FG can’t pin its incompetence on rear view mirror politics

WHEN former taoiseach Enda Kenny launched a blistering attack on Fianna Fáil’s record in government a few weeks before the 2016 general election it was clear that such criticism was already showing signs of wear and tear.

In a call-to-arms Kenny reminded Fine Gael members and election candidates that Fianna Fáil had destroyed the country and left an ‘economic cesspit’ behind them.

It was all true, of course. But even then it was beginning to sound like a history lesson.

Fianna Fáil had been savaged in the 2011 general election a full five years earlier. They had paid a high price for their demonstrable uselessness, for their woeful mismanagement of the economy, for their hob-nobbing and Galway tenting with big business and for their calamitous breach of trust with the people of Ireland.

What Enda Kenny failed to recognise in 2016, however, was that he had been in charge of the country for a full term – five long years. Despite all his talk about fiscal rectitude the place was still in rag order. And it was about to get a lot worse with a rapidly developing homelessness crisis and a thoroughly dysfunctional and dangerous health service.

PEOPLE were growing weary of Fine Gael excuses for their own appalling failures and the results of the 2016 election made that perfectly clear. Fine Gael dropped 16 seats, Fianna Fáil increased theirs by 23 and the two big parties were essentially neck and neck in their share of the vote, with just 1.2% of a margin to the Fine Gael.

Following Enda Kenny’s departure, Leo Varadkar has continued to rely on attacking Fianna Fáil for the economic disaster of 2008 as a means of elevating his own status as a leader with competence.

During his Fine Gael ard fheis speech in November Taoiseach Varadkar blamed Fianna Fáil for the housing crisis, referring to busted banks, ghost estates, pyrite, Priory Hall, builders on the dole and massive negative equity. By that point Fianna Fáil had been out of government for nearly EIGHT years.

Varadkar’s excuse making – that he inherited a mess from Fianna Fáil – had by now lost all traction with the men and women who get up early and suffer multiple tortures like exhorbitant creche fees and traffic tailbacks on their way to work. Rear-view mirror politics had passed its sell-by date.

Now, the longer Varadkar and Fine Gael stay in power the more people will realise that this Government is entirely unexceptional in terms of its capacity to govern.

They match Fianna Fáil in the one way we wish they didn’t – incompetence. And if you ever needed proof for that, then I’ve two words for you: Children’s Hospital.

Sadly, the Government’s extraordinary ineptitude is not just confined to Health Minister Simon Harris’s failure to recognise a disaster when he saw one at the end of August last year when told of a potential over-run of €391m in the hospital’s build cost.

One is entitled to ask what Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe was up to? As the bookkeeper he should have been all over this like a rash. The fact that he wasn’t suggests an equal dereliction on his part.

At the same time the nurses’ strike has escalated into the red zone where lives could be lost – a mismanaged dispute with finger prints matching Harris and Donohoe all over it.

Meanwhile, the Taoiseach reminds us on a regular basis of how politically naive and cackhanded he really is.

On cervical cancer he pledged that no woman would be dragged through the courts. Untrue. Because, shamefully, that’s precisely what’s occurring.

HE SAID that Joanne Hayes would be compensated for the trauma she endured from gardaí and from a judge at the Kerry Babies Tribunal 34 years ago. Untrue. Because State lawyers now insist there’ll be no compensation, just an ‘ex-gratia’ payment out of the goodness of their hearts.

And then he declared – in another blundering but wilful attempt to court popularity – that names would be named when it comes to assigning accountability for the disaster that is the Children’s Hospital.

Again, untrue. Nobody will be named because the law won’t allow it. Because multiple judicial interventions insist on ‘fair process’, and frown on the kind of scapegoating envisaged by Varadkar. But the Taoiseach should have known that already.

Laughing and joking with Donald Tusk over his reckless ‘special place in hell’ condemnation of Brexiteers of a certain stripe was beyond politically stupid.

He was like an ordinary bloke in the presence of a celebrity, desperate to play it cool and not make a fool of himself, but as always happens to him in such moments he was a picture of gurning gauchness. It was excruciating.

Less Leo the lion, and more Leo the fawn.

Fine Gael, after eight years in government, has adopted all the traits of empty-headed incompetence we thought we had banished in 2011.

The longer they go on the more they’re being found out.