Why these three will play a crucial role in the next election. And why it will dramatically change the country
I CHOSE to make my home here and care deeply about this republic, but potentially seismic changes are imminent and not all of them for the better. The past, Sinn Féin and Fianna Fáil would have us believe, is another country but the future is now being shaped from recent history as the public confronts the self-serving and dishonest politics of successive governments. Established political parties, including this Government, which was elected because it promised to stop the rot, have let down their traditional supporters so badly, for so long, they are now tempted to make radical choices that they would never have contemplated before.
How else can you explain people’s willingness to give their votes to completely untried and often eccentric independents? How else can the stellar rise in the popularity of Sinn Féin be explained when its leader, Gerry Adams, is questioned about the abduction and murder of a widowed mother of 10 children?
The Adams arrest throws up revealing insights into the darker corners of Sinn Féin’s internal workings.
The response of Sinn Féin to its leader’s arrest makes sense only when you know that it was his former brothers and sisters in arms (and not just Dolours Price and Brendan Hughes) who identified Adams as the IRA commander in Belfast. It was Dolours Price and Brendan Hughes, two of his closest comrades in the IRA’s Belfast Brigade but later two of the most vehement opponents of the peace process, who accused Adams of sanctioning the kidnap and murder of Jean McConville in December 1972.
Six months earlier, in June 1972, Adams had been released from prison and secretly flown to London alongside the most senior IRA leaders for talks with the British government.
Adams denies any involvement in the murder of Mrs McConville. He also denies that he was ever even a member of the IRA.
His poker-face denials fly in the face of logic, the testimony of former IRA members who served with him and the informed opinion of security services of this republic and Britain.
Both the British and Irish security services had infiltrated the IRA at its most senior levels and had detailed knowledge of Adams’s influence, influence as a member of the ruling IRA Army Council.
Not everyone is convinced that a back-to-the-future shock like Adams’s arrest will, in the medium and long term, stymie support for Sinn Féin.
It would, however, be deeply depressing if voters were prepared to suspend their judgment on Adams’s bloodsoaked past to send a horse’s-head-in-the-bed warning to conventional politicians.
Their willingness to put aside any such queasiness is a measure of the depth of frustration and antipathy towards the traditional parties. Yet even if Adams stepped down, his obvious successor, the estimable Mary Lou McDonald, would accelerate Sinn Féin’s popularity in the Republic. Disenchantment with the three parties that have dominated governments since the foundation of the State is written in every number of recent opinion polls.
Voters are considering such a radical switch because the estab- lished political parties have lost the trust of the electorate.
I suspect that the Anglo Irish Bank sentencing decision last week confirmed voters’ instincts that the people who govern them are not fit for purpose. THAT’S what happens when the people who run the country, both those elected to office and the salaried officials in the permanent government, fail to do their duty. And when there are no consequences for failure and, in some cases, failure is rewarded, punishment can only be delivered at the ballot box.
In that frontier justice, Sinn Féin will be the benefactor, not because of any innovative ideas it has but simply because it is not Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and most of all, not the Labour Party. What’s more, it is looking much more likely that voting choices in the European elections, the by-elections and local elections on May 23 may not be confined to a mid-term protest.
This could well be the first lurch in a profound shift in the politics of this Republic.
If a significant number of voters abandon the three main parties and that shift prevails after a general election expected in 2016, a different configuration of political interests will be voted into government.
A boost in the number of independents, more fringe parties plus a few eccentrics, and the resulting government would be an eclectic forum offering instability as a virtue. Think Italy.
That could happen if the electorate is more concerned with expelling politicians from office than carefully considering who will replace them in the Oireachtas.
This is a time for fresh ideas and for new people to step into the breach; this Republic needs root and branch reform but I’m not convinced there is a stomach for revolution.
The Anglo criminal trial concentrated minds about who did what in the 2008 banking crisis, but the absence of consequences was the shame that dared not speak its name.
A helter-skelter of incompetence from the Financial Regulator, through the Central Bank and into the Department of Finance leaped out from the evidence.
Look at the main players: Patrick Neary, who joined the Central Bank in 1971, had neither the skills nor, apparently, the intellect required for his job as financial regulator.
His deputy, Con Horan, was seconded to the European Banking Authority in London in the after-
math of the debacle but will return to the Central Bank later this year.
This was the team that permitted the illegal loan scheme and ‘led’ the convicted directors of Anglo Bank into ‘error and illegality’, according to the Judge Martin Nolan.
Elsewhere, their boss, John Hurley, had been secretary general at the Department of Finance until his appointment as governor of the Central Bank, so his promotion looked like Buggins’ turn in the civil service.
And there was Kevin Cardiff, a senior civil servant in the Department of Finance who was responsible for banking through the crisis of 2008.
Both Mr Neary and Mr Hurley were given enormous six-figure, tax-friendly handouts plus index-linked pensions worth millions on retirement and Mr Horan can expect the same when he retires.
Mr Cardiff was promoted to secretary general of the Department of Finance by the Fianna Fáil-led government and then elevated to the EU Court of Auditors by the Fine Gael-Labour coalition.
MEP Nessa Childers objected to Cardiff’s promotion and the scandalous treatment of her by the Labour Party led to her leaving it; maybe that is why she is topping the opinion polls.
A Labour Party TD will chair the Oireachtas inquiry into the banking crisis and the party lobbied hard in Europe for Mr Cardiff’s appointment to the EU Court of Auditors.
It’s difficult, therefore, to see either a Labour or Fine Gael TD asking embarrassing questions of, or making damning findings against, Mr Cardiff. The banking inquiry will hear much of the same sworn testimony from the same officials as the Anglo trial, which revealed nothing much more than truly shocking ineptitude. DOES anyone think Patrick Neary’s evidence to an Oireachtas inquiry would be any more illuminating than his sworn evidence in court? And whatever a banking inquiry unearths, there is one thing you can be sure of: there will be no consequences.
Consequences? No, business as usual: inevitable rewards and a notable absence of sanctions.
Even before they went into office in 2011, both government parties were making promises they knew they could never keep. Both the Taoiseach and the
Voters have found the old parties out. As long as spoof is their currency, they will continue to haemorrhage
support
Tánaiste were competing like bidders in an auction even though their election to government was a certainty.
Later, Pat Rabbitte said that making promises at elections was ‘what politicians do’; does that mean voters were mugs for believing them?
With just 19 days to polling, they were at it again.
Last week, Michael Noonan was hinting at tax cuts and the Labour Party was vacillating about water charges. James Reilly was adding a third tier to the health system by suggesting he would ease up on the cancellation of discretionary medical cards.
Do they really think that sceptical voters will believe them given the massive health cost over-runs and the escalating cost of the water levy?
Not everyone who goes into public life or public service is self-serving but the evidence of recent crises and failures has made cynics of too many citizens.
It is a terrifying irony: in the past the electorate was suspicions of new parties’ lack of experience in government; now, more of the electorate is prepared to be sympathetic to any party, independent or dissenter, precisely because they have not been in office.
Voters have found the old parties out. As long as spoof is their political currency, the recidivist old parties will haemorrhage support.
Given the very strong likelihood that, come the next election, we will be even more mutinous, you can only wonder aghast from what diverse array of untried Independents and newly popular parties the next multi-faceted coalition government will spring.