FF enters Calamity Kim territory as Greens sink to the margin of error
That includes the US in the 1960s and 1970s during the Vietnam war and the Watergate scandal. At the height of Watergate, when Richard Nixon was forced to resign from the White House in disgrace, his approval rating was 24%, which is 7% higher than Brian Cowen’s current rating.
Of course, it should be noted that the US president with the worst approval rating of all was Harry Truman, who plummeted to 22% during the Korean war. But historians now regard him as one of his country’s finest presidents.
Even though Truman had a 67% disapproval rating, which was also worse than Nixon, he was still 7% better than the Taoiseach’s current thumbs-down rating of 74%. Moreover, Mr Cowen has the distinction of having the highest disapproval rating of all five party leaders in the Dáil.
The latest poll was conducted before the publication of the two recent reports on the financial crisis and the banking scandals. Both were scathingly critical of Cowen.
The worst political disillusionment that I witnessed in the US was a devastating scandal that erupted in Texas in 1971. Frank Sharp, a Houston banker, had been loaning money to prominent state politicians so they could buy stock in his Sharpstown State Bank and his National Bankers Life Insurance Corporation.
It was naked stock manipulation and many of the politicians and their friends made enormous amounts of money by then selling their stock at a handsome profit. But the federal Securities and Exchange Commission stepped in and the whole thing came crashing down.
The governor, lieutenant governor, the state’s attorney general and more than half of the state legislature, including the speaker, were ousted. In the midst of the scandal, other exotic stories came out. One legislator was exposed for having bought a pickup truck with postage stamps he had been given to correspond with constituents.
The political disillusionment with our current Government is even greater than it was in Texas. The shenanigans at Anglo-Irish Bank are reminiscent of what happened at the Sharpstown bank.
From a national perspective what happened in Canada is probably more representative of what has been happening in this country. In the final year of his second term as prime minister Brian Mulroney stepped down. He had been in power for almost nine years and clearly saw the writing on the wall. Kim Campbell replaced him to become Canada’s first woman prime minister.
Her parliamentary mandate had only five months to run. After four months she called a general election for October 1993. Under Mulroney, the Progressive Conservatives won 169 seats in 1988. That was an overall majority of 21 seats. Against that backdrop the ensuing defeat was all the more devastating.
‘Calamity’ Kim Campbell and everyone but one of her cabinet colleagues lost their seats in the general election of 1993. The Progressive Conservatives were reduced to just two seats in the 295-seat House of Commons. That would be like Fianna Fáil being reduced to a single seat in the Dáil.
Maybe that could not happen here under our system of PR, but it is worth noting that Progressive Conservatives had a 22% approval rating in October 1993, which compares with our current Government’s pathetic satisfaction rating of just 12%.
Since the latest Irish Times public opinion poll was conducted, the banking report drawn up by Patrick Honohan, governor of the Central Bank, was sharply critical of the Financial Regulator, the Central Bank, senior managers of the banks, and the Government’s fiscal and budgetary policy for contributing significantly to our current economic crisis.
The Government has responded with breathtaking arrogance by establishing a commission of inquiry into the banking crisis and stipulating that the probe not investigate the decisions taken by government. This is a gross affront to democracy and an insult to the intelligence of the electorate.
It would seem the Greens have already become contaminated because they are backing these measures and thus behaving with the same contemptible arrogance.
Eamon Ryan tried to suggest the Green party had nothing to do with what went wrong because it “was not in government for the long period in which these failings developed”.
That is true, but the Greens are now making up for lost time by facilitating the cover-up. They are essentially supporting the betrayal of the Republic. In the circumstances nobody should be surprised party leader John Gormley has both the second worst approval and disapproval ratings of all the party leaders.
With just 3% support, the Green party is within the margin of error. It may actually have lost all of its support. John Gormley and Eamon Ryan should note that the PDs, who had been propping up Fianna Fáil, have gone out of existence altogether.
The contemptible arrogance of Fianna Fáil in power appears to know no bounds. In a further affront to democracy, the Government has refused to move the writ for by-elections. Fine Gael moved to amend the law to ensure by-elections were held within six month of a vacancy, but the Government blocked it.
Of course, Fine Gael’s own failure to move the writ for a by-election to fill the seat vacated by George Lee – because Labour would likely win it – made a mockery of the Fine Gael proposal. Telling people to “do as I say, not as I do,” is no way to lead. Enda Kenny obviously shot himself in the foot and the 7% decline in his popularity amounts to a loss of 22% from his support in the previous poll.
MEANWHILE, the public are being confronted with one horror story after another. In recent days there has been the expenses abuse scandal in the Seanad and the death of at least 188 children while supposedly in state care. Now there is the unfolding scandal about the botched pregnancy scans. Things seem to be getting worse.
Brian Cowen now “deeply regrets” his own bungling as Minister for Finance in relation to problems facing the country as a result of the property crash and financial crisis. Previously he had said the collapse of Lehman Brothers was responsible for the Irish crisis, but this was rubbished by the reports this week, so his latest excuse is that nobody saw the crash coming.
He tried to deflect blame onto the IMF, which predicted a 3% growth in the Irish economy in late 2008, whereas there was a 9% contraction. If Mr Cowen knew then what he knows now, he says would have done things differently.
“Hindsight is always clear,” he explained. “Obviously we would have taken such a course if we had known the scale of the property collapse which was facing the country. I deeply regret that.”
Hindsight is essentially a universal quality. Any fool can have it, but good leadership requires foresight and perspicacity – essential leadership qualities that Mr Cowen sadly lacks.
