It’s useless to expect competence from Fine Gael brass

YOU can have an implausibility of gnus, a deceit of lapwings, and a sneak of weasels, but what would the collective noun for a group of ex-Fine Gael leaders be? Ah, yes — a uselessness.

Another week of unravelling chaos for the Government began with a sinister little giggle from Fine Gael’s second most useless leader, Michael Noonan, who signalled that he would do nothing to rein-in Fine Gael’s all-time most useless leader, Alan Dukes.

How blessed are we to have such a burgeoning uselessness of Blueshirt leaders in public life — shame they do not act in the public good.

Dukes is now in charge of Anglo — the bank that ate Ireland’s future. We are not supposed to call it that anymore, but IBRC, instead — though this cunning little re-branding wheeze has proved as successful as the name change from Windscale to Sellafield, as, like Anglo, the nuclear plant is still a huge toxic mess, polluting and contaminating all around it, despite the new pixie-coated name.

Noonan has mouthed platitudes about the lavish pay and pension packages the taxpayer is funding for bank bosses, but he refuses to take any action.

The finance minister seems content that Dukes should just tear up the letter Noonan sent him in April asking for a modest 15% cut in top salaries, so as to bring Anglo in line with other public-sector workers.

Mr Noonan let out his little giggle while insisting that contractual arrangements left him powerless to get Dukes to do the decent thing. The finance minister has forgotten that governments govern and that people elect leaders to lead, so the emergency legislation urged by the opposition would seem to be the order of the day.

Anglo is, after all, just a husk of a debt-collection agency that has spectacularly failed to retrieve the vast fortune the Quinn’s have squirrelled away, so why would anyone think its bosses would deserve that level of cash, anyway?

Due to what went on there before the State wasted €30bn bailing it out — and ensuring at least another decade of stagnation for the country, as a result — Anglo is, in the phrase of independent TD Stephen Donnelly, “a dead, criminal organisation”.

But then, what is the scandal of half-a-dozen Anglo boys earning upwards of half-a-million euro when disabled pensioners are targeted for swingeing cuts in home-help care, when this Government wastes so many other, precious public resources so needlessly?

When the Coalition allows €150,000 to be squandered on Christmas cards for Oireachtas members, and €180,000 is to be spent on buying them iPads, where does parody end and outrage begin?

Nearly as much money — €130,000 — will be splurged by Health Minister James Reilly on “golden hello” payments to begiven to 13 new members of the HIV/Hep C Compensation Tribunal, after he ordered a clear-out for no specified reason.

As Reilly is merely deputy leader of Fine Gael, he deserves his very own collective noun.

Thankfully, there is only one Reilly, but if, God forbid, there were more, they would have to be known as an ‘offensiveness of Reillys’.

The publicly named-and-shamed debtor, who has failed to comply with a High Court order, excelled himself for gracelessness this week when he offended sufferers who contracted HIV and Hep C through contaminated blood products.

Scrabbling around to find justification for the unnecessary and extremely expensive sweep-clean of the Fianna Fáil-appointed tribunal, Reilly insisted it needed “fresh blood”.

Support groups demanded an apology for the crass choice of words, but Reilly lacks themanners or humility to oblige.

Fine Gael just does not do apology — which brings us to the children’s referendum fiasco.

Again, we are lucky Justice Minister Alan Shatter is a solo act, as the collective noun would have to be an ‘arrogance of Shatters’.

After his sheer smugness, and failure to communicate an articulate argument, caused the Government to comprehensively lose the referendum of last year that would have restored the powers of investigation to the Oireachtas that most parliaments enjoy, Shatter refuses to say sorry for the Government’s waste of €1.1m of public cash on an information campaign the Supreme Court branded extensively biased.

Funny how Shatter, the Labour Attorney General Máire Whelan, and all the so-called ‘legal experts’ employed at great expense, did not spot the glaringly one-sided elements to the package, when several journalists were able to as soon as it was launched.

Considering this Government is so keen to cut resources for blind and disabled people, why did it feel the need to flush more than €1m down the toilet, when the impartial Referendum Commission was providing all relevant information via a perfectly adequate €1.9m effort of its own?

The blatant own goal merely handed ammunition to those hoping to wreck the long overdue constitutional reform, and fed straight into their mad narrative of conspiracy theories.

The only sensible reason to be against the passing of this referendum is because it does not go far enough in enshrining child protection, not because it does too much.

Indeed, it seems Fine Gael has now been cross-contaminated with the conspiracy-theory disease, as Government sources mutter darkly that the Supreme Court ruling was deliberate judicial revenge for having their pay cut last year in one of the most overwhelming referendum victories ever.

So, yet another weak week for the Government, when even that great capitalist tool, the Financial Times, branded the pay levels in the Irish banking sector “Dublin’s Shame”, in a stinging editorial.

But, sadly, the capitalist tools in Fine Gael will not do anything about it.