Labour were never going to walk on water

AT LEAST it was fitting in Holy Week that we asked the question: Will Labour walk on water?

But, of course, the answer was, “Erm, nah, they won’t”. For, despite the very public Cabinet squall on metering charges, the junior party had nowhere to walk out to, except, of course, oblivion.

Marginalised as Phil Hogan leaked like the proverbial burst pipe, Labour went into a fit of pique, got all huffy, spoke-up the Cabinet “split”, then went quiet again.

The upshot is that the average charge will still be about €240, the “free allowance” of water will still be meagre, and we still do not know how vulnerable groups, like the elderly and low-income families, will be helped with the new, big fat bill for an essential sustainer of human life which used to be a right, but is now just another commodity.

But then the Coalition has only had three full years to sort this key policy out.

It was one of those spurious Irish political rows where everyone really agreed about everything, but the only problem was how to try and posture in a vain, and doomed, public relations push to pretend you actually had some principles left.

Indeed, as Twitter has dumbed down an already pretty dumb social media culture by reducing everything to 140 characters so you just get the flash of an incident, rather than context, so Irish political debate lacks muscle.

The first four months of the year has just been a blur of passing frenzies: #Rehab, #IrishWater, #Expenses, #WhistleBlower, #Bugging, #GSOC — flashing past us all.

One Labour TD was dismayed by the “shambles” of the party’s manoeuvring over water charges ahead of the May 23 local election polls, stating: “It’s a disaster, there is no strategy there. All we have done is raise people’s expectations that we can do something about water charges, and we can’t.”

They do things far more efficiently on the other side of the Irish Sea.

Though, perhaps a little too efficiently, if Britain’s work and pensions minister gets his way.

For, as well as handing people a bus pass and a pension book on their retirement, the British government also wants to slip them something else — the date they are expected to die on.

The cheery little idea of the “estimated death date” is intended to make people plan properly for their later years, but has a much more sinister ring to it than that.

Obviously, Labour already knows its fate. The party is due a near-death experience on May 23, and will then be left really fighting for its life in March 2016 — the expected date of the next general election.

It is difficult to remember when Labour last won an election — oh yes, October 2011 when the party took the Dublin West by-election, and (sort of) the presidency on the same day.

Now, old socialist Michael D Higgins is more regal than Queen Elizabeth II after his week at Windsor Castle, and the less said about by-election victor Patrick Nulty the better.

All the other Labour TDs were elected on the back of their “Every Little Hurts” campaign which set out how only the party’s participation could stop nasty Fine Gael from introducing such horrors, as, erm, an average water charge of €240 per household.

But Mr Nulty, in the dying days of the Government’s honeymoon, was the only Labour TD actually elected on the programme for government — though he quit the party within weeks in protest at the implementation of that document’s Tory template of austerity misery, and finally resigned from the Dáil after sending emails regarding spanking to a 17-year-old girl.

Private Fine Gael polling in Dublin West shows the Labour vote all but gone in the seat which is really now Fianna Fáil’s to lose.

But, every political wreckage throws-up some survivors, and speaking of Fianna Fáil losers, former cabinet minister Noel Dempsey returned to the public eye after being appointed head of an organisation charged with regenerating Dublin’s Temple Bar.

Mr Dempsey last disturbed national consciousness in November 2010 when he and fellow minister Dermot Ahern shook their heads like a particularly bewildered Laurel & Hardy as they denied any knowledge of the Troika taking over the country — just as the Troika took over the country.

The running joke at Leinster House all week has been: “Jaysus! The recession must be over if even Noel Dempsey can get a job again.”

Indeed, even Bertie Ahern has risen from his shallow political grave and seen fit to comment on national affairs by reportedly slamming the performance of Micheál Martin as FF leader.

This should, in fact, do Mr Martin much more good than harm, as he is the only one of the two men not to be branded a liar by a tribunal of inquiry, and it is not Micheál who is unable to explain where all the money sloshing around his 23 bank accounts came from when he was finance minister in the early 1990s.

So, maybe Bertie would be better using his time to finally tell us the truth about his past, rather than comment on Mr Martin’s future?

We are also meant to be approaching the moment of truth as to how Ahern, Martin, Dempsey, and, of course, Brian Cowen, brought-us to the edge of financial calamity, via the Oireachtas banking inquiry.

However, as this will be held in Leinster House by TDs who lack the constitutional ability to apportion blame, it will be conducted in the wrong place by the wrong people using the wrong powers.

Far better to set up a judge-led probe, modelled on Britain’s Leveson Inquiry, which would be free from the taint of party political bias and deliver a short, sharp verdict.

Otherwise, the 166 characters in the Dáil will just deliver another, pointless, 140 character crisis assessment which takes us #Nowhere.