We’ve muddled along for decades but politics could deliver changes in 2018

This year promised political storms and upheaval but turned out more ‘sunny spells and scattered showers’, writes Eoin O’Malley

EVENTS normally flow rather than jump. We expect things to muddle along most of the time with major changes only happening intermittently. 2017 promised to be a year of political upheaval. Trump took office and the triggering of Article 50 made Brexit real. There was to be further advances in populism, with the threat of Marine Le Pen in France.

At home few thought Enda Kenny’s government could last the year, as ‘New Politics’ would implode under the pressure of its own ineffectiveness. A few of the more deluded thought that Ireland may even take some tentative steps to leaving the EU.

In Northern Ireland the year started with Martin McGuinness bringing down the Northern Ireland executive, with Arlene Foster under an ash cloud of suspicion. We were certain something big would happen, probably the departure of Foster, perhaps even the eclipse of the DUP.

But a bit like the now ubiquitous Met Eireann weather warning, it all ended in “sunny spells and scattered showers”. Political events bumped along. Trump didn’t declare World War III, the impact of Brexit thus far is neither as bad as the harbingers of gloom warned nor as wondrous as its supporters had hoped; “My Granny and Granddad voted for Brexit, and all I got was this blue passport”.

A constant in Ireland was the Garda. Enda Kenny started 2017 with promises that there would be a ‘root-and-branch’ review of the force. This followed revelations of the treatment of Garda Maurice McCabe, how it dealt with and recorded traffic offences and what the Department of Justice did or didn’t know. By March, Kenny was ‘not happy’, and Frances Fitzgerald was under pressure to explain how she only found out so late about what happened. In April, Kenny was again answering questions as he denied that he forced the former Garda Commissioner, Martin Callinan, from his job. This barely credible claim put Kenny under further pressure to step down. The Garda scandal almost certainly cut short his tenure as Taoiseach. By the time he was going in May, Kenny admitted ‘all is not well’ in the Garda.

And latterly the ongoing Garda controversies took out another commissioner, a Tanaiste and threatened a Christmas general election. McGuinness, Fitzgerald and Kenny now seem like historical figures. Politics has an imperative to move forward; there’s no place for sentiment.

Leo Varadkar’s easy victory in the Fine Gael leadership election showed him to be a clever and strategic political operator. But he got sentimental in his dealings with Frances Fitzgerald, and he handled her departure ineptly. It was luck rather than skill that freed him from a Christmas election. He looks to be damaged, certainly his parliamentary party won’t assume he always knows best.

But they might not care if polls seem to go in Fine Gael’s favour. Varadkar inevitably had a honeymoon, and the international media loved the idea of a young, gay, son of an Indian immigrant becoming Taoiseach. He started off well, offering in a ‘Republic of Opportunity’ not just a neat slogan, but a slogan that encapsulates a popular political idea — that everyone should be given the chance to have their hard work rewarded.

The polls before Varadkar took over as leader had a preponderance to give Fianna Fail a lead, but since then show Fine Gael consistently in the lead, and that lead is growing.

Despite the new government’s youthful vigour, it is a reactive government that can’t do much without the approval of a divided opposition. No number of announcements will get away from the problem that the Government is a ‘policy taker’. It hasn’t yet learned how to use the opposition’s division to push bold, controversial proposals that set the opposition awkward choices — be seen to oppose something that might be popular or might work.

Instead it concentrates on small stuff, and nothing showed a lack of ambition like setting the hosting of the Rugby World Cup 2023 as a key goal. It’s certainly a laudable aspiration, but should rank low on a list of priorities.

And how has the Government tried to deliver the Republic of Opportunity? Some increases in spending on pupil-teacher ratios make sense, but they are no more than reversals of past cuts. The Government continues to lack imagination or ambition in dealing with social welfare, where no one is willing to criticise or oppose ongoing increases in unemployment assistance, old age pensions or child benefit.

Despite the rhetoric, it’s been unwilling to take on the assumption that there’s significant material poverty in the country. Yet there are few who want for basics because of a lack of money. There are other problems in their lives. Continuing the significant cash transfers to young unemployed, the well-off elderly, or the parents of kids does little to deliver a Republic of Opportunity, but that’s just what this year’s budget did. The Government showed itself unwilling to take money off these programmes and put it into ones that could really work, such as early childhood education.

And the real problem hindering young people must be the cost of rents in cities and the paucity of good jobs outside the cities. There was no shortage of ministers seen in hard hats with sleeves rolled up in 2017, but Simon Coveney left the department with no real movement on the problem, and despite renaming the department to include Housing, there’s no sense of a government thinking big. The Government might say that all those little things will make a difference, and they might, but it could just be the result of economic growth and builders reacting (slowly) to supply the pent-up demand.

That economic growth continued unabated in 2017. It was not all Leprechaun Economics. Job and wage growth is in evidence. All that extra revenue for the Government meant it didn’t have to think too hard about what it does.

One area where the Government has been thinking and performed well is on Brexit. It successfully tied Ireland to the European Union negotiators’ mast. The nonsense coming from the UK has made it easy for the Irish to look reasonable and Varadkar didn’t lose any votes in criticising the British.

Brexit also showed the pointlessness of the position Sinn Fein put itself in. It brought down a Northern Ireland executive, but is now no more than a spectator on Brexit, an issue that looks like it will do more to deliver Irish unity than its violence ever did. Meanwhile, the DUP has become more powerful, yet the DUP appears to be doing Sinn Fein’s work for it in destabilising the wrong Union, the United Kingdom, rather than the European Union.

In keeping with the Government’s approach of doing trivial things because it’s too cautious to do big ones, was its announcement that it will hold eight referendums in the next two years. Most are irrelevant, but there’s one significant one on repealing the Eighth Amendment, where the Government, maybe wisely, took a cautious approach. Having pushed the issue to a citizens’ assembly, it then handed it to an Oireachtas Committee.

The committee’s proposals didn’t appear remarkable when they were delivered a few weeks ago, but they might have done at the start of 2017. More remarkable has been the changes of mind in many people’s sincerely held views. And after 35 years of muddling along and messing up, it looks like politics could deliver a real change in 2018. That will be quite a leap. Dr Eoin O’Malley is the Director of MSc in Public Policy School of Law and Government, DCU

‘Growth continued in 2017. It was not all Leprechaun Economics’