Dáil (should that be Dial?) phone fiasco is a wake-up call

WE’VE all seen the late-night TV ads in which the sultry voice whispers: “Hot girls in your area waiting by the phone now, call: 1590....”

While I’m not claiming to be an expert on this, I suspect the person at the other end of the phone, if indeed she actually exists, probably isn’t the supermodel-type reclining so provocatively on the screen.

But one thing the whole unseemly Healy-Rae saga has taught us is that politics certainly livens up when you throw premium-rate phone lines and taxpayers’ money into the mix.

Maybe Fine Gael are missing a trick with their admirable — though pedestrian — bid to trim TD numbers by a dozen or so.

Why not introduce dial-a-deputy, whereby, rather than have their money wasted by persons unknown in Leinster House, voters can throw it away themselves by indulging in fantasy-line calls to secure their ideal political mate?

“Competent TDs in your area waiting by the phone now, call: 1590...”

The Healy-Raes would be untouchable, as they are such a wildly popular and attractive political dynasty, but other, less-deserving deputies could be voted out of Leinster House depending on their chat-line appeal. One Fine Gael minister in danger of being cut off would be health supremo James Reilly, who seems to have been rather liberal with his election promises for such a conservative party.

It seems strange to look back on the panic that gripped FG in the run-up to February’s Dáil showdown, as, despite facing a Fianna Fáil in meltdown after surrendering to the IMF just about the last thing this country still had any pride in — its economic sovereignty — Enda Kenny & Co were so haunted by the spectre of six straight defeats they promised just about anything to anyone.

And how those unnecessary hostages to fortune are now coming back to haunt our shiny new Government, as Mr Reilly’s habit of trying to push a candidate over the line with a little letter promising to preserve local hospital services meets the reality of a near-bankrupt state and the toxic organisational skills of a dysfunctional HSE.

And, more worrying for the Government, they only have about three weeks’ worth of their favourite excuse — “It’s not our fault, it was that lot!” — left to run before it has to be delivered to the knacker’s yard along with their tattered, endlessly re-announced jobs initiative. Or, the “what jobs initiative” as the 5,000 people taken off the dole lists to go into work experience will probably soon be calling it.

Voters quickly forget what went before and just want to focus on the future, so when the current Dáil wraps up for the summer later this month, ministers are going to have to come back in September with something a bit more positive than blaming everything on the admittedly largely ruinous 14 years of Fianna Fáil misrule.

Even somebody with the rhetorical skills and drop-dead charisma of Barack Obama only got away for six months with pointing out that the wars, economic crash and social divisions he inherited were very much the fault of the disaster-laden presidency of George W Bush.

But one thing Barack and Enda do have in common is that they are blessed by the poverty of their opposition.

Here, Fianna Fáil remains in post-election plane crash mode.

It believes the Government’s unpopular U-turns on the banks and bond holders are a vindication of their terrible term in power and claim this will make the party popular again. Sinn Féin is stymied by the woeful Dáil performances of Gerry Adams, who seems strangely diminished by the limelight of the Leinster House political stage.

In the US, Obama must relish the prospect of Minnesota congresswoman Michele Bachmann edging ahead in the Republican nomination race; so twisted and ignorant are her views that she makes Sarah Palin look like a cross between Mary Robinson and Aung San Suu Kyi.

Interestingly, Bachmann believes the founding fathers abolished slavery — an idea that comes as a surprise to anyone who has read the original US constitution and notes that it values black slaves as being worth three-fifths of white people.

But not to fear, we still have deputies of the quality of the Healy-Raes of this world to keep our faith in democracy and openness alive.

And isn’t it strange that Leinster House authorities claim they cannot isolate the phone line within the Dáil that made the 3,636 calls helping Michael Healy-Rae win the Celebrities Go Wild show, and thus raising his profile as he manoeuvred to succeed his father Jackie in the Oireachtas?

I wonder if they would find such a simple piece of technological sleuthing so difficult if, say, one of the restaurant workers or odd-job people had cost the taxpayer €2,639 by constantly phoning porno chat lines? Hmm.

But Healy-Rae has put his hand in his pocket to replace the money taken out of the taxpayers’ pockets by persons unknown — though at the same time he has insisted he knows absolutely nothing about how the phone shenanigans happened.

How nice of him — maybe he’d like to pay some other bills that seemingly have nothing to do with him, like the €85 billion bail-out disaster loans the country is saddled with. Oh, but then the Healy-Raes sort of are partly responsible for that, well his father anyway, for propping-up a dead-on-its-feet government totally devoid of any signs of competency, whose legacy of financial vandalism we will live with for a generation at least.

And how long exactly will it take to get out of the mess? The bad news is it seems we may get a hand-out from visiting aliens long before our children stop paying for the bail-out/banker debts.

Andrei Finkelstein, director of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Applied Astronomy Institute, estimates we will make contact with extraterrestrial life within 20 years — much closer than when we shed the dead weight of our loan doom.

Still, at least we’ve got €2,639 back in the kitty now — but if only that mystery caller would reveal himself to the tormented taxpayer, even if it’s just to ‘fess-up in the style of Stevie Wonder and admit I Just Called To Say I Mugged You.