Gilmore ‘green jersey’ talk an own goal

The jersey agenda is what got us into this mess and is a statement that should be consigned to the dustbin, writes Political Editor Paul O’Brien

AND now, truly, we are entering the twilight zone. It was one thing Michael Noonan sounding like his predecessor, the late Brian Lenihan, when the finance minister said Ireland was “fully funded” for the next few years and that talk by economists of a second bailout was “ludicrous”.

But Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore urging the Opposition yesterday to “pull on the green jersey” was simply astonishing.

Nobody in Government, surely, needs reminding that it was a “green jersey agenda” that — allegedly — played such a major role in this country’s economic collapse.

According to those allegations, banks were urged to don the green jersey and support each other in the run-up to the collapse rather than expose the scale of the problems within the sector.

Whether this green jersey agenda existed — and whether arms of the state actively promoted it — forms part of the backdrop to the ongoing Garda investigation into actions by some of the banks.

For that reason one might have assumed that the Government — sickened by what was allowed happen in this country prior to its term in office — would have consigned the phrase firmly to the dustbin.

Instead, Mr Gilmore wheeled it out yesterday as he urged Sinn Féin to support the Government in its ongoing negotiations with the troika.

As least in Michael Noonan’s case he had a good reason for suggesting talk of a second bailout was “ludicrous”.

With EU leaders continuing to work on the fiscal compact — the proposed plan to help resolve the eurozone debt crisis — the economic scenario for Ireland could change, for good or for bad, within weeks.

Sources say Mr Noonan believed it genuinely was ludicrous to be predicting what would happen at the end of 2013 when nobody could say with certainty what would happen in a few weeks’ time.

But if there was a rationale to Mr Noonan’s comments, where was the rationale to Mr Gilmore’s?

After seeing the disasters that unfolded because of the alleged green jersey agenda, why on earth would he want to encourage a new form of that agenda?

If the opposition had pulled on the “green jersey”, who would have — rightly — criticised the harsher elements of the budget?

Who would have applied pressure on the cutbacks to the disability allowance for young people or the cutbacks to teacher numbers in disadvantaged schools?

Numerous Government backbenchers will justifiably argue that they immediately raised concerns about these issues when the cutbacks were announced.

But it was the opposition who piled the pressure on the backbenchers and, by extension, the Government.

It is the opposition’s job to oppose — and Eamon Gilmore should allow them get on with it. No government is ever right all the time, as Education Minister Ruairi Quinn recently admitted on the education cutbacks.

Mr Gilmore may argue his point was simply that the opposition parties should assist the Government in pushing the troika for better terms for Ireland, such as a reduction in the debt burden.

Even then, though, he should remember precisely what his own party and Fine Gael did in opposition.

They acknowledged the need for the bailout and agreed, by and large, with the overall thrust of the programme.

But they insisted that the cost of the bailout was excessive.

As a result, when they came into power, they pushed the troika for — and, to their credit, secured — a reduction in the interest rates.

They had a mandate for doing so, having argued the case forcefully while in opposition instead of merely “pulling on the green jersey” and agreeing with everything the Fianna Fáil-Green coalition did.

It is also worth noting that when the head of the European Commission review team to Ireland, Istvan Szekely, conceded at yesterday’s troika press conference that “job creation is an area where we need to do more” — which was something of an understatement — he didn’t credit the Government with making that case.

“We met a wide range of stakeholders and some of them raised I think very legitimate questions about unemployment (and) the impact of policies on the most vulnerable... and certainly these are areas where we want to do more work,” he said.

In other words, the questioning of policies by those outside of Government had an effect.

Less of the green jersey agenda rather than more might therefore be the way forward.