Ross the radical? He’s far more like the Healy-Raes

AREVIEW of all 139 Garda stations closed since 2011 was included as part of the deal Fine Gael reached with the Independent Alliance in the tortuous negotiations for government a year ago. At the end of those 70 days of negotiations, the de facto leader of the alliance, Shane Ross, was appointed Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport.

The following month, the Government agreed to guidelines for a process that would reopen six of these stations. Why six has never really been made clear. Now, to absolutely no one’s surprise, it seems that Stepaside Garda Station in the Dublin Rathdown constituency is one of the chosen six agreed to by Garda management and signed off on by Commissioner Nóirín O’Sullivan. Stepaside just happens to be in Minister Ross’s constituency. Moreover, his effort to have it reopened was central to his re-election campaign.

Drawing a dystopian vision of gangs of burglars roaming south Dublin, Ross claimed in the Dáil in 2015 there had been an ‘epidemic of burglaries’ in Stepaside since the station closed down some two years earlier. Ross’s emotional calls easily outstripped the calm, rational arguments put forward by his constituency rival, former minister for justice, Alan Shatter for why it had been closed and why the closure of Garda stations all across the country made sense. After all, the original Garda station model dates to the late 19th century. Ross topped the poll, Shatter lost his seat.

THE politics of the parish pump is not only alive and well in Ireland, it is thriving. It just lives in the shadow of openness and transparency as, after all, this is an operational decision taken by the Commissioner and has nothing to do with Cabinet government. Ross has been the great crusader of Irish public life during his time in both Seanad and Dáil on the opposition benches. It is worth remembering that he has been a member of the Oireachtas since 1981. On his election to the Dáil in 2016, he proclaimed that the citizens of Dublin Rathdown were looking for radical reform, saying his was a positive vote for ‘let’s do something radical, let’s do something different’.

The result of that difference and radical zeal has been a breaching of Cabinet collective responsibility on abortion, a decision not to intervene in the Bus Éireann dispute as, after all, why would a transport minister get involved in such a thing, and ensuring a Garda review of the closure of Garda stations, the result of which will benefit his own constituents. When it comes to constituency-minding, the radicals it seems are just the same as everyone else in Irish politics.

A final thought: Can you imagine the outrage among the metropolitan elites if the Healy-Raes secured the opening of a rural Garda station in South Kerry?

WHAT is the point of the Dáil? There is an old Danish joke that suggests the best way for a deputy to keep something secret is to announce it from the rostrum of the parliament as it is then certain that no one will hear it. The joke travels pretty well to Ireland.

Thursday’s Dáil debate on the Tuam babies scandal had to be delayed for 10 minutes as not enough deputies were in the house to make the quorum of 20. Given the nature of the discussion on the ‘significant remains’ found in a sewage system at the ‘mother and baby home’ (never was something so badly named), it beggars belief that near panic broke out in the struggle to get enough deputies into the chamber to allow the debate to take place.

If deputies won’t turn up to this debate, what will they turn up to, we might well ask.

The low turnout is reflective of a wider problem in Irish politics and one that goes to the heart of the dysfunctional relationship between TDs and the Dáil they sit in. For the vast majority of TDs, the Dáil is little more than an inconvenience. A place where they have to go and vote every so often on bills they may not understand or even care about.

For the newly elected TD, particularly those from outside Dublin, once they get over the first day’s excitement of photographs with friends and family, the Dáil is that place in Dublin that they have to put up with for a few days before they can get back to their constituencies and tend their seats.

New politics was supposed to change this relationship. The reality, however, is that an aura of inertia surrounds the Dáil which has become a place Government and opposition TDs alike treat like a luxury holiday home.

The Tuam babies outrage is but part of a milestone in tackling the darker chapters of our past, including both Catholic and Protestant mother and baby homes and the truly hideous saga of illegal adoptions with the shipping of babies to the US.

Last Thursday’s Dáil debate should have been the beginning of this process and demanded a full turnout. The fact that so few TDs could be bothered turning up speaks volumes.

ENDA KENNY has made a number of very fine speeches in the Dáil over the years and he was at it again during the week with his stirring words on the Tuam babies scandal.

He caught the national mood with his description of the mother and baby home as ‘a chamber of horrors’ and a ‘social and cultural sepulchre’. But yet.

Kenny’s July 2011 speech criticising the Vatican for frustrating the work of the Cloyne inquiry into how both Catholic Church and State authorities handled allegations of abuse in the Co. Cork diocese was widely hailed at the time. The speech was an unprecedented attack on the Vatican by an Irish politician, and a devoutly Catholic one at that.

This week it was revealed that the Catholic religious congregations who ran residential institutions where children were abused have paid just 13% of the costs of a redress scheme set up to help survivors.

Words are all fine and good but citizens will and should be rightly suspicious of them given the revelation that the Christian Brothers have withdrawn an offer to transfer land worth €127m to the State as part of the deal struck in 2009. All this goes to show that words travel only so far.

The religious orders seem indifferent to the overtures of our politicians. They would take more notice if the Dáil moved to abolish the indemnity deal struck with Church institutions by Fianna Fáil minister Michael Woods in 2002, and went after the money. It is time politicians stopped pontificating and started legislating. YOUR columnist found himself at Vicar Street on Thursday night attending the RTÉ Choice Music Prize awards. The winners of the Irish album of the year were the Rusangano Family for their effort Let The Dead Bury The Dead. With roots in Limerick, Clare, Zimbabwe and Togo, the intrepid trio (described as hybrid of rap/ hip-hop/electro) declared that they would be back in work teaching the following morning. The album, with its themes of immigration and alienation, speaks to a wide audience and the group themselves epitomise the best of the new Irish. In a grim week for Ireland’s past its future with these men as educators would seem in safer hands.