Miracle of a leader who dared do the right thing
WE probably can’t blame our politicians for being confused. It’s not their fault that they’re bothered and bewildered. When something truly strange and unfamiliar appears on the horizon, the natural human response is alarm.
Think of their prehistoric ancestors, building a temple to honour the winter solstice and the grand stretch in the evenings. They couldn’t explain why the sun changed its mind and turned back, just when it seemed to be about to disappear forever.
The strangeness of the whole thing scared them silly, but they thought it best to keep up with the worshipping and sacrificing and general grovelling, just to be on the safe side. Why stop chanting the usual mumbo-jumbo when it did the trick before? Why bother applying reason to the situation, in other words, when ignorance always worked in the past?
Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin’s decision this week to extend the confidence-and-supply agreement with Fine Gael was a bit of a winter solstice moment around Dáil Éireann. In the depths of a deeply bleak and apparently endless gloom, it was a hopeful ray of sanity and common sense. No wonder the folk in Leinster House were mystified and perturbed.
The sight of a politician acting in the national interest, even at a risk to his own career, is a disturbingly unfamiliar one around our national parliament. No wonder Opposition parties huddled in groups on the plinth to chant the usual incantations before the big blazing suns of the television cameras. No wonder disgruntled members of his own party did their muttering and cursing in the darkness of their backbench lairs.
The sniping of Mr Martin’s critics, both outside and within his party, is staggering. From this side of the Irish Sea, we are observing the catastrophic and corrosive effect of politicians caring only for their own self-interest, their own careers, their own toxic echo-chambers and their lowest-common-denominator instincts.
That challenge to British prime minister Theresa May’s leadership was never about securing a better Brexit deal – it was about the ambition, the egos and the delusions of adequacy of a bunch of posh twits who couldn’t care a damn for the national interest. Remember that Boris Johnson had two newspaper columns written before his initial declaration on his Brexit stance – one arguing for leaving, one for remain: then, as now, the deciding factor was which would serve his overriding objective of selfpromotion and personal advantage.
We can now study, in laboratory conditions, the consequences of prioritising party and self over country: witness the corner into which the DUP have painted themselves, or the option of humiliation, chaos or colonisation that faces the Conservative Party, all because their loudest voices chose to put their own interests first.
By contrast, Mr Martin’s decision to ensure political stability in this country for the whole of next year, postponing a general election until well after next March’s Brexit deadline, is a model of responsibility and restraint.
HE has taken brave stances in the past: his smoking ban was an uphill battle, and he was also prepared to face down a stubborn rump in his party to expel Bertie Ahern, if he hadn’t jumped before he was pushed. Provoking an election early in 2019 might go down well with Fianna Fáil’s yahoo wing, but it would be politically reckless.
And yet few are prepared to give him credit for risking his own party’s wrath, and even his own political legacy, in the country’s best interests. Instead, he’s being accused of using the Brexit argument to mask his fear of the facing the electorate, given recent opinion polls and Leo Varadkar’s popularity. Éamon Ó Cuív said the move left him ‘speechless’, as ‘the quicker we can get in, the better so we can build houses and make sure the bureaucracy works’.
Given that it took four months in 2016 to negotiate the current confidenceand-supply deal, Mr Ó Cuív’s flight of fancy makes even Boris Johnson look like a hard-nosed realist.
Our politicians are understandably alarmed by a sight they rarely see. They are taking fright and gathering to read the runes, trying to figure out what it really means. Calm down, folks, park the burnt offerings and the sacrificial lambs. It’s just a political leader acting responsibly and putting his country’s interests first. It’s the manifestation of basic decency and integrity. It’s a rare phenomenon, but has been known to happen in the past. And, astonishingly, the sky hasn’t fallen in yet.