Martin must find his voice or keep taking flak for Leo’s errors
ON May 7, musician Ciarán Cooney flew to Glasgow to see his partner after a couple of months of physical separation. At Dublin Airport, he was asked to identify himself by gardaí who said they were carrying out immigration checks. A week later, his Pandemic Unemployment Payment (PUP) was docked.
The resulting furore about the sharing of such information between An Garda Síochána and the Department of Social Protection led to a car-crash interview with Minister Heather Humphreys on RTÉ’s News At One on Monday, in which she attempted to justify the policy, before an embarrassing U-turn the next day when she said anyone in receipt of PUP could indeed take two weeks’ holidays to a green-list country.
But what of the green list itself? Every minister interviewed always sticks to the line that we should not engage in non-essential travel, while the Department of Foreign Affairs’ website continues to explicitly state: ‘As of July 21, travel to a very limited set of locations is exempted from this advice.’
Confusion
It adds: ‘The security status for those locations to which nonessential travel can resume has been changed to “normal precautions” rating.’
Once again, this has led to all sorts of confusion and worry for many, who are naturally anxious to do the right thing for their families and communities, but unlikely to recover the cost of their holidays from insurers because there is no official advice against travelling to the likes of Italy and Cyprus.
Both issues highlight the problem facing the new Government – Taoiseach Micheál Martin has spent all of July firefighting problems that, with the exception of his handling of the Barry Cowen affair, are not of his own making. Instead, they have their roots in the previous government. It was Leo Varadkar who pressed for a State car for Simon Coveney, it was the previous government that stalled on putting out the green list and left it for the new administration to carry the can, and it was the previous government that did little to nothing at all to explain how schools could reopen next month.
Indeed, former education minister Joe McHugh was proudly boasting he had initiated talks about how best to achieve this at the very time children in much of Europe were already back in their classrooms. This all leaves Micheál Martin in something of a pickle.
It is the apparently God-given right of any government to blame the previous one for all the challenges it faces; let’s not forget that well into its own second term, the Fine Gael-led government was still blaming Fianna Fáil for the housing and homelessness crises, despite having had nine years to sort them out itself.
The Taoiseach could point the finger and in turn blame Fine Gael for mounting the purge against those on the PUP, for delivering mixed messaging about foreign travel, for leaving a massive mountain to climb just to get children back to classbased learning, for pulling a ‘one for the boys’ stunt of Minister Coveney’s car – but he can’t. He can’t do it because the previous government is part of the current one too, and who wants to look uncivil just as Civil War politics came to an end with a once-unthinkable truce?
The problem is that despite their many similarities, all that has happened in the first month of government is that the very real ideological differences between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are bubbling to the surface. In the normal course of events, these fault lines would probably not be noticed to the same extent, but these are not normal times. Over 200,000 people are still receiving PUP and, for many, it is the first time they have ever had to rely on State assistance to feed themselves and pay bills. They do not see taking a holiday as inherently wrong (though there are, of course, mixed views on whether anyone should be travelling abroad), because they have paid into the system and now, as per the social contract we all have with the State, feel they are getting the help they have paid for themselves.
Any attempted demonisation of people like Ciarán Cooney plays very badly. It is never a good look to be stripping a man of his only source of income because he made what many actually would consider an essential journey, to see his partner, at the very same time as a much-touted pay cut for TDs still leaves them on more money than they had in the last Dáil, because of a public sector pay increase in the meantime.
And, as if all that wasn’t enough, the third spoke on the already wobbly wheel comes in the shape of the Green Party. Yesterday, farcically, the party’s own whip, Neasa Hourigan, twice voted against the Government and, at the time of writing, says she still wants to remain in the Greens, though that might be wishful thinking.
Fightback
Micheál Martin must feel like he’s living in the monkey enclosure in Dublin Zoo given the number of banana skins underfoot, and he will surely be more delighted than most that the Dáil breaks up today for the summer recess. He has over 30 years of experience of national politics, as a TD, minister, leader of the Opposition and now Taoiseach, and he surely must use his time off to draw on that experience and start the fightback.
He is not responsible for creating many of the issues he now has to deal with, and he might just need to point that out, especially when – as was evident in his comments on the green list – Mr Varadkar certainly seems happy to throw the odd spanner in the works.
This Government is one with no clear identity, as it tries to balance the ambitions of all three partners in the coalition. As Taoiseach for two-and-a-half years, Micheál Martin has a very stark choice to ponder – to pretend everything is going swimmingly despite the strong undercurrents already evident, or to be more assertive and call out mistakes made by Fine Gael. That should give him plenty to think about on his holidays.