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Cowen to Grab the Bull by the Horns?
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The Irish Times leads with is economic recovery plan – heavily weighted toward R&D, knowledge economy and associated buzzwords (not in so far as they are illegitimate only that they have no government backing – making them dead phrases). It occurs to me though that a real kick start plan would start with the sacking of half his ministers.
They have been trotting the same old sh**e out now for 10+ years. They are out of ideas and out of energy. Give some of your younger guns a run – worst that can happen is you lose the next election anyway. It is a gamble, it is a risk but it might also turn things in his favour – even if one or two get some traction on something valuable. For all the jokes, look at the energy which Gormley and Ryan have in their portfolios a a case in point.
Cian,
You are spot on. Cowen should sack…
…but half is nowhere near enough.
He should cut the Cabinet to six; using professionally qualified, proven, competent individuals.
He should then re-write the boundaries and cut representaion in parliament to 1 TD per 100,000 of indigenous population.
The cost savings might only be a hundred million, but the real gain would be efficiency; the abolition of parish pump politics and a professional, businesslike approach to running the economy, which is the motor for the well-being & future prosperity of Ireland.
I was listening to Newstalk earlier today when they were talking about getting businessmen in to help the government in a similar way to which SOS is. I don’t get it. It’s businessmen that caused our current problems.
Niall,
It has been made abundantly clear that Bertie Ahern wasted the fruits of The Celtic Tiger.
He ordered Brian Cowen to bring in the disastrous Budget that sent our economy spiralling into recession.
It is even more alarming to discover that this bone-head incompetent has been let loose to talk to international bankers about a bail-out.
When I say that a Future Cabinet of six Minsters needs to be manned by professionals, I am not exonerating those, who through greed, allowed themsselves to be blinded to the realities as to what the Shylocks in Wall Street, in the USA, had perpetrated.
The Central Bank, in spite of all the evidence of the impending melt down, following the unravelling of the sub-prime lending in the USA, advised Taoiseach Ahern that all was well; the economy was on a sound footing & the property market was buoyant.
Ahern, ever conscious of how dependent his vote was in thrall to the public sector unions, ordered Cowen to boost social spending and, in an act of astounding arrogance, sanctioned an increase in his own salary to €230,000 per annum – the highest in the EU – and similar rises for other Ministers – all waste.
We have only had two professionally qualified Finance Ministers in the recent past – Charlie Haughey & Charlie McCreevy – both highly competent.
It was Ireland’s misfortune that Haughey was a thief – more of a pickpocket – consumed by social climbing that needed a vast supply of cash that he could not earn by honest endeavour.
The rest is history. Ahern was a book-keeper in the Mater Hospital and barely numerate. His only skills were as a Union negotiator, a job he should have stuck to. He wasted inordiante amounts of time abroad, usurping the job of his namesake – in Foreign Affairs.
In the process, he failed to do the job he was paid to do – to manage Ireland’s domestic affairs, especially the economy – not those of Europe – or Northern Ireland.
It is not my suggestion now , or ever, that our Cabinet Ministers be businessmen – merely that they be professionally competent and honourable, unfettered by local constituency influences and bribes.
Six in Number to get Ireland back on track – Justice (including Defence); Finance; Human Resources; Communications and Natural Resources – Ireland’s treasury of good land; good people and the energy and committment to hard work.
This is not the time to rewrite our constitution. In fact, the proposal to gain efficiency by slashing the number of Dáil deputies is woefully wide of the mark.
Sacking the cabinet has at least a grain of sense – there are among their number several at least who are almost comically unfit for the job – our Tánáiste comes to mind. Still, it would be political suicide now for Cowen to start firing the team he chose after his selection as Taoiseach. It would be equivalent to him saying, hey, my judgment is terrible. Hardly a wise move for an already wounded Taoiseach.
Niall’s comment that “It’s businessmen that caused our current problems” must be intended as humour. But if it were meant to stand as a serious statement it would draw gasps of bewilderment.
Ireland’s economic malaise originated from a hazardous mix of two things: one is our political culture which sees no hard separation between big property, the banks, and government. The fortunes of FF in particular have been so intertwined with developers that disaster was always a matter of time. In fact, you could argue disaster was continuous – first it was corruption and its legacy of scarred, unplanned cities, then it was the might of sheer vested interest pushing aside anything in government that looked like sound policy on housing or development. When the bubble was strained almost to bursting, the government injected more air by aiding the builders through tax relief and stamp duty changes. The other combination though is arguably harder to eradicate. It is the Irish obsession with property ownership and the view that bricks and mortar is the tripple A investment. For a time in the late bubble, property – at home and abroad – was on the tip of every tongue of those who had even a few pound to put aside. So and so has a place in Bulgaria, such and such is buying in Turkey (by this stage Spain and the South of France had become passé). And this frenzy certainly primed us for catastrophe.
I know people who paid out tragic sums of money for shoe boxes in the wastelands of Dublin’s soulless outer suburbs. In a country supposedly rich, it seemed something of a paradox that young couples were going to live in accommodation that seemed well equipped as a dolls house, but scarcely believable as a proposal for modern living. Yet couples queued, staid out in tents, bought of ‘plans’, and sadly, borrowed heavily to acquire these wretched boxes. It seemed so hiddeously wrong. What drove it? How could Ireland brightest generation get lured into such an obvious and inevitable trap?
It is true that many developers had no more conscience than a gerbil, and our banks were reckless in the extreme. Government too were compromised, incompetent, and empty of courage and vision. But something in the Irish psyche left us vulnerable to this unhealthy mix. We voted repeatedly for this formula – never once rebelled against it, in the way say that the pensioners campaigned against the budget. Yes, we voted for this lethal configuration, acquiesced in it, and literally bought into it as well, in some cases bought in to the very brim with borrowed money. The more I imagine it, the more it takes on the shape of a horrible nightmare.
