Fergus Finlay: Poor political decisions leaving lifetime scars on public psyche

I can’t recall when an Irish government last sat down to make an important decision, knew they were going to hurt an awful lot of people, and went ahead anyway, writes Fergus Finlay

 A member of the crowd at a recent protest at Parnell Place, Cork. Picture: Cian O'Regan.

Good politics often leaves a mark. Bad politics leaves scars. All our lives, whether we know it or not, are shaped and informed by politics. We depend on good decisions being made after careful analysis by rational and decent people.

Over the weekend, and I guess for the next few days, we will get a fair few reminders of the art of good politics that brought about peace in Ireland. It’s a strange peace, we know that — nobody seems to want to build on it, but nobody wants to break it either. But it’s there. I wrote here recently about the 1,500 days between the Downing Street Declaration and the Good Friday Agreement. They were 1,500 days of highly skilled politics aimed at one over-riding purpose.

But while we’ve been celebrating the outcome of good politics, all sorts of really bad politics, the sort that leaves deep scars, have been unfolding around us. Here at home and in some of the places we know best.

I have a lifetime of political experience, and I’m really struggling to understand the weird rationale behind the decision and the timing of the end of the moratorium on evictions. It’s impossible to imagine competent politicians deciding and transmitting such ill thought out messages. The only argument I’ve heard, from government representative after government representative, has been “if we didn’t do it now it would be worse later”. Hello? Can you hear yourselves?

It’s an appallingly bad political decision. They may have intended to send out a message of toughness — but actually, they just painted themselves as callous and incompetent.

Much worse than that, it has potentially devastating social consequences. 

Hundreds, maybe more, families — mothers, fathers, children — will take years to recover from the potential consequences of this decision. Surely the government must have been told that?

Despite my best efforts I honestly can’t remember when an Irish government last sat down to make an important decision, was presented with enough evidence to know for sure they were going to hurt an awful lot of people, and went ahead and made it anyway. There’s no room for talk of “unintended consequences” here — they knew exactly what the consequences would be.

I heard the minister for finance on the radio on Sunday outlining a range of measures intended to (a) bring stability to the rental market and (b) bring hope to hundreds of families facing the prospect of homelessness and what that will do to their children. Everything he said sounded reasonable and fair.

Except for one thing. All the things he was talking about are weeks if not months away. You’d really have to wonder who is advising them. If they really believed they had to end the moratorium, why in the name of heavens didn’t they announce four or five months’ notice of its ending — and at the same time announce all the reliefs that would be in place when the notice period was up?

That’s our current example of bad politics. Hopefully, it’s a crass political mistake for which there will be democratic consequences. If you look across the water at the United Kingdom, it’s hard to label what’s going on there as just stupidity or incompetence.

The English radio commentator James O’Brien routinely describes his country as the first democracy in the world to blindly impose permanent economic sanctions on itself. Its current ruling party, which appears to be composed of one double-barrelled weirdo after another, has endured scandal after scandal and clearly has no answer to any of the problems it has created.

Fear and hatred

So it is doing what bullies and tyrants throughout history do. It’s picking on the weakest. It’s exhorting people to hate and fear migrants and to see them as the cause of the country’s problems. Especially those non-white people, armed to the teeth no doubt, who cross the Channel in rickety little boats. Be afraid of them. Lock up your children. Protect your pets and valuables from them. Export them immediately to Rwanda. Deprive them of all recognised human rights.

Last year something less than 50,000 of the “boat people” landed in Britain. Yes, it was an increase over the previous year. It represented one immigrant for every 1,300 Britons. If you add the total of Ukrainian refugees who have come to the UK, it might be as much as one refugee or asylum seeker for every 400 Britons. 

Ireland, by contrast, has taken a combined total of one refugee/asylum seeker for perhaps every 70 of us. And yes, it’s a strain, and yes, it causes issues. 

But we’re not being told by our leaders to hate them and fear them. And we know the great majority of the people who are here only want to go home as soon as it’s safe for them to do so

There is a link between the hate-mongering that is part of official policy in the UK and a growing trend towards authoritarianism. It’s being held at bay by the fact that Britain is still a democracy, with a general election inevitable, sooner or later. If the Tories win that election, however, — and I hope that’s unthinkable — hate can only grow to a point where the UK will be unrecognisable.

But it’s no longer unthinkable that hate can win in the United States, a country that has had a deep democratic commitment for nearly 250 years. As you read this, barriers are being erected around a courthouse in New York. Streets are being blocked off, and security is being doubled or trebled. All because a suspected criminal is arriving to face a judge and enter a plea of guilty or not guilty. By now, the presiding judge will have received dozens of death threats.

Donald Trump and his legal team are preparing for the unprecedented spectacle of an appearance in court on Tuesday of a former US president facing criminal charges.

Donald Trump is coming to town. Again. He will pull no stunts in the court because he’s too gutless for that. But there’ll be grandstanding on the way in and afterwards. It will all be designed to paint this disgusting rich powerful man as some kind of victim.

The party that he leads, if his behaviour could ever be characterised as leadership, is now willing to embrace his racism, his antisemitism, and his misogyny in its totality

The party of Abraham Lincoln has sunk so low that those who want to replace Trump have all calculated that they have to move even further to his right. The policies emerging — as a sort of tribute to this man who actually believes in nothing at all — are deeply sinister and frightening. If they’re ever put into law, they will create a dystopian country.

The other thing that bad politics does, apart from leaving scars, is it shapes the future.

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I haven’t even mentioned here what’s happening in Russia, or the existential challenge of climate change. There are moments in history when the world cries out for good politics when all it can see is bad. And there’s always a balance — room for despair in Putin’s behaviour, grounds for hope in Ukraine’s resistance.

In the end, our first job is to demand better politics from our own. They really messed up, and they need to be told that openly and honestly. It’s their job to put it right.