Over the New Year I’ve been pondering the implications of a discovery I made while researching my book on the Famine* namely that one of its principal legacies to Ireland was what the psychiatrists called ‘learned helplessness’.  The beliefs that no matter how one tried there was nothing to do in the face of catastrophe save succumb to it or emigrate. There was no possibility of getting back at those who brought about the disaster. In the case of the Famine and in today’s Ireland people are either accepting whatever burdens have been placed upon them with varying degrees of despair or they are getting out.

If one looks at the plight of modern Ireland and comments in astonishment; ‘and nobody is going to jail!’ one can be certain that the automatic knee jerk reaction will be; ‘No! And nobody will go.’  The correct response of course would be for thousands to gather in the streets outside the Dáil demanding the prosecution of the politicians, the policy makers, the regulators who did not regulate, the overseeing civil servants who did not oversee, and the decision takers in the banks and other financial institutions who indulged in spectacularly reckless trading.

The good people, the would be educators of their families, the hard workers are being lashed into carrying the nation’s burdens while the decision takers responsible for their misery ride off unscathed in to the sunset with their pay offs and their pensions and knowing smirks on their faces.

How can we punish the people responsible for Ireland’s present economic and psychological woes? Crime is up, so is unemployment and Irish suicide rates are now acknowledged to be running at 50% above the pre- financial crash levels.  On top of this the country has lost its sovereignty and stands in a Brussels dole queue while it’s young people stand in airport queues to emigrate.

The people are coping bravely and industriously with the threat of unemployment, new taxes and wage cuts but those responsible go Scott free. The government has made no effort to beef up the fraud squad whose good police work is ultimately largely rendered impotent because of a public service embargo necessitated by the credit squeeze which prevents the hiring of essential expertise; forensic accountants, solicitors, senior counsel and so on.  Thus the people who caused the embargo to be instituted escape unscathed and a government reluctant to proceed against key figures in the worlds of law, politics, the Civil service and finance is enabled to shirk its duty of rendering the mighty as well as the meek amenable to the law.

When it first came into office the government did make an effort to set up Dáil committees of Inquiry which would have brought relevant figures to the Dáil to explain themselves as is done in London and Washington. However the attempt was made valueless by the half-hearted way in which the government went about winning the referendum campaign which would have been necessary under the Irish Constitution to allow these committees to be set up.  The referendum was lost, paradoxically in part because the public had become so mistrustful of the politicians that they shrank from giving them further powers.

Moreover a phalanx of former attorneys general further discouraged the public by signing their names to an open letter stating that the proposed committees would interfere with a man’s right to his good name and the judiciaries’ right to independence.

One of the signatories to that letter Mr Dermot Gleeson, was the chairman of Allied Irish Bank.  Another was Mr Peter Sutherland of Goldman Sachs. Incidentally another referendum called for by the financial crisis was one which was necessitated by the reluctance of judges to accept the same pay cuts which other ordinary citizens had to undergo.

There is a great sense of unfairness abroad in Ireland.  As I write these words people are agonising over where they are to get the money for yet more taxes due later this year, a property tax and a beginning to Water rates with the introduction of meters. The Irish are no less patriotic and hardworking than they ever were and just as willing to accept sacrifice for the public weal, but that sacrifice should not be borne solely by the innocent people who would be far more willing to shoulder their burdens if they felt that the guilty suffered for their crimes along with the innocent. It’s time for the government to either revive their original committees proposal or introduce some new initiative to wipe the smirks off those fat cats’ faces.

Feel free to contact me with any comments, suggestions or ideas through the contact section on this website or through my Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/#!/timpat.coogan.3

Tim Pat Coogan’s new book, ‘The Famine Plot, England’s role in Ireland’s Greatest Tragedy’ published by Palgrave Macmillan is available in bookshops now.

Tim Pat will give a lecture entitled ‘Michael Collins and the Bankers’ on 19 August in the Glasnevin Museum as part of the Glasnevin Trust lecture series. Tickets for the event cost €10. All monies raised will benefit the upkeep of the cemetery.

The lecture, which starts at 2.30pm, will consider what Ireland’s first Minister for Finance might have made of the present day banking crisis.

Within days of being appointed Minister for Finance in 1919, Michael Collins set about raising the funds necessary for Dail Eireann. Writer Frank O’Connnor said of him: “He was a born improvisator, and from the moment he was appointed … the Department of Finance began to function, within a few weeks his mighty Loan was under way and even today when we have forgotten or can no longer imagine the preposterous conditions under which the department worked – censorship, imprisonment, confiscation, murder – one is filled with respect for the variety and thoroughness of