Truth is that people are not angry about water charges but about lies
The third biggest electoral revolution in Western Europe since the Second World War brought in a government that followed an economic policy written by the previous administration. But that’s not the problem. The problem is that the Government said they would do something different and the people believed them.
Blaming every unpopular decision on the Troika worked for a while, although anyone who knew anything knew the Troika only insisted on the bottom line, not how it was reached.
Reaching it was never going to be easy. Minister for Public Expenditure Brendan Howlin and Minister for Finance Michael Noonan have ploughed away in the national interest, isolated from the rest of the Cabinet to hide that the policy they are following is that of their predecessors.
They were not responsible for the lies.The reason they will get no thanks for hard work that has delivered the beginnings of recovery is because they are not doing what their parties promised to do.
The tragedy of this Government was written before the last election, like a libretto for a bloody opera. But it is a far bigger tragedy for us than it is for them.
That the biggest financial crisis in the history of the State was used shamelessly by the two opposition parties who formed the Government, as they competed with each other for votes, has degraded our political system. And that is tragic, because we have a democratic tradition stretching back to Grattan’s Parliament and, until recently, our level of social cohesion was among the strongest in the world.
People feel betrayed by politics, when the truth is that politics has delivered massively for Ireland in recent decades. I remember Garret Fitzgerald, on TV during the Self Aid concert in 1986, telling us we were a rich country — ranked 33rd. This year, after all our travails, the World Atlas ranks us ninth for wealth, among the few countries without oil to make the top 10.
Clearly, the Fianna Fail-led administrations that turned a miracle economy into a miracle property boom in the early 2000s deserve a lot of credit for breaking politics. But the people went gaily to the polls with promises ringing in their ears. And it was only when they saw those promises being broken that they gave up on politics.
The promises were stupid. The narrative that letting the banks go bust would have saved us billions is baloney. If the country’s banks go, so does its entire economy. Anglo was, in essence, no different to the so-called ‘pillar banks’, because the banks were interconnected. It was AIB and Bank of Ireland that went to the Government begging for Anglo to be saved.
Tánaiste Joan Burton, who must take a lot of responsibility for this narrative, articulated no clearer idea as to why Labour should not support the bank guarantee than that she didn’t want to hand Fianna Fail a “blank cheque”.
Quite what supporting the banks had to do with giving Fianna Fail a cheque is anyone’s guess. It certainly wasn’t a cheque they could cash. But the narrative suggested that Fianna Fail wanted to bail out the banks because they were their friends.
It was telling that Burton was on the news this week, saying that people will have a choice, at the next election, of electing parties who advocate default “six years after the guarantee” or electing parties “who actually have a proven record.”
In fact, Sinn Fein supported the Government’s guarantee in 2008 and Burton led the counter-attack. But the people have watched the Government pay the Anglo bonds and re-guarantee the banks twice.
The Government is a prisoner of its pre-election narrative. The water charges have become such an issue because the Government blamed them on the last administration’s agreement with the Troika, not understanding that the people would not applaud them for honouring a hated deal.
It wasn’t true, of course. The water-charges idea originated in Ireland, in the Tax Commission of 2009. The Government should have sold the water charges as the face of political reform.
But they didn’t, and that is why the charges — and now the universal social charge — have crystallised as rallying issues.
And that is why they were still being linked in the public mind with the old story of Anglo’s junior bond-holders.
Taoiseach Enda Kenny and Burton have been claiming that there aren’t “any circumstances” in which Anglo’s remaining junior bondholders will be paid. The truth is they don’t know if they will or not, because there is likely to be a legal challenge, but Kenny and Burton are hoping none of this will happen before the next election.
In the context of the kind of money we have paid out, the €280m face value of the bonds is not huge. But the big-bust narrative, which has us starving and bare-foot because we bailed out the banks, is so potent that no politician, and no media commentator, dares to point out that, as economist Morgan Kelly wrote, the economic collapse “was a lot smaller than expected” and that outside property and construction, there was “surprisingly little contraction.”
I wish we had never had a bust and I wish we were a more equal society.
But the truth is that saving the banks spared those of us who depend on the State for welfare from a much worse fate. The people who would have benefitted most from a bust are the ones Burton describes as the “high rollers” who had the biggest debts.
This Government is a busted docket, not so much because of what they have done, but because of what they promised to do. The lies began two years before the general election and they grew and grew, until they became a web from which this Government can’t escape.
It is too late, now, for them to make a clean breast of it. The best they can do is stagger on, pointing to the tangible benefits that have been achieved by following the policy they were elected to discard. Kenny’s promises on personal tax reduction for higher earners, as a reward for voting him back in, smack of desperation.
He’s only one Taoiseach and his Government is only one Government. It shouldn’t matter too much that they’re in trouble. But it does matter, because the Irish people have been lied to and their sense of betrayal threatens to destabilise this society.
It’s not so much because of what they have done, but because of what they promised to do
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