Performance Gongs 2009 – the foxes pass judgement on the chickens

It’s that time of year again when the mainstream media distrtibute performance gongs among their favourite politicians. There’s a touch of the foxes sitting down to judge the chickens about the whole thing. In due course that ‘Politician of the Year’ stands a fair to middling chance of being chewed up, masticated and spat out by the very same media.

It’s also subjective, more about who the foxes like than individual political substance. About who provides them with the juiciest morsels, i.e. headlines and quotable quotes, over the course of any year. Fine feathers of overblown rhetoric make for fine political birds. The headless chicken careering around in ever decreasing circles of their own inanity is favoured over some wise old bird scratching away quietly in the corner of the yard who might actually be rooting out something of value to the wider community. The public generally see it for the farce that it is, shrug, and move on.

But 2009 was different. 2009 was the Year of the Crash, the Year of the Fall of the Great Institutions of the Irish State; the Year We Almost Went Bust.

As they folded their tents on the field of disgrace, the great and the good from our banking institutions did not depart emptyhanded. Most of them left weighed down by bags of loot – our loot, by proxy – to ease their passage into public oblivion. Michael Fingleton of Irish Nationwide, infamously promised to pay back a one million euro bonus allocated to him for his brilliant stewardship of IN’s 2008 losses, but of course he never did. The latest seen of Seanie Fitzpatrick, former boss of Anglo Irish Bank, was on RTE’s Primetime, scuttling down the steps of an underground car park to get away from a reporter.

The early retirement of our Financial Regulator, Patrick Neary, the man who knew nothing untoward was going on even as all around him were buzzing with the facts, was also well-cushioned, courtesy of the public purse. He would naturally have felt entitled to generous severence terms, akin to those awarded to the DG of Fas, Rody Molloy, who, albeit in different circumstances, had retired from his post late the previous year.

Spectacular and all as was the collapse of our financial world, the crash of authority of the Roman Catholic Church in the wake of the Murphy report should have more lasting implications for Irish society. Four bishops down; its power is broken, its claim to moral authority in our society as bankrupt as our banks.

The sad thing is that we’re unlikely to see much reform in the way the Catholic Church operates as an institution, in its treatment of women, for example, or the way it trains its priestly recruits, or in its concern for its own status above all other considerations, as a result of this exposure of its most grievous sins. As one commentator put it, these people don’t think in terms of events, they think in centuries. They will retrench, most likely further in the direction of rigid orthodoxy than towards inclusion and transparency.The banks will always survive because any Government will grant them a lifeline; they have no other choice. The Church may stumble, but it’s still a long way off falling apart.

Coming into 2009 the current Government appeared the most vulnerable of the lot. The previous October budget had been a political disaster, with a near riot by pensioners almost fatally wounding the government’s authority. The threat that Anglo posed to the entire banking system was finally acknowledged and the bank was nationalised in February. The Government only narrowly warded off State bankruptcy by recapitalising the banking system and an emergency Budget in April, that increased taxes and imposed a pension levy/pay cut on the public sector. All done amid promises of a lot more to do in December.

In the meantime, NAMA was devised as the next stage in the near –disastrous, drawn-out process of stabilising the banking system. The rate of private sector job losses escalated to thousands per week. Economist Colm McCarthy set to work as head the group charged solely with identifying cuts in public expenditure. And then, the catastrophic fall in public support for the government parties dealt them a blow in the local government and European elections, especially Fianna Fail, the likes of which they had never believed they would live to see.

Still, at year end the Government survives. It has also achieved the targets it set for itself before the summer – passing the second referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, concluding a deal on a new programme for government, establishing NAMA and, against all the odds and expectations, delivering a €4bn cut in expenditure in the December Budget, while at the same time breaking the stranglehold of the trade unions on public sector pay and policy.

Yet if you were down among the foxes trying to decide the nomination for ‘Best Political Leader of the Year’, the debate would likely become as hot and heavy as exchanges over Social Welfare legislation in the Dail.

The Taosieach and Leader of Fianna Fail, is like a man on the edge of a cliff, chosen to lead the country through a dense and dangerous fog,. Instead he opts to hide beneath a large stone, only big enough to accommodate himself, in the hope that the fog will lift sometime soon and everyone will find their own way safely out of it.

Fine Gael finishes the year as the largest political party in the country and 13 points ahead of Fianna Fail in the opinion polls.  It could and should be twenty points ahead, given the deep unpopularity of its rival. Fine Gael has worked hard at developing policy options that are credible, if not immediately popular. It also has a leader who appears so desperate to be Taoiseach, he seemingly can’t pass a microphone without blasting something into it that he has either half-understood, and therefore gone off at half cock about. Or that he hasn’t told anyone else in his party but knows it’s good mood music for the public ear.

It’s hard to discern Eamon Gilmore’s credentials – the tough man who calls it when it needs to be called, like ousting the former Ceann Comhairle from office; or the little man lodged in the top pocket of Jack O’Connor’s jacket, occassionally popping his head out to say he’s the man for all the people, not just the trade unions, but with no policy worth examining to back up any of this rhetoric. Labour, sadly, seem to sing only one tune.
John Gormley has shown himself cool under fire, and well able to bring his own party with him on crucial decisions. But his ambitious green agenda is being swamped by the primacy of economic matters. His achievements are hidden; but then so are his mistakes. As for Sinn Fein, Caoimhin O’Caolain puts in a creditable performance in his contributions to the Dail, but gets drowned out in the overall noise of that assembly. Sinn Fein gives the impression of a party in the depths of its own private crisis, but a crisis they are determined to keep well under wraps for as long as they can.

In all the circumstances it might be best to cancel the award for Best Political Leader in 2009.  There really is no candidate amongst the current crowd deserving of it. The real leadership seems to reside in the second tier.

Brian Lenihan successfully reinvented himself in 2009 as a clever, courageous and courteous Minister for Finance. Fine Gael’s Richard Bruton knows his stuff and can not only produce a first rate analysis of the defects of Government proposals but also put forward credible alternatives.

Among the rest of Cowen’s Cabinet, Mary Coughlan might steal a lesser prize for ‘Political Bungler of the Year’, Batt O’Keefe for the ‘Man who is always left behind’; whilst Michael Martin springs to mind for mainly good things, and Dermot Ahern for mostly bad, namely the new law on Blasphemy. What other Ministers do or what they should be famous for this year, I’ve mostly forgotten. It’s hard to remember what some of these creatures look like anymore, or indeed their Opposition shadows, to the extent that one wonders if they only come out when it’s dark.

Of the two Dail newcomers this year, George Lee appears determined to replace Fergus O’Dowd as the Fine Gael Spokesperson for Public Outrage; while Maureen O’Sullivan gives the impression of affability and a rock of common sense, a quality otherwise notable for its general absence in the parliament that’s meant to rule us.

2010, they say, will be even tougher than 2009. It’s impossible to predict if the chickens will muddle through, or if the foxes will have many fine days out yet at their expense.