Leo’s giving good leadership over threat of garda strike
LAST week, while shopping in Blackrock, I experienced two epiphanies about the next general election — neither of which were good news for Fianna Fail.
The first was in my local Spar last Wednesday when I saw an Irish Independent headline: ‘Leo Varadkar adopts hardline stance on garda strike,’ and mentally said “Lead on, Leo.”
The second, in SuperValu on another day, was when I heard a checkout operator and a customer giving out about Barry Cowen.
Before explaining why these two experiences struck me so strongly, let me first set the scene by sharing a trade secret about writing, which can also be applied to politics.
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, in On the Art of Writing, laid down an iron principle for writers, wrongly attributed to William Faulkner.
“Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it — wholeheartedly — and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.”
All writers know this adage is always true. The sentences you love the most are the ones that eventually erode your whole structure.
Politics is bound by the same iron principle. Whatever issue you hang on to most will end up hanging you. Sinn Fein’s passion for a united Ireland, and its unwillingness to atone for its past sins in pursuit of it, proves the point.
Without that green albatross around its neck, the party would be a far more formidable force in Irish politics.
Likewise, Fianna Fail’s foolish love affair with the public sector unions is now a heavy underwater drag on what should have been a clear sail to power.
Middle Ireland is alienated by Fianna Fail’s failure to take a hard centrist political position on one of the major issues facing the country: the threat of a public sector pay stampede.
The real story of our “recovery” is belied by the state of public pay, as revealed by the only two financial journalists courageous enough to confront this core issue: Dan O’Brien and David McWilliams.
Brexit adds a further banana skin on the road to recovery. We could easily find ourselves back where Brian Lenihan found himself on that dark morning, waiting alone for his Brussels flight to sign away our sovereignty.
A full-blown public sector campaign for pay rises for 300,000 public sector employees could trigger our next financial Armageddon.
Middle Ireland’s jaundiced view of Fianna Fail’s failure to condemn public sector pay demands is matched by its neglect of the private sector.
Fianna Fail shadow spokespersons find it hard to even articulate the words “private sector”, because the party’s whole heart and mind is in the public sector.
This was brought home to me by the angry reaction to Barry Cowen’s mulish performance on the News at One last Thursday.
Referring to housing, he revealed his limited view of what constituted an Irish worker by telling us what Fianna Fail wanted.
“To help and assist these ordinary people, young guards, young doctors, young nurses, young teachers, who are renting at exorbitant rates.”
In Cowen’s closed shop there are only gardai, doctors, and nurses. No lorry drivers, refuse collectors or self-employed people who make up the majority of workers in Ireland.
But Cowen wasn’t finished. Asked whether he would forgo the TDs’ wage increase, he told us that it was tied to the pay of principal officers.
There are two problems with that reply. First, if TDs are tied to public sector pay, then they logically have a vested interest in supporting public sector pay increases.
Second, Cowen ignored the political context in which the average income of all households has dropped.
Presenter Richard Crowley said: “There are TDs who say they will give it back, but you personally say you will keep this money.” Cowen: “Yes.” Soon after, Roisin Shortall, of the Social Democrats, and David Cullinane, of Sinn Fein, promptly stole Fianna Fail’s clothes in every workingclass constituency by refusing the raise.
Cowen’s bullish reply replicates that of John Bruton. In the course of an otherwise engrossing talk on John Dillon at a history meeting last weekend, he suddenly told us that TDs were perfectly entitled to their raise.
That said, it’s important to distinguish between the case of the gardai and that of the teachers.
Until 1998, I was so close to being a garda groupie that I sounded like a trainee security correspondent.
But the blue flu of 1998 gave us a glimpse of garda greed that left a permanent stain on its relations with the general public.
That glimpse turned into a grim gaze in recent years, as whistle-blowers revealed a culture of cover-up and possible corruption.
Here we have to face some hard truths. Because the recent GSOC report reflects a global problem with closed police cultures.
Transparency International reported that police corruption is worldwide. European democracies are not immune.
According to a 2002 report, crime syndicates commonly bribed Scotland Yard police officers.
In 2010, Francisco Ubeda de Torres and Edgar Duenez-Guzman — two researchers at the University of Tennessee — in a paper called Power and Corruption, came to a shocking conclusion.
Police corruption, they said, was endemic and could not be eliminated. The only consolation was that a slightly corrupt police force could still catch more serious criminals.
We can no more have a perfect police force than we can have a perfect society. The price of virtue in both is eternal vigilance.
Accordingly, we need a powerful inspectorate to guard the guardians — or rather guard us against the guardians.
But an equally pressing problem with gardai is the anecdotal evidence that far too many of them have too little to do.
The basic cause is bad management. Hence the public shock when the garda managers of the AGSI courted anarchy by talking of striking at the same time as the rank and file.
Turning to the teachers: they can hardly argue with George Lee’s figures on RTE last Thursday showing that their hourly rate is the highest in the country.
But, of course, that won’t stop them waxing indignant. Mary McCarthy caught the culture perfectly in her satirical novel, The Groves of Academe.
“A sense of vicarious outrage — the vocational endowment of all educators — fused them like a Greek chorus behind their colleague as protagonist.”
But fair is fair. In spite of the holes in their wider pay case, we have to have some sympathy with ASTI wanting to close the pay gap for younger teachers.
Spare us the outrage, however. ASTI selfishly allowed the gap to be created in the first place to suit established teachers.
Meantime, I must eat humble pie. Regular readers will recall I seldom said a good word about Leo Varadkar, whom I considered too laid back to be a leader.
But, like economist John Maynard Keynes, when the facts change, I change. And if Leo continues to act with good authority, I will change my mind.
And many floating voters will do the same.
‘A full-blown public sector campaign for pay rises could trigger our next financial Armageddon’