WATER CHARGES
Brendan O’Connor: Why we’re paying the price for politics
‘THE sooner you realise there’s only one business left in the world — the money business, just ones and zeros — the better off you’re gonna be.”
This is what Hamish Broker says to Mike Milligan at the end of the second series of the TV show Fargo. The show was a dizzying meditation on everything from the meaning of life to the corporate world. Hamish is the boss of corporate crime syndicate Mike Milligan, an enforcer who has just conquered a territory for them. Milligan’s reward is to be shown into an office with a typewriter and a pen on the desk and told that he will mainly be working now with the accounts department.
You can see Milligan’s disillusionment. Here is a bright guy, but one who specialises in killing people and getting things sorted. And now he is being told that’s grunt work, and he’s being promoted into the real business, the business of corporate life, the business of ones and zeroes.
There is increasingly a sense that there is only one business left in politics and that is the business of politics, which is the business of survival and getting re-elected and of ducking the blame for anything. Politics is just another manifestation of corporate life, where the solving of mundane problems is grunt work at best. The real business is survival. After all, what is the politician’s ultimate motivation? To get elected.
As a country, we face many threats at the moment. Indeed, if we were to do what our corporate friends do and apply a SWOT analysis to Ireland, one would worry about the weakness and threats more than one would take comfort in our strengths and opportunities.
But what do we get? We get Fianna Fail conducting a turf war over Bertie Ahern’s seeming intention to help out in his local constituency, with Micheal Martin making it clear that Bertie is associated with a past that Fianna Fail must move on from, while Chris Wall, one of Bertie’s associates, points out that Micheal is from that time, too, and maybe he should move on.
And we get a Fine Gael leader whose main focus seems to be hanging on to his leadership, while the main focus of his subordinate seems to be to run to newspapers saying how he must go, while various of his immediate satellites jockey for position.
To paraphrase Hamish Broker, the sooner we realise that there is only one business left in the world of politics, the better off we will be.
Which brings us to water charges. Another fine mess that seems to have very little to do with the wellbeing of the people and everything to do with the corporate/political axis and its need to thrive and survive and multiply.
So before we went anywhere, tens of millions were spent on consultants, on PR people, on laughter yoga, on bonuses, on all the things that thrive in the corporate world while the grunts do the work. The much-vaunted, very expensive billing system, which was apparently central to the success of the whole operation, which would look after the only business that counted, the ones and zeroes, turns out to have been somewhat of a disaster, hasn’t it? All it succeeded in doing is making half the country feel like eejits, and making the other half realise that if they if just refused point blank to obey the law, there was nothing much that anyone could do to them. So basically this expensive billing system sent the message that you would be an idiot to obey the law.
And that feeling is still there. It still festers. Half the people in the country are emboldened and feeling superior and smarter for not paying their bills, and the other half feel they have been made fools of. And the longer what Noonan calls this ‘dead cat’ is with us, the more annoyed they feel. The grunts are not happy. And meanwhile the politicians get on with the only business that counts, that of moving on and surviving. So the issue that concerns them now is not the massive waste of money, the huge errors of judgment. The issue facing them now is how to move on now, with as little damage done to their own game as possible.
Different ones are reacting in different ways. Coveney and Varadkar have taken the seemingly odd route of telling the half who feel like eejits that they will get nothing back and telling the half who think they were smart that they will be chased to the ends of the earth for their bills, opening up a kind of nightmare scenario where the Government becomes a kind of Scrooge-like debt collector, with Coveney as the face of it. The rationale here is presumably to not back down and admit they cocked up. Water charges in the form they were in were the right thing at the time and Varadkar and Coveney will prove this by seeing it through to the bitter end. Leo is even suggesting he would let this bad smell linger for years into the future by attaching water bills to people’s houses so they can’t be sold without paying the bill.
The men who deal with the only business left in the world, the money business, have a concept. It’s called sunk cost. It means that anything you’ve already lost in a course of action is gone and it’s not coming back. So you forget that and only think about any losses or gains from here on in when deciding how to move forward. Leo and Simon are clearly not accepting the notion of sunk cost. They need to keep this mistake going to prove it’s not a mistake.
Meanwhile, Fianna Fail is unsure what it needs to do right now in the best interests of its survival. It will come up with an official opinion on this once the committee on water charges has finished its deliberations. Fianna Fail has flip-flopped on water charges and is technically against them, but also against the people who are against them, and also wanting to look responsible, and also propping up a Government that is for water charges. It has been suggested now that its answer might be that we have water charges but that they be part of a property tax. This would enable Fianna Fail to do what is most important, which is to move on and survive. Interestingly, this was something first proposed by Phil Hogan, but it was deemed unworkable. Hogan has since been taken out of the field, out of grunt work and has been given an office with a typewriter and pen in Brussels. He is winning in the only game that matters.
Meanwhile, various other people — some Fine Gael TDs and Shane Ross — are up in arms, arguing that those who were made fools of should have their money given back to them.
They have clearly decided that the best way for them to survive is to go the populist route, to just move on from this mess as quickly as possible. They hope that people are mollified by getting their money back, and hope that people don’t ask too many questions about the colossal waste of money by the guys in the corporate game, hope that we can just forget about another gigantic cock-up. So while Leo and Simon want to refuse to admit there was a mistake, these guys want to buy themselves out of the mistake.
Whatever happens, just remember. None of this is about what is right and what is good for us. This is firefighting because they made a massive cock-up of what should have been a straightforward issue. And this is about the only business left in politics. Moving on, and surviving another day.
‘Whatever happens, just remember none of this is about what is right’