Fasten your seatbelts, we’re heading off a financial cliff
THE inter-mingling of high farce and absurd incompetence by our so-called ‘political elites’ was on full display again this week. And, unsurprisingly, the stand-up comedian on this occasion was Housing Minister Darragh O’Brien as he struggled with the financial implications of the entirely legitimate demands of thousands of homeowners whose lives have been destroyed by the mica block disaster in Donegal, Mayo, Clare and Sligo.
O’Brien and that other political inadequate Roderic O’Gorman have now become the Eoghan Murphy/Simon Harris partnership-of-disaster in this historic Coalition, assuming all the previous pair’s trappings for a permanent scarcity of performance.
O’Brien’s woeful parade of political shortcomings could not have come at a more difficult time for the Coalition as Sinn Féin surges in the opinion polls, now with 31% support, as against 27% for Fine Gael and 20% for Fianna Fáil.
The Housing Minister is quite rightly concerned, on our behalf, about how much these useless mica building blocks might eventually cost us when all the sums are finally totted up.
On Tuesday, Micheál Martin said a scheme to repair or replace about 5,000 homes that are literally falling to pieces could cost more than €1bn, which leaves a staggeringly indeterminate eventual cost hanging somewhere in the air.
This shocking lack of anything even near a final figure persists despite years having been available for somebody in our vast State apparatus to have worked on the details.
Then later that evening on Prime Time the fog became even more impenetrable when O’Brien said the potential cost of fixing the houses could go over €1.5bn – up hundreds of millions in half a day.
WHICH makes you hope nobody dares to ask him the same question this weekend; God only knows what figure he’ll read from the back of that envelope. If the virus had that kind of R rate, we’d all be gone by now. Also on Prime Time he dismissed the suggestion that the final tally for the mica debacle might even go to €2.5bn with the witheringly unconvincing: ‘I’m not sure it will go that high.’ Comforting, isn’t it, to have somebody so in control of his brief on a matter that could send our debt soaring by billions?
Seeing as how this latest incompetency spectacular is from the same State bureaucracy that produced the runaway money guzzler that is the Children’s Hospital, it’s time to fasten our seatbelts as we speed towards the financial cliff face.
The same lack of clarity about the spending of taxpayers’ money has afflicted the bank bailout debate since that bubble burst over 10 years ago. We even had the Taoiseach claiming there was, in fact, no bank bailout at all last December, until he was embarrassed into walking that back.
Considering that only the Comptroller and Auditor General has given clear figures on what the bank bailout has cost us (€41.7bn to the end of 2018), would it not be a good idea to call in that expertise now for a looksee into the mica black hole? That, hopefully, would end poor Darragh’s pathetic guessing game.
The latest Irish Times Ipsos MRBI poll should, in normal circumstances, cause any government intent on staying in power to up its game. However, Martin, in particular, appears happy to ignore Churchill’s advise that the best thing to do if you’re going through hell is, keep going.
Instead of plotting a clear course towards the recovery of public trust, the Taoiseach is allowing others to make the running. He’s stuck in some kind of political lower world, content to serve out his time until December of next year when he hands over the reins to Leo Varadkar.
While the latest opinion poll figures are hugely impressive for Sinn Féin, it is clear, nevertheless, that Mary Lou McDonald is still unlikely to become taoiseach after the next election.
At this rate Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil still command a combined 47% support, 4% up on their actual 2020 general election results. The Greens, at 6%, show only a marginal drop in support from their election performance, meaning the combined predicted support for the Coalition parties puts them at over 53%, guaranteeing them another spin on the merry-go-round.
With the threat from the pandemic appearing, increasingly, to be receding, Martin is entitled to believe all is not yet lost. All he needs to do is raise his game and the performances of his nominees in Cabinet. Rather than being stuck in a permanent state of inadequacy, he simply needs to ‘keep going’.