Kenny and Gilmore are waging a revolution. Has anyone noticed?

AN APOLOGY is owed to Enda Kenny and Eamon Gilmore.

It is especially due to Mr Gilmore in a week when successive opinion polls show people in increasing numbers demonstrate their ignorance of what he is about and ingratitude for his efforts.

I can’t account for others but I am apologising for myself. The cliché that Kenny and Gilmore promised and then betrayed a democratic revolution is on mature reflection untrue.

They are delivering on what they promised. We are having a democratic revolution. We simply forgot to ask what sort was intended before it began.

Those in denial about their own lack of due diligence and the fact of an actual ongoing democratic revolution in our midst will author a lot of dross in the coming days. When we vote on Friday to decide the fate of the Seanad, and if opinion polls are credible, the answer on Saturday when the votes are counted is affirmative, their caterwauling will be loud. A lot trees will be felled to soak up the ink used to write about the power-grab and a loss of opportunity for this state of a reformed and reinvigorated Seanad. And on and on it will go at least for an entire weekend.

I still believe in the arguments for a reformed second chamber. But the abolition of our current largely ineffective Seanad will make it impossible to reconstitute a reformed second chamber in the future. A limb brutally hacked from the constitution by 40 amendments will not be easily sown back on again. In any event the debate will move on.

The Seanad, serving out its notice, will unwisely kick-up. In doing so it may remind voters why they think so little of it and some of its incumbents.

Retaining and reforming the Seanad, creating a governance of real checks and balances within the legislature, between the legislature and the executive, holding the permanent administration to effective account would have been revolutionary. It was, Seanad abolition apart, the sort of revolution expected from Kenny and Gilmore. But then property prices were once expected to increase forever, and good times never to end. Life is not like that. We may not be having the democratic revolution expected. But, we are having one nonetheless.

Our actual democratic revolution is a conservative and traditionally Irish. It is based not as revolutions abroad often are on changing everything. Instead it is intent on preserving almost all. It follows rhythmically the ebbing away of established authority and its subsequent more vigorous reassertion that marks Irish history once every hundred years.

This decade of commemoration marks the last Irish Revolution from 1912 to 1922. The metamorphous from colony to Free State via the Easter Rising appears momentous. It changed the appearance of everything and the substance, south of the border, of little.

The greatest change was repositioning Ireland in the world. The least notable one was within the Free Sate and republic that emerged eventually. Of course as with every revolution there was a wholesale change in personnel. The Irish Party, long dominant was decimated and discredited. Seeing the fallen mount the scaffold and swing from the noose of history is essential fodder for revolutions everywhere.

The great theme then was continuity, not change. The British Empire was sundered, but its apparatus of governance preserved intact. It remains largely so today. A decades old political class was replaced eventually with another that came to enjoy a tenure which with only few interruptions endured until 2011; the starting point of our current revolution.

And class is the main variation between the Irish Party that was usurped first by Cumann na nGaedheal and then by Fianna Fáil. The minor gentry, prosperous merchants and barristers of the Irish Party was replaced by large farmers, lower professionals and middling business people in Cumann na nGaedheal. Fianna Fáil facilitated a further slide in social standing. But if every roll of revolutionary thunder provided a leg-up for the class a half step below, it was so that they could fully enjoy while not challenging what they inherited.

Along the way there were alternate voices and other visions. But Connolly the socialist threw in his lot with Pearse the nationalist. The Labour Party sat out the 1918 election so that the national question would have a clear run. The Irish people, including much of the left were unable to think beyond of the power structures of the colonial power they ostensibly defeated. They were not only obsessed by British power, they were saturated in it.

The ultimate British achievement was not the colonisation of Ireland, it was the colonisation of the Irish mind. That pernicious success and the shared aspiration of all Irish classes to become seamlessly part of what they apparently resented most, ensured a very conservative revolution one hundred years ago. By 2011 another cataclysm has engulfed the country. It brought with it both the greatest turmoil since the foundation of the state and the greatest electoral decimation. Fianna Fáil joined the Irish Party in the ranks of the politically discredited. Today it sits precariously on the edge of the dustbin of history; its ultimate fate undecided. But if the future of that party remains in the balance an afterlife is already assured.

After decades of power the legacy of Fianna Fáil is such that it has so effectively colonised the mind of its opponents that even in, and perhaps especially in their opposition to it, Kenny and Gilmore most effectively imitate it.

Kenny of course is a legitimate heir to Cumann na nGaedheal. In his the muscular assertion of the authority of his office within his party, in cabinet, in the Dáil and in the removal of the Seanad he is also a leader in the tradition of WT Cosgrave and Kevin O’Higgins.

Eamon Gilmore by way of the Workers Party is from a tradition of radical authoritarianism. Through influence exerted in trade unions, in RTÉ and other media, and successive political party’s of which Labour is only, though likely to be the last, the project has always been a top down one. The impulse towards control, authority and structures makes it perfectly logical that the deepest and most genuine impulse of Gilmore is to restore the authority of the state, at almost any political cost, now that he has finally mastered it.

Our conundrum is not that our leaders have mislead us. It is that when they spoke we only heard what we wanted to hear, not what they were saying, They have largely been true to us and they are certainly true to themselves. The litany of broken promises are minutiae compared to the central pledge of restoring our sovereignty and credibility.

On that central pledge they are delivering. As for radical revolution, we never voted for it anyway and would be appalled if it were actually offered. We have the conservative revolution we want. It is reasserting governmental authority and economic credibility. What could be wrong with that?