NONSENSICAL DECISION TO LET FANS IN
FORMER CABINET MINISTER AND BLACKROCK MAN, DERMOT AHERN TALKS TO JOHN MULLIGAN ABOUT THE COVID-19 CRISIS
THE passage of time waits for no man.
It is no different for anyone, man, woman or child.
For Dermot Ahern, former goverment minister from 1997 until 2011, the current COVID-19 crisis must have brought him back to his time at the cabinet table, the pressures and challenges that come with the job, particularly in a time of national crisis.
However speaking from his Blackrock home via a WhatsApp video call, he concedes that once removed from the bubble of politics and particularly Leinster House, you realise just how insular that particular world can become.
‘When you leave politics it’s funny you come to realise that everything doesn’t revolve around Leinster House, people are getting on with their lives, have other interests in fact. Sometimes people go out of their way to avoid it and they only really begin to pay attention to politicians when there is a budget, an election, or there’s a crisis.
‘Other than that, they don’t really care who’s in government as long as their futures were looked after.
Now however there is a crisis, a monumental one, in public health and the economy and certainly there’s an interest in politics, with a caretaker government in place making unprecdented decisions in relation to spending and over 100 days having lapsed since the February General Election, as talks on a new coalition government trickle on at a snail’s pace.
Having served in numerous departments as a full minister under Bertie Ahern and then Brian Cowen, the Blackrock man, has unique experience in assessing how the interim government under Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has dealt with the crisis and in general he suggests they have done very well although he has some very pointed observations in relation to nursing homes, the delay in introducing travel restrictions at the outset of the crisis and what he believes is a very conservative approach to unwinding the lockdown.
‘It’s very hard to tick every box and I think initially the whole thing was to make sure that the hospitals were able to cope and because of that, I think to a certain extent they did take their eye off the ball a little bit in relation to nursing homes’.
‘Having had experience in nursing homes, both as a politician but also as a family, I was aware of the difficulties that nursing homes would have and I was a little bit surprised listening to TV and radio in the initial phases that the nursing home organisation and private nursing home organisation had difficulty getting meetings with people.
‘I would have thought that that was particularly given. That’s not as a matter of criticism, it’s just a comment.
Like so many, he has concerns about the level of financial support provided by the Government and how it will be paid for in the long term, although he insists it was absolutely the right thing to do in the extraordinary circumstances.
‘ There will be a day of reckoning unfortunately and having been around the cabinet table for 14 and a half years, I can just visualise the Department of Finance officials will be extremely worried about how this is all going to be paid for’.
As a former Minister for Social Welfare in a Department second only to the Department of Health in terms of spending, he is acutely aware that any changes to any benefit would have huge budgetary impacts, ‘ there’s no doubt anomalies have been thrown up by the €350 payment particularly, but those will ironed out eventually’ but he adds, ‘in fairness it’s given people an income to those that have lost their jobs’.
More specificially however he says that there must be EU solidarity in how to tackle the economic challenges that lie ahead.
‘We will have a large very large debt, but we will be able to spread it out over a much longer period because this is not just exclusive to just a few countries, it’s worldwide and the EU has the financial muscle to push this debt out into the future’.
Such solidarity wasn’t evident in the initial stages of the pandemic as individual states locked their borders and one of the cornerstones of the EU - the freedom of movement of people - was unilaterally curtailed, with Italy feeling very abandoned by their European partners.
‘ The freedom of movement particularly that we’ve all been used to under the European Union has all been blown away by the virus, and a lot of the countries themselves in the initial stages decided to close our borders.
‘We were a bit reluctant to do that, possibly wrongly so, because we always tend to try to be good Europeans.
He is critical of the decision to allow Italian rugby supporters who had booked trips for the cancelled Six Nations match into the country and for the Cheltenham festival to proceed as madness with the image of ‘Italians walking around Dublin nonsensical’.
Such EU solidarity was missing too, post the financial crash when in the view of very many Ireland was sacrified in order to protect larger member states.
‘I would be a strong supporter of the EU and I heard a lot of talk about solidarity amongst all the nations of Europe and actually said it at our cabinet meetings at the time, where’s all this talk of solidarity, we’ve been thrown to the wolves. I believe we were thrown to the wolves by Trichet and the ECB who gave us no support. The European institutions weren’t that helpful. Some of our colleague countries weren’t that helpful in assisting us and were prepared, because we were a relatively small country we were sacrificed and you know, there was an element of that, this time when Italy were in trouble and there wasn’t proper coordination.
