that if the banking house of cards was going to come crashing down, their complete indifference to probity and discipline would be prime factors. Of course they used the same principles to build an economic mirage. In budget after budget (and I wrote about many of them here in the Irish Examiner) money was poured in to incentivise every conceivable form of building. At the same time the Exchequer became more and more dependent on revenue from the very source it was incentivising. At the height of the property boom nearly a third of all tax revenue was being derived from property transactions.

We ended up importing thousands of people from central Europe to come to Ireland, to build houses — whole estates of them — for the people who were coming to Ireland from central Europe. It wasn’t just a house of cards, it was a mad hatter’s tea party. Brian Lenihan, to his eternal credit, tried to stop the madness, but by the time he got the job it was all too late.

And in the process, of course, they gave away our sovereignty.

The price we paid for the indulgence of the Ahern/McCreevy/Cowen years was the loss of freedom to make our own decisions. We made so many bad ones, no one will trust us for a long time to come. That’s the background against which this government has to be judged. And only an idiot would rush to judgement. It was Barack Obama who said the American economy would have to be rebuilt brick by brick after the devastation of Bush’s second term. In our case, the bricks are all in NAMA. But still, they say a week is a long time in politics. By that standard three months ought to be an eternity. But it hasn’t been. One of the leading market research companies in the country, Behaviour and Attitudes, constantly monitors the issue of confidence. They have found that there is a tentative view among consumers and business people that things are beginning to look a bit better. There is a government in office that inspires trust, that seems to be determined to put things right, and that is behaving appropriately modestly.

Among us the people at large, things are a bit more mixed. It will take a long time, and a lot of doing, before we can believe again that any government is to be truly trusted. The shocking sense of betrayal that most people felt over the last few years has left behind a feeling that is almost like post-traumatic stress.

But the experience of being let down, of having our children’s prosperity snatched away, has also forced us to look afresh at things we perhaps took for granted in the years when money was the god. The researchers talk about people’s search for “authentic experiences” — and those experiences are to be found in family and friends, in the neighbourhood. People are getting involved again, in things like volunteering for instance, and in projects that involve “doing it for ourselves”.

And we’re also doing other things we used to look down our noses at. We’re shopping for bargains.

Nights out have become nights in. Even people who can still enjoy the bling of old are deciding not to flaunt it.

In other words, maybe, we’re dealing with the recession in our own way.

We’re hoping the Government can get it right, and we’re prepared to give them a decent chance.

But we’re not relying on politics to solve our problems, and we’re certainly not waiting for money to be thrown at every problem the way Bertie used to.

In that context, sure we can dust down the soundbites of the election, and announce that the government has failed to do this or that.

We can talk about the U-turns that are inevitable when a government, acting in good faith, comes to grips with the depths of our problems.

But I don’t honestly believe that anyone expected a new government to come equipped with a magic wand. Hey presto – the bank debt is gone. Abracadabra – our deficit has disappeared.

All of us knew, when we went to the polling booth, that we were facing two years, at least, of hardship before we would see any sign of growth in the economy.

But is there more confidence about?

Are we feeling any better as a result of the democratic decisions we’ve made?

Did the visit of the Queen and Obama have any lasting effect on our morale? Do we trust our leaders now more than we trusted our leaders then?

The answer to all those questions is yes. A fragile yes, to be sure — it wouldn’t take much for us to lose faith again. And we want the Government to be a lot more disciplined and coherent in its messages than it has been.

That part of the learning process has been uncomfortable and halting.

Apart from the specifics, we all know we’re on a journey. There’s not a lot of point in asking “are we there yet?”. We’re not, but hopefully we’re on the way.