DIVIDED WE STAND
As 2017 recedes, Trump divides the US, Brexit divides the UK, and the housing crisis here exposes the ‘have/have not’ division in Irish society. Roll on 2018...
THIS should have been the post-2017 general election column. Just a month ago it looked like the political year would end with an election when the confidence and supply arrangement – fraught since its inauspicious beginning in May 2016 – looked to have fatally frayed.
The possibility of Leo Varadkar being Ireland’s shortest-serving Taoiseach was a real possibility. The great boy wonder of Irish politics had seemingly negotiated himself into a general election that nobody wanted, although the suspicion remains that Varadkar himself quietly fancied the idea of seeking a new mandate. Still, he saw the whites of Micheál Martin’s eyes and knew they were not for turning on the issue of Frances Fitzgerald being forced out of office.
Eventually, after much handwringing, Fitzgerald fell on her sword over her inaction on emails about the State’s treatment of the Garda whistleblower Maurice McCabe. The political Christmas was saved and a view emerged that the confidence and supply arrangement survived its sternest test.
Good times, at least politically, are ahead runs this narrative with both Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil making noises that there is no reason the Government won’t be able to produce another budget in 2018, and even renegotiate a continuation of confidence and supply. Suddenly, talk is in the air of the Government going the full distance.
This will particularly please the Independent Alliance. Now Stepaside Garda Station has got the goahead to be reopened, they can give their full attention to important matters of State.
It’s been a curious political year. On the international stage it began with Donald Trump’s inauguration at which he painted a dystopian picture of a United States about to unravel. The problem was a bloated government obsessed with pointless regulations which resulted in a country where entrepreneurship had been stilted, the cities were crumbling, and immigrant-induced crime was rampant. The cure to these woes? The President himself.
Trump may be misogynistic, bombastic, narcissistic and obsessed with belittling anyone who crosses his path on Twitter – including members of his cabinet – but he has managed to get the first major federal tax cut enacted in the US since Ronald Reagan did almost 40 years ago. That cut led Reagan to a landslide 49-state win in 1984 and a second term. The long term result was the financial crash.
Trump, barely a year in office, is already obsessed with his legacy. He has that most unusual trait in a politician of keeping his electoral promises. He has his $1.3trillion tax cut and has moved the US embassy to Jerusalem. Both were central to his election. They have long been cherished goals of American conservatives. Trump said he would achieve both in his first year and he has. That wall might be built yet.
If Trump and his devoted base long for a return to the 1980s, the British yearn for the 1950s. A year and a half after the Brexit vote, they still have no idea as to what Brexit means or how to achieve it.
The political year in Britain ended with the stentorian announcement that the cherished blue British passport would return. The change of colour had long been seen by some of the more overexcited Brexiteers as a symbol of the UK ceding sovereignty to the EU, and its return has been heralded as Britain taking back control. Of what? you may well ask.
SINCE the referendum, Brexiteers have trumpeted the idea that Britain leaving the EU will result in an economic nirvana where British firms will be freed from the shackles of EU regulation and bureaucracy and be able to pick and choose the best migrants in the world. British spirit and ingenuity will see the land of hope and glory reassert itself.
Warm beer and good weather will return and England will reign supreme at cricket, just like in the old days. Well, England have just been trounced in the Ashes, the British economy limps along, and the Tories have just discovered that the Irish border is a problem.
The Brexit deal cobbled together a few weeks ago is a classic fudge of constructive ambiguity. There will be no hard border and the integrity of Northern Ireland will be retained, according to Theresa May. We are told the intention is to achieve these objectives through the overall EU-UK relationship, but should that not be possible the British will propose specific solutions to address the unique circumstances on this island.
It is hard to take anything the British prime minister says seriously. This after all is the politician who said the reason her Conservative party didn’t do as well as expected in the June election was because they were unprepared. This missed the pretty central point that May herself had needlessly called the election. May is Trumpian in her hubris and the result of that election is that she leads a paralysed government which is reliant on the DUP to maintain office.
WHILE the DUP are normally seen as a mere afterthought in British politics, they flexed their muscles when scuppering the original Brexit deal by saying they would not accept any form of regulatory divergence which separated Northern Ireland economically or politically from the rest of the UK. There was to be no compromise to the economic and constitutional integrity of the UK according to Arlene Foster.
The Brexit conundrum remains. There is to be no hard border on the island of Ireland, but nobody has any idea of how this can really be achieved when the British remain wedded to leaving the customs union and the single market.
And still there is no Executive in Northern Ireland and no great urge on anyone’s part to get one back up and running. The results of the general election in Northern Ireland pointed to a hardening of polarised
inevitable and profitable.
A lot of people who are supposed to know these things think he looks tired and that he is out of touch with the world. The continuing demand for Ryanair tickets in spite of the tsunami of negative publicity is proof positive that only fools and horses would write off Michael O’Leary. I don’t believe it is a condition peculiar to the Irish but we never seem as keen to count our blessings as litigate our gripes.
And we should welcome the Central Statistics Office’s latest report on income and living standards in Ireland. For a start, each household’s median disposable income increased by nearly €600 in the two years from 2014 to last year. And in the same time-frame deprivation dropped by 8%. Although the carbuncle of homelessness still disfigures the face of a more prosperous Ireland, we are nevertheless continuing to move away from the economic crash. But the Government is far too canny to trumpet ‘you’ve never had it so good’ to voters – they pay anonymous spin-doctors millions of taxpayers’ euro to do that for them. I’VE never met a stupid builder from the banner county – and none of the Clare natives I met in New York would work for Donald Trump: too difficult to get paid, they said. So don’t count on an exodus of New York-based builders from Clare to tender for the only barrier wall that Trump is likely to build in the foreseeable future: the 38,000 tonne sea wall along his golf course in Doonbeg.
Amid all the frenzy of Christmas festivity, my marked lack of holiday spirit has more to do with crutches and an enormous orthopaedic boot than a Scrooge-inspired ‘bah humbug’.
But my sore ankle was put in perspective with the realisation that I have so much to be grateful for… have a wonderful Christmas.