A great week for us. At last, we have held someone accountable
PHILIP NOLAN
THE last nine days have proved to be among the most turbulent in the State’s history – and, maybe counterintuitively, up there with the best of them. How so, you might ask, given that the country has been vibrating with fury at the breach of Government guidelines on the running of public events by those who attended the now infamous golf dinner at the Station House Hotel in Clifden?
Well, here’s why. In Ireland, we are good at many things, but these are often social or cultural. We make a great cuppa, punch above our weight in music and literature, and have gained a reputation as the best travelling soccer fans in the world. These are lovely, but they don’t butter a lot of parsnips when it comes to the really important stuff.
In other areas, you see, we have set a very low bar. We’re not, for instance, great at planning for the future: we built two Luas lines that didn’t meet up and then spent a fortune and caused years of chaos by remedying the mistake. We built an M50 that wasn’t fit for purpose almost from the start, given the long delays at off-ramps and at toll booths that turned the daily commute into misery for thousands until we came up with a better plan.
Expensive
When we do plan for the future, we’re not great at putting a price on it. Twenty-seven years ago, the Royal College of Physicians set forth a proposal for a national children’s hospital. Had it been acted upon then, it might well have cost a reasonable amount to build, but after years of wrangling about the location, we now find ourselves in a situation where we are spending maybe €2billion on the most expensive hospital in the world.
The problem of poor planning feeds into our greatest failing of all though, and that is accountability. When something goes wrong here, it is unusual to see anyone fired. No-one resigns. Everyone just puts their heads down and hopes the news cycle will change, that something else will come along to take the heat out of a crisis that can then quietly be forgotten about. If it looks like we actually can’t forget about it, we turn to the tribunal, the carpet under which everything can be swept, with the dirt later sucked out particle by particle over the course of years. When tribunals, at breathtaking expense, do find evidence of corruption, those deemed to have engaged in it or to have benefited from it often still face little sanction.
This stasis has led to weariness, because opinions often split along party lines. One man’s desire for accountability can appear to another as a witch hunt, a politically motivated act of malice or revenge.
The human brain seems hardwired to seek out the new, a fact borne out on social media where the perennially outraged move from one issue to the next like a group of particularly nimble Catholics doing the Stations of the Cross.
This year, though, for the first time maybe since the Emergency, and give or take Italia ’90, something seismic happened that brought us all together. A minuscule virus changed our lives and how we live them, possibly forever. There was no them and us. Rich or poor, CEO or shop-floor worker, priest or heathen, politician or voter, we all faced the same threat to our own lives and the lives of those we loved.
To protect those lives, we accepted the most draconian restrictions on our personal freedoms in modern history. We confined ourselves to within a 2km radius of our own homes, unless we were essential workers and could travel further, or had to go to the shops. We sombrely accepted restrictions on one of the things that is a hallmark of our nationality: how we say goodbye to our dead. Churches that should have been overflowing with the support of friends and community instead became hollow echo chambers, with just ten mourners allowed to attend.
Adult children could not visit their parents in nursing homes. Families who normally would meet and laugh and share a bottle of wine instead had to settle for virtual versions of each other online. Those isolating alone, like myself, came to rely heavily on the goodness of local shops, friends and neighbours, to ensure we still had enough to eat.
Sacrifices
None of this was easy. In fact, as the days wore on, it became harder and harder.
How many people did you hear saying that the one thing they missed above all else was a hug, a simple human need for physical nurture?
This was not done because we wanted to do it. It was done because we are accountable – in the first instance to ourselves and the protection of our personal health, but also to our communities. That is what being civic-minded is all about, so it was little surprise when news of the Oireachtas Golf Society dinner broke that everyone who had made massive sacrifices was livid. I cannot remember any response to a political crisis that was so unified.
And, because that sense of unity was forged in March when the first lockdown was introduced, it was an unstoppable force. Where once, Dara Calleary might have rode the tiger and survived, this time it bit him on the bum. The standard get-out, the contrite apology, was never going to be enough. One by one, they fell – Jerry Buttimer, even Seán O’Rourke, whose plans for future projects with RTÉ were shelved by the Montrose mandarins. It gives me no pleasure to see people lose employment opportunity or income, but hundreds of thousands have, and they didn’t get steak and chips and a Cabernet Sauvignon with the lads to soften the blow.
On Wednesday night came the biggest casualty, when EU Trade Commissioner Phil Hogan fell on his sword, or was given a gentle push, after a week of drip-fed revelations contradicted his own version of his movements as he zipped from Dublin to Kildare to Kilkenny, back to Kildare and on to Limerick, through Clare to Galway, and to Roscommon, in a bizarre game of Where’s Wally? – with or without that second uppercase W.
Again, nothing personal against the man, but I was elated – he was held accountable, and not only for his actions but also for turning facts into fudge.
It seems strange that in a democracy almost a century old that it should come as somehow shocking that poor leadership had such stark consequences for so many, but better late than never, I say. Fighting a virus is no longer the only thing we’re all in together. Demanding higher standards of our representatives is on the table now too, and it’s a joy to behold – even if only with five other people from three different households.