Where is the radical reform?

Tonight, the government wagons will circle around Alan Shatter, and the minister will continue on. Perhaps the opposition will get lucky and the minister come unstuck on the basis of further revelations. But that is what it will take to shift him.

Shatter dieting on humble pie is a distraction but not a big deal. Issues like abortion and the underlying challenge of political reform will matter much more. It is telling that while the political legions muster to decapitate or defend a minister, there is no comparable commitment to addressing deeper challenges. The agenda for substantive change so persuasively offered by the government party’s before the last election has run into the ground. In hindsight, we shouldn’t be surprised. Enda Kenny is our longest serving TD. He has upheld the status quo longer than any other politician.

If he has demonstrated as taoiseach personal mettle and political management skills, he never demonstrated any impetus for radical reform. All that talk about broken politics before the election was palaver. Kenny is the heir of Liam Cosgrave, another underestimated and personally engaging politician to whom the medium of television was not always kind.

Cosgrave in the 1970s was faced with an unprecedented political and security crisis that threatened the State. He was long unloved but ultimately respected by a self-styled and intellectually self-regarding social democrat tendency in Fine Gael. The familial and political heir to the Fine Gael tradition identified with the foundation of a state he was determined to safeguard, he preserved the State intact as taoiseach and handed it on. Kenny is a conservative in the Cosgrave tradition. His tenure as taoiseach reminds me of the great political line in literature from the Italian novel The Leopard made famous in the film of the same name starring Burt Lancaster, “if we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change”.

He is leading an essentially conservative government who deserve credit for preserving a state in economic crisis but none for challenging, let alone changing, the underlying causes of that crisis. Even his opposition to the church, his statement that the constitution is “my book”, is less about social radicalism than pursuing by different means the constant interests of changing politics. Politicians clamoured aboard the clerical bandwagon for so long as it gave international and domestic kudos. It was the church that lost its moorings and then politics did, as politics does, move on. It is an under-appreciated irony that politics, so cowered by the church, went from kissing the ring to kicking the arse of the clergy in exact tandem with the swing in public opinion.

In Enda Kenny’s political lifetime, there have been two major radical movements in Irish life, both of them conservative. Socially, the prolife movement apparently succeeded by passing the eighth amendment to the constitution. In fact, that radically conservative revolt did more than most of its opponents to finally wreck the social fabric their preemptive strike was intended to preserve. That Fine Gael, the ultimate upholders of the State, has almost intact turned 180 degrees to face them down and legislate for abortion is proof of that.

The other major radical movement was economic in the guise of the Progressive Democrats. By any measure, including their own disappearance, they apparently failed. But this Government is implementing their vision of smaller government more effectively than the PDs ever did. Over the same period, the left never produced any movement of remotely similar scale or impact to those two. The Workers Party posed but never produced and the afterlife of its once radical leaders is tragedy reincarnated as comedy.

On the issue of abortion, the legislation proposed is minimalist and politically masterful. Contrary to what Enda Kenny and Micheál Martin say, this is the crossing of the Rubicon. But it is the degree of change required to allow things remain almost the same. It is certainly another shambles in the making. It is a cowardly avoidance of the self-evident need to repeal the eighth amendment successfully, and avoids the need to face up to the fundamental question of whether or not there should be a right to choose.

It is too soon to say if the Haddington Road Agreement will pass and if it does if it will deliver what the Government claims it will. But if Fianna Fáil are increasingly anxious to pick rows over government policy, this government is following remarkably closely the programme agreed with the Troika by Brian Cowen and the late Brian Lenihan.

What the Government is following too is the tradition accumulated through decades of social partnership of a mutually unaccountable cartel of power between government and the senior management of the public service. If pay is being cut across the board, accountability has not in any meaningful way been increased. The public service is not effectively accountable to government, government is certainly not effectively accountable to parliament and our ineffective parliament is about to be emasculated rather than reformed. The proposal to abolish the Seanad is symbolic of the deepest impulse of the Taoiseach to preserve power intact rather than risk it’s dispersal through amendment. But the problem for the Taoiseach is that while he is being true to himself, he is being untrue to the electorate to whom he promised radical change. Yes, he promised abolition of the Seanad, but abolishing the Seanad and leaving power concentrated in an unreformed Dáil and unaccountable public service management is calculated to be just enough change to allow things stay as they are.

Enda Kenny is inarguably the most successful standard bearer in the Cosgrave tradition. His electoral success has enlarged his party. But his unwillingness to reform the State risks leaving it trapped in the rising waters of future crises. It is not enough change to allow things stay as they are; it is too little and soon it will be too late.

* Gerard Howlin is a public affairs professional and a former senior political adviser.