Tomaltach,
In the late nineteeth/early twentieth centuries, the Irish had much the same obsession with owning land as we have displayed in the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries in relation to property. Much of the historian Joe lee’s work on the emergence of modern Ireland was devoted to examing our historic love-affair with the cult of materialism and it’s a pity we have long since laid aside his analysis since we had much to learn from it. So we laid the basis for our newly independent state on the creation of a nation of small owner/occupier farmers – an entirely unsustainable model that effectively crippled the Irish economy and Irish society for decades afterwards. I know I’m over generalising for the sake of brevity, but I believe the origin of what you aptly describe as our ‘doll’s house’ syndrome is rooted in this history.
I don’t agree, though, that FF is soley responsible for feeding so much rope to developers that they’ve effectively hanged the rest of us as well as themselves. ALL of the main political parties carry a responsibility in this (as do Independent newspapers) – FG and the Labour Party were just as vociferous as various Sunday Independent columnists in demanding that Brian Cowen reform stamp duty rules to ‘stimulate’ the ailing property market when it was quite obvious that Cowen didn’t want to go down that road and resisted the pressure as long as he could. What he couldn’t do, short of resigning from the Cabinet, was resist the then Taoiseach’s will in the matter and presumably we will have to await his memoirs to know what his private thoughts really were. Had he resigned, he would have been cast into the political wilderness by his own party. He would also have signalled that the game was up and precipitated a national as well as a political crisis.
I agree completely with your point that beating up on the political establishment, dismantling the constitution and all this talk of bringing in ‘businessmen’ to run the country is a knee-jerk reaction and complete nonsense. It’s become apparent that throughout the western world nobody has a clue what to do and most of what they have been doing so far – especially the continuous bailing out and recapitalisation of various financial institutions – just hasn’t worked. Now that we’re entering the phase of the big economies gambling on stimulus packages, all we can do is wait and hope. If their gamble fails, then no stimulus package devised by our own government, however inspired, well-thought through or ambitious it may appear to be on paper, will make a blind bit of difference.
“Niall’s comment that “It’s businessmen that caused our current problems” must be intended as humour. But if it were meant to stand as a serious statement it would draw gasps of bewilderment.”
It was more tongue-in-cheek than anything else. Obviously it doesn’t make sense to speak of business people as though they were some sort of uniform group, but it is the princes of the business world that are largely to blame for the severity of the downturn.
The government listened to the businessmen of construction and property development. They listened to the bankers. The believed the accountants who signed off the incredible accounts of some companies. If the government were told to bring in some private sector expertise to guide the economy four years ago, chances are they would have brought in the some of the same people who were responsible for the recession.
Now consider the fact that one of the most prominent and successful businessmen active in Irish politics is Declan Ganley. Consider that Mary Harney, in trying to make the health service more business-like ended up making it no better for her efforts. Clearly, there are probably a couple of people in the private sector who might be able to offer some sort of decent advice to the government, but the idea that somehow Irish society would be better off if every government department was run and populated by the bastard lovechildren of Michael O’Leary and Sean Quinn is grotesque in more ways than one.
The nation is not a corporation and while there is some overlap between skills required to run a company and those required to run a country, there are very significant differences between the way the two are run.
it is the princes of the business world that are largely to blame for the severity of the downturn.
Utterly untrue. This statement is so wrong that it hurts to read it. To conflate the most reckless in the banking sector and the least scrupulous of developers with the entire Irish business world is astonishingly stupid.
It is true that the Irish economy depends on its talented, industrious work force. But it also depends – even more heavily on hundreds of thousands of business people the length and breadth of the country. Beside this huge and important group, the developers and bankers are merely a handful. The latter groups in general earned the opprobrium they now endure. But even there we need to be careful – not all bankers are wankers, and not all developers were unscrupulous. Plus, not all builders were developers. Some small time builders (the bulk of the profession) scattered across the country are for the most part honest people trying to make a buck.
The Irish business community includes these small time builders, but it also includes butchers, florists, owners of small manufacturing enterprises, those who own and run bus companies, and so on and so forth.
To say that this group somehow caused the downturn is quite simply preposterous.
Michael O’Leary is unloved for very good reasons. He is arrogant and mean spirited and often hostile to his employees. Whatever about his flaws in these areas, we have one thing to thank him and Ryanair for – affordable flying. That is not to say that I approve of shaving every comfort from the customer in what is patently still only a quasi-competitive market.
As for Sean Quinn, one of the most amazing success stories in the history of Irish business, the classic self made man, we only have him to thank for the tens of thousands of jobs he created by putting his very hard earned money where his mouth is.
“Utterly untrue. This statement is so wrong that it hurts to read it. To conflate the most reckless in the banking sector and the least scrupulous of developers with the entire Irish business world is astonishingly stupid.”
If you hadn’t ignored the first half of the sentence, it’d probably hurt a little less.
“Obviously it doesn’t make sense to speak of business people as though they were some sort of uniform group, but it is the princes of the business world that are largely to blame for the severity of the downturn.”
I’m not conflating the entire business world with these people. I’m saying that some of those people you describe as the “least scrupulous of developers” and the “most reckless” bankers were looked upon very favourably until recently. They were princes of the business world.
As for O’Leary and Quinn, I don’t know why you’re defending them. I never attacked them. Certainly, I’d share your opinion of O’Leary but my point in mentioning them was not that businessmen are bad, only that being a successful businessman did not, in and of itself, qualify one to advise the government on how they should run the country.