Enda’s long goodbye will severely taint his legacy
ALAN SHATTER gave an explosive interview on Friday’s Seán O’Rourke programme on RTÉ Radio 1, where he proclaimed: ‘The unfortunate reality is that in some areas, the Taoiseach has a casual relationship with the truth.’ It strikes yet another crippling blow to the Taoiseach’s political reputation. We should remember that Shatter supported Enda Kenny in the 2010 Fine Gael leadership election and was subsequently rewarded with the post of justice minister in March 2011. He resigned in May 2014 after he received the report of Seán Guerin into allegations by Garda whistleblowers about the penalty points system. It can perhaps best be defined as the nadir of that Fine Gael-Labour government.
It does, on the face of it, seem extraordinary that Guerin did not interview the then minister for justice as part of his investigation into the whole affair. The Court of Appeal agreed with Shatter, stating that the conclusions in the Guerin Report were reached in breach of fair procedures and constitutional and natural justice. A clearly vindicated Shatter was not long in wreaking his revenge on the Taoiseach.
But Kenny does have a point when, in rejecting Shatter’s damning ‘casual with the truth’ remark, he reminded people that, on resigning as minister, Shatter stated that the Taoiseach was an ‘extraordinary’ man doing an ‘extraordinary job’ on behalf of the Irish people.
All of this hardens the view that the Taoiseach should have left the national stage at the end of last summer. While few among us would voluntarily give up the top job, sometimes it’s just better to go and go quickly. As the water charges stand-off between those blue bloods of Irish politics, Simon Coveney and Barry Cowen, showed during the week, the confidence-and-supply deal remains a delicate work in progress, which will clearly collapse at some point of either Fine Gael’s or Fianna Fáil’s choosing.
Notwithstanding Fine Gael’s slight recovery in the polls, the Taoiseach’s long goodbye over the next two months will be tainted by the disastrous events of the last few weeks and the shadow of the Charleton tribunal, which will loom large when Kenny’s legacy is being discussed.
THE ratings agency Moody’s rather breathlessly announced during the week that Ireland was the EU country most at risk from Brexit. Warning that some form of border controls between the North and the Republic are likely to re-emerge to disrupt trade, and Moody’s also darkly announced that an overhaul of US corporate taxes could reduce the flow of investments by US multinationals and harm Irish public finances. This is as classic a statement of the bleeding obvious as I have seen in some time. There has long been a problem with these agencies.
They were incredibly bullish about the Irish economy’s prospects just before the crash in 2008. Then, during the dark days of the Troika, they were full of dire warnings about our poor benighted country’s future.
Anyone who has seen the movie The Big Short, which tells the story of the financial crisis and housing bubble in the US, will have been struck by the scene in which the representative of a ratings agency says that if they don’t grant a triple-A rating to a particular Wall Street bank then that bank will simply take its business elsewhere. Ratings agencies survived the crash better than most and still make money. One can only wonder why.
My golfing namesake Gary Murphy, the former European tour professional from Kilkenny, told RTÉ’s Morning Ireland on Thursday: ‘If you’re a cheater in golf it’s probably the worst thing that can ever be said of you.’ This might well be the case at the 19th hole, but the adage hardly travels to the world of high politics where it never mattered a jot to either of those avid golfers, Bill Clinton, left, or Donald Trump. The ESPN analyst Rick Reilly famously called Trump a scurrilous cheater on the golf course whose only rival in this regard was Bill Clinton, a man well known for his use of a mulligan or 12. While Clinton and Trump vociferously denied any shenanigans on the golf course it seems that the millions who voted for both men weren’t too bothered by the ‘cheater’ tag. Still, the alickadoos in the golf clubs can tut away to their hearts’ content.
THE sad death of the former Fine Gael and independent TD Peter Mathews during the week at the relatively young age of 65 sparked a memory of a spirited joust I had with him on RTÉ’s Late Debate programme a few years ago.
In January 2015, Mathews proposed a radical Bill to give TDs and senators freedom of conscience in votes. He proposed a referendum to amend the Constitution, modelled on a sentence in the German Constitution, stating that all members of the Oireachtas will be ‘representatives of the whole people, not bound by orders or instructions, and responsible only to their own consciences’.
In hyperbolic terms, Mathews introduced his Bill declaring that the political parties ‘are not allowing for the organic breathing of liberty and democracy’.
I gently pointed out to him that inserting vague clauses into constitutions was generally not a very good idea – the Eighth Amendment, anybody?
The Mathews amendment, as I suggested it would be called, was based around his strong conviction that the Irish people had been done a grave disservice in relation to bailing out bondholders and his unease about the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Bill, which ultimately led him to lose the Fine Gael whip and become an independent.
He lost his seat at the 2016 election but he certainly livened up Irish politics during his term in the Dáil. Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam.