Fergus Finlay: What are the government parties planning under cover of the virus?
We’ve all been so preoccupied with the coronavirus pandemic and how it has shut down our daily lives that we’ve forgotten that the political system is derelict. It’s like they’re hiding behind the virus, afraid to come out, writes
How have we let them get away with it for this long?
Look, for example, at the 10 ‘missions’, or policy goals, that Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil have just published. Who cooked those up? What do they mean? And how in the name of all that’s holy — and a lot that isn’t — did they take so long to write?
Actually, holy might be a good description.
Back in the day, the annual missions were a regular feature of our Catholic lives.
When I was a child, they lasted for weeks, although I suspect my memory might be distorted. My father would drag us to Mass every morning and to a sermon in the evening, and we were encouraged to make a really good confession.
I made up a few sins I hadn’t even committed yet just to make my confession juicier.
Holier than thou might be a good description of Fine Gael’s and Fianna Fáil’s joint government mission.
The ‘missions’ are a document agreed between the two “to facilitate negotiations with other parties on a plan to recover, rebuild, and renew Ireland after the Covid-19 emergency.” (Every time the pandemic appears in the document, it’s accompanied by the word ‘emergency’ with a capital ‘E’. We haven’t seen that since the Second World War. That’s how pious the whole thing is.)
The document is about 4,000 words and it’s remarkable in a number of respects. I will return to one of its more unusual features in a moment.
But it’s taken more than 10 weeks to get us here.
A long time ago, at the end of 1992, I was one of a small group of people who worked around the clock for 49 days, and at the end of it produced a fully-fledged government unlike anything that had gone before: New departments, new structures, new relationships, new timelines.
It was a detailed and complex programme.
The outcome wasn’t a happy one, because the people decided they didn’t like the cut of the jib of that government. In its first two years, that government produced the Downing Street Declaration and that, in turn, was instrumental in an IRA ceasefire.
By the time that government (with different combinations of participants) had finished, it had implemented more than 90% of its commitments, including a successful referendum on divorce. But it was still fired out of office.
The cut of the jib matters.
Look at the 10 ‘missions’ Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil published. How did they take so long to write?
But the point is that those 49 days, which produced a fully-fledged government, also happened against a background of extreme pressure.
A couple of months before that 1992 election, Black Wednesday occurred in the UK. The British government was forced to float its currency and that led to the devaluation of the British pound, sterling.
In the immediate aftermath, speculators began attacking the Irish pound, or punt (these were the days before the euro).
The outgoing government denied that it would never devalue, and one of the consequences was a huge surge in interest rates, with the cost of mortgages going up every month.
Apart from the fact that I was working constantly, I also bought a house towards the end of 1992, just as the interest-rate surge was starting.
I’ll never forget the fear when my second mortgage payment was £120 a month bigger than the first, and when I realised, just after Christmas that year, that there wasn’t enough money in my bank account to cover the third mortgage payment.
Throughout all that — and I guess because of the terrible instability affecting the entire economy — we worked against the sound of a constant media barrage.
How crazy, how irresponsible, how reckless we were that we wouldn’t form a government.
We had all abandoned any sense of national duty.
Of course, we did it in the end. In 1992, a government was formed in pretty short order, between old enemies, in the face of a national economic crisis.
In 2011, a government came together quickly enough to deal with economic and political chaos that was even deeper than it had been in 1992.
Again, the parties involved in those negotiations were daily reminded, in thundering editorial after thundering editorial, of their national duty to save the country.
But where is the media barrage now? Where is the argument that democratically elected politicians have abandoned their national duty? Has there ever been a bigger crisis, and less urgency about it?
This is especially the sense when you read the ‘missions,’ as Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil call them.
Maybe I shouldn’t be critical of the content. When I’d finished reading them, I couldn’t remember where I’d remembered reading them before. And then it hit me.
I have a few biographies of Willy Brandt at home, because he’s one of my heroes.
The greatest European social democrat of all, he led Germany through an incredible period of reform in domestic and foreign policy.
You’ll find Brandt’s reforms and his social-democratic programme in the biographies, but they’re all listed, too, on the main Wikipedia page about him.
And that, I reckon, is where Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil cogged the missions from.
Because that’s what the document is. It’s a social-democratic charter, put together by the two least social-democratic political parties in the country.
Where are Fine Gael’s beloved people who get up early in the morning? Where is Fianna Fail’s commitment to the enterprise economy? Why are there no references, anywhere, to enterprise, or risk, or incentives, or tax breaks?
Is it possible that both Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil have concluded that their core values have let us all down? Is it possible that, somewhere on the road to Damascus, they’ve fallen off their horses, knocked themselves out, and woken up as social democrats?
As my wife might say when I propose sneaking out for a game of golf while there are chores to be done: ‘I don’t think so.’
They’re trying to entice people of a much more social-democratic bent into the sort of detailed negotiations from which there is no retreat, by saying, ‘Look how warm and cuddly we are, really.’
And, no doubt, they are, on a personal level, warm and cuddly (most of them, anyway).
But they haven’t suddenly fallen out of love with the vested interests that have sustained them down through the years.
So, despite the need for urgency — and it’s pressing — the smaller parties reading this agreement need to steel themselves for a battle.
They’re about to enter the spider’s parlour, and that means they need to tread very carefully.
Above all, they need missions of their own.
They need a strong and total commitment to bottom lines, written in blood, if necessary.
Because, irony of ironies, if they want to fulfil the social-democratic vision offered by Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, they’ll have to fight them every inch of the way.
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