We didn’t all go mad, it was flawed ideology that got us in this mess

YOU have no idea how lucky you are.

You’re reading a column written through the mists of pain, 1,200 words or so that establish once and for all man’s ability to transcend suffering. It would be difficult, nay impossible, to describe the heroism behind the typing of each faltering word.

Well, a slight exaggeration maybe. But I’ve never seen the vomiting bug in action before the last couple of days, and believe me, I never want to see it again. And I’m by no means the worst affected in our house. Other family members have been through the agonies of the damned over the last 24 hours, and it has attacked all of us, one after the other. We’re all recovering, but it’s astonishing how weak and drained and staggering it leaves you.

Mind you, I was already weak and drained after a week or so of listening to Michael Noonan telling us that emigration was a lifestyle choice, the Taoiseach announcing that it was all our fault because we’d all gone mad, and Eamon Dunphy telling us on the Late Late Show that the reason we should all leave is because our country is a dump.

My wonderful colleague Terry Prone wrote approvingly here yesterday about how Richard Bruton, in reference to the coverage of our Taoiseach’s remarks in Davos, talked about the growing trend for “pouncing on a phrase”. And she went on to say that there was this current fashion in an awful lot of commentary for inferring that a verbal gaffe is emblematic of the entire intellectual and moral makeup of the man or woman.

She’s right, of course — we do make too much of these things in some ways. But there is a problem. The problem is that we don’t just deserve better from our leaders, we need it. When things are at their toughest, we look to the people we elected to high office to at least avoid putting their feet in it.

Over many years, Bertie Ahern became known as a master of the “foot in mouth” type statement. Remember him telling critics of his economic management to go and commit suicide? Or phrases like “smoke and daggers” or “upsetting the apple tart”?

We all chuckled when we heard those things at the time. The economy was growing, we could throw money at every problem, the good times were going to last forever. It really didn’t matter that the economic and fiscal genius who was driving it all was a bit of a verbal dunce.

But then there was the furore over “Garglegate” — when Brian Cowen gave a halting, stumbling interview that bore all the hallmarks of far too late a night. It was in the middle of a crisis. We deserved a far better performance than that, and we needed our Taoiseach, of all people, to be on top of his game. That performance, fairly or unfairly, was one of the larger nails in Brian Cowen’s political coffin.

It’s highly unlikely that Enda Kenny’s performance in Davos will be politically fatal to him, of course. As slips of the tongue go, it was in a different order to Garglegate. But it did send a warning signal. He, and Michael Noonan, need to get their act together better.

I can just imagine them thinking, when they read the reaction to their remarks, “would people ever lighten up!” If they do think that, they don’t get it. They are both paid large salaries to represent us in public and to provide leadership. If they fall into the kind of easy utterances that went before them — remember “anger is not a policy” or “we are where we are”? — they are neither leading nor representing.

And when they pretend — or others do it on their behalf — that it never happened, or they were quoted out of context, or it ought to be obvious to every thinking person that they meant something different, then that’s just insulting our collective intelligence.

I took part in a radio discussion on Sunday morning with several other people, about the events of last week (not easy when all you want to do is throw up). One of them, Tom Clonan, said passionately that what was happening in Ireland — especially the bailing out of the banking system — was unethical and utterly wrong. Full stop. Another, Robbie Kelleher, said he understood that sentiment, but there was no choice.

I found myself caught in the middle. Somebody tweeted afterwards that I was speaking out of both sides of my mouth. I agreed with Clonan about the lack of any ethical base for the policy, and with Kelleher about the lack of choice.

Isn’t that an appalling situation for a country and a people to be in. We are taking money away from essential services, allowing people to suffer in all sorts of ways, to prop up a system that essentially failed through corruption. We’re doing it because our leaders believe the alternative would be worse, and we have little choice but to trust them.

Almost nothing can square that circle — the dilemma between the unethical and the lack of choice. But the one thing that would make a difference would be an absolute determination to ensure that we didn’t go through this without proper accountability. And the real problem with casually telling the world that we all went mad is that it might actually suggest that we’re getting ready to give up on accountability.

The story of what happened in Ireland needs to be told, honestly and in detail. We didn’t all go mad. It started with ideology, a fundamentalist conviction that lower taxes would drive higher growth. Remember the debates we had about Boston or Berlin?

That ideology infected politics, and led to some of the biggest and least sustainable giveaways it was possible to imagine. Several elections were bought, for example, by massive increases in child benefit, back-dated for several months, or by the magic of the SSIAs, which were described as a savings vehicle, but were actually a device aimed at encouraging a huge consumer splurge.

And then there was the close and unholy relationship between building and politics. In budget after budget, year after year, the tax system was effectively restructured to provide an astonishing array of incentives for anything that involved putting one brick on top of another brick. Builders were king, because some politicians made them king and built a huge time bomb under the tax base in the process.

When we look for accountability nowadays, we tend to think about the cheap money, the reckless lending, the lousy regulation. But we do need to go back to where it starts — to ideology and to bad politics. If we don’t do that — if we ever for a moment accept that we all went mad – we will be doomed to repeat the same terrible mistakes.

And then there’s Eamon Dunphy. Did you see him, laughing like a schoolboy over the handsome fee he is getting for his McDonald’s advertisement, and advising the rest of us to leave because our country is a dump. Honest to God, even without the vomiting bug, it would make you want to vomit.