There’s now another way of seeing things

The success of the FF/FG twins depended for decades on the story they sold us, but it’s clear now it’s a fairytale, writes Gene Kerrigan

POLITICS today is a battle of marketing skills. It’s a competition between storytellers. Each party tries to concoct stories that will make them look good.

And stories that will make the other crowd look bad.

Preferably those stories should be true, but if the marketing people have to play around with the facts — ah, well... sure, it’s all in the game.

Notions of truth and lies have little to do with all this — it’s all about credibility.

If you can fake that, you’re in with a chance.

Fine Gael tells a story of Fianna Fail crashing the economy — and they leave out the bit about how they competed with Fianna Fail in revving up the Celtic

Tiger nonsense.

But that’s okay, because Fianna Fail has concocted a story about how they’ve renewed the party. They’ve served their penance and they’re ready to take over from that awful shower that can get nothing done.

The stories over which they have argued during the past three weeks have only a distant relationship to the country in which we live.

They are made-up stories about where we are and how we got here, and they have no other function than to convince people long enough to vote for them.

In marketing terms, it’s called “controlling the narrative”.

And that’s where the twin parties who have controlled this country for almost a hundred years have a problem.

Look around.

The evidence is all over the place. Last Friday, to pluck a random example, Tom Lyons, from The Currency, tweeted startling statistics from an analysis the website has published.

Between 2010 and 2019 the steepest rise in USA rents occurred in Aurora, Colorado. There, rents rose 70pc.

But in Cork, in that period, they rose 84pc. In Galway 90pc. And in Dublin, rents rose a staggering 100pc.

And what are the consequences?

Here, in an extortionate housing market, one person in 10 now spends 60pc of their income on rent.

Many today are working not for their children, they’re working to make landlords, investors, bankers and builders richer. And thousands, squeezed out of this narrative of greed, are homeless.

The story that Fine

Gael and Fianna Fail have concocted, the narrative they control, and which the media largely supports, is one of success and progress.

Yes, it says, Fianna Fail blundered before 2008, but they’ve learned lessons.

And Fine Gael are now the pragmatic, capable people. Between them, they take turns correcting each other’s errors, and the country is basically in good nick, despite the “yelps” of the dissenting left.

There’s just a few persistent, annoying problems they’ve had trouble shaking off (housing costs run amok, public health service in perpetual crisis). But, give them time, give them time, perhaps another hundred years.

There are enough of us comfortably off, many of whom choose to believe this narrative, so they limp on.

But, clearly, from the above rental statistics alone, this narrative is tosh. The twin parties of smug complacency have led us into a swamp of deep, deep excrement.

Gradually, another narrative about how things are, and how they got to be this way, has been attracting support. And, in this General Election, the support for that narrative became enough to unsettle the establishment.

I’m writing this at lunchtime yesterday. The exit poll and the actual vote will tell to what extent that unsettling was a momentary occurrence, and to what extent it might reflect an urge for systemic change.

What’s clear is that the old narrative is no longer taken as gospel, handed down from Fianna Fail and Fine Gael.

The alternative narrative might run something like this.

After five or six decades of introspection and stagnation, this country looked outward. And we eventually connected with the global economy.

This was followed by a scrum of corruption, as ambitious builders and politicians cooperated in fleecing us.

In the 1980s, a complex network of tax frauds saw a huge transfer of wealth from the mass of the people to the covetous classes — huge numbers of those who owned property, those who lived off rents and dividends. The cream of the commercial class, the professional class, and some politicians.

We paid taxes, they didn’t, but they thrived on the benefits.

This continued into the 1990s. The Tribunals uncovered some of it — there’s evidence the organised criminality was much more widespread.

In that period, many of the fortunes were formed that allow the rich to exploit the housing crisis today.

Through all this, with multiple crimes uncovered, involving billions of euros, few were charged, hardly anyone went to jail. A failure to use State power that remains unexamined.

Meanwhile, Mr Varadkar warned us of “benefit cheats”. And in Jobstown, working class people who engaged in an over-long and raucous but peaceful protest, sitting in front of a car, were charged with false imprisonment — a use of State power that remains unexamined.

Today, there is in place a conglomeration of homegrown professionals and overseas corporations, who between them, are managing perfectly legal tax dodges, the legality of which is arranged by a cooperative State.

This has made this country notorious among tax-compliant people worldwide.

Whatever the project — be it a children’s hospital, a road or a Dart rejuvenation — hundreds of millions are added to costs.

That money doesn’t evaporate. It follows a wellworn path into the bank accounts of the rich, and a confident, fantastically overpaid, greedy, and demanding professional class.

When trouble hit, the centrist parties imposed austerity for a decade.

In that austerity lifeboat, some went hungry while others had more meals than they could eat.

The parties of complacency pushed back the programme giving girls the vaccine that can prevent cervical cancer.

Children needing operations had to wait, and deteriorate, in pain. There were more important things to worry about.

Bankers’ pay was capped at half a million (in 2018 the Government put out a tender for a €144,000 report, to see if they could get away with paying bankers more).

These are more than mere competing narratives. These are two worlds, occupying one space.

In that space, the more powerful, using its wealth and connections, benefits grossly, while others eat their dinner off a cardboard table on a Dublin pavement.

This General Election has seen a collision of narratives. Whatever the outcome — and I’m always pessimistic — the alternative narrative is finally in the game.

‘The austerity parties pushed back giving girls the vaccine that can prevent cervical cancer’

‘We have home-grown professionals managing perfectly legal tax dodges — the legality of which is arranged by a cooperative State’