After losing the PR war, these vapid, shambolic policies won’t save Simon
AFTER Leo Varadkar mercilessly pulverised Simon Coveney’s campaign in the opening days of the leadership battle, supporters of the Housing Minister said he would pull back from the brink when his magisterial plan for the future of Ireland was unveiled at the weekend.
Mr Varadkar, they suggested, was too obsessed with optics and cheesy photocalls to focus on the boring stuff of policy and procedure. Unfortunately for them, Mr Varadkar seems to have spent just as much time honing policy as he did persuading senior ministers to support him.
It will hardly come as a surprise that the two candidates for the Fine Gael leadership battle have almost entirely identical policy documents – promising to lower the tax burden, improve public services and increase spending on infrastructure.
However, Mr Coveney billed himself as a policy wonk whose vision and attention to detail would secure him the Fine Gael leadership against all the odds, but his policy document is a shambolic collection of bland platitudes that is long on aspiration and short on specifics.
Mr Coveney’s unique vision is he wants “all of our people [to] reach their full potential” and that “no one [should be] left behind”. In other news, it’s also believed the Cork TD is a fan of motherhood and apple pie.
“Our goal should be nothing less than the creation of a society in which everyone can participate and an economy from which everyone can benefit,” said Mr Coveney, a sentiment that no sentient politician from any ideological background would disagree with.
When the vapid clichés are stripped out of Mr Coveney’s 16page treatise, there is little else left – and some of the elements, masquerading as serious policy proposals, are frankly ludicrous.
Try this, for instance. Mr Coveney wants to make the next government the “greenest in the history of the State”, which would probably sound more credible if he hadn’t, as agriculture minister, presided over an increase in greenhouse gas emissions in that sector.
While Ireland is set to spectacularly miss its EU 2020 target of a 20pc reduction in emissions, on course to achieve only a 6pc reduction, the main culprit for this abject failure is agriculture.
Currently, agriculture accounts for 33pc of Ireland’s greenhouse gas emissions with that figure expected to jump to 45pc in the coming years. The comparable figure for the rest of Europe is just 10pc.
So, what is Mr Coveney’s big idea to tackle this existential problem? Did he bravely suggest reducing the dairy herd or cutting back on milk production?
No. Instead he plans to “set a specific date when only electric cars should be available for sale within Ireland”.
“Norway, although an oil rich country, has a target for 2025. This may be too ambitious a target in an Irish context, given our low starting point, but highlights what could be possible,” he muses.
Really? Has anybody told Mr Coveney how low our starting point really is? Last year, out of nearly two million private cars licensed across the State, just 2,000 were electric. We’ll all be living in communes on Mars, watching the Earth smoulder from a safe distance, if we wait for electric cars to save us.
Mr Coveney’s other big idea is a massive increase in spending on infrastructure over the next 20 years.
“We should seek to provide up to €20bn of dedicated capital funding for key infrastructure projects – mostly but not exclusively focused on transport infrastructure – over two decades from sources including the European Investment Bank, private funders and increased Exchequer Provision,” he said.
Given that the Government’s current capital plan, which runs from 2016 to 2021, will see €27bn spent on infrastructural projects in just six years, this target cannot be described as either ambitious or visionary – and the proposed funding stream is vague enough to have been pulled from an Anglo banker’s backside.
Mr Varadkar, although he had the same big idea to spend more money on major capital projects, at least gave some indication of how he would pay for it. He has proposed increasing the national debt target from 45pc of GDP to 55pc, thereby releasing funds for investment.
Elsewhere, Mr Coveney has suggested setting up a new AntiCorruption and Transparency Commission, an idea that seems to have been nicked from the Social Democrats, while he has also promised to hire a “strong chief of staff” in his department to push through reforms.
Are we therefore to assume that former taoisighs’ chiefs of staff have all been weak and ineffectual?
Working with this new heavyweight chief of staff will be a new communications team that will “engage with the public around major policy developments in a much more positive and proactive way”. Or, in other words, lots more public relations people will be hired to spin the government’s plans into something palatable that can be swallowed by the plebs.
It may be unfair to monster Mr Coveney’s precious manifesto when Mr Varadkar employs the same asinine clichés and focus-group drivel. But at least the Dublin TD used a couple of lines of his 12-page policy document to explain exactly how he intends to implement his ideas.
Mr Coveney, having lost the PR battle, said he would win the leadership war using substance and seriousness. If that’s the case, he’s going to need a new policy document.
‘We’ll all be living in communes on Mars if we wait for electric cars to save us’