Reflecting back on the financial crisis, he says, ‘ There was a jealousy of how a small country with four and a half million people could get the level of foreign direct investment we were getting.
‘We talked about that we were an English speaking country, well educated, the very flexible workforce that we had, but also our taxation regime, which, was a magnet for other countries. Some countries did try and replicate it but we suffered for that from some of our European neighbours when the times got tough for us, that they made huge efforts during the financial crisis, to get us to change our 12.5% corporation tax. I mean we were nearly bribed I recall by some of the larger countries and to change it, as a quid pro quo for help’.
With the second phase of the unwinding of the lockdown to commence next week, he has mixed views on what he describes as a very conversative approach by the government, believing theat the restrictions must be unwound more quickly.
‘We’ve seen the officials coming out every day in the press conferences and I must say they’re very impressive. I knew one or two of them. They’ve impressed us all with their logic and also the way that they’ve expressed some of the sentiments as well. It’s not easy for them.
‘I think we’ve been very, very conservative and I’m one of those people who think that, we should open up a little bit more, to be honest because while the spread of the virus in the community is awful, it’s gone down to virtually nothing.
‘I look at the figures every day that are given on a website and looking particularly at countries like Denmark and Germany and you know they’ve opened up and their figures are still going down there to virtually nothing. I think that there is a template for us’.
However he is concerned that the different strategies north and south of the border create practical difficulties in steering a course back to a new normality.
‘It’s disappointing the situation on the island, it’s 14 days quarantine here and it’s only seven of the north and so on. The conditions and the restrictions are not the same, we should be in lockstep. The island should be treated as one core, for this health crisis.
‘Unfortunately, you know the political system in the North is
WHEN YOU LEAVE POLITICS IT’S FUNNY YOU COME TO REALISE THAT EVERYTHING DOESN’T REVOLVE AROUND LEINSTER HOUSE, PEOPLE ARE GETTING ON WITH THEIR LIVES
such that, a lot of the time they can’t really get agreement amongst each other, so you can see why they can’t get agreement with us and it is a pity because when you look at the examples of New Zealand and Iceland particularly, we had an ideal opportunity when this thing started to close down our borders around the island of Ireland but didn’t and I think that was a big failing of the political system’.
Looking further down the road, he is confident that the conditions are correct for the Irish economy to bounce back from the shock and lockdown which commenced in March.
‘We’re lucky in that we have the ability to borrow at very low interest rates, so if you take one of the things that are going on in the negotiations for the formation of government and that is to put in a big injection of borrowed money into infrastructure. That is as it should be, because that will create the jobs.
‘It’s not like during the banking crisis when we couldn’t borrow. because every other country in the world is in a similar position. We are probably in a better position to do those things. I think government has to put a wee bit more into small businesses. They’re the lifeblood of our economy, even though we rely very heavily on foreign direct investment from companies outside the country, and at the same time I think this crisis has shown that we need to be as self sufficient as a country as possible in every aspect’
‘I am hopeful that we’ll turn the corner reasonably quickly. I mean I hear all this about another wave and all of that, but I do think we’d be better prepared the next time if it does happen. And that’s why I would be optimistic, as somebody who is somewhat pessimistic in his life’.
‘I think, you know, one of the things that this crisis has brought us all back to is that community and family is so important and it’s more important than, perhaps maybe some of the things that we thought were essential in our life and they’re not’.
Like everyone else he has found lockdown difficult, missing seeing his grandchildren and important milestones in his daughter’s life.
Not an official cocooner, in the plus 70 age category, the 65-yearold says, ‘I have rheumatoid arthritis, so that’s an auto-immune disease, and I’m on medication for that so I’m one of those listed and was advised to cocoon’.
In fact he had underwent a knee replacement operation last December and was cocooning for two and a half months prior to the commencement of the lockdown in March.
‘We stuck to our two kilometres and we went for a walk early in the morning or in the evening and I have to say it was a bit of a benefit for my knee recovery because, I needed to walk a lot in order to get the knee moving, because I hadn’t got a great prognosis after the operation’.
‘I couldn’t meet my grandchildren, which was a big thing. They only live 500 yards from ourselves and would be regularly in our house, nearly on a daily basis and we couldn’t meet them for weeks, so that was a little bit difficult and also my youngest daughter who is a nurse in the Mater Hospital and she hasn’t been home. And in the meantime, she’s bought her house and moved into the house and got engaged, and had her 30th birthday so we couldn’t celebrate any of that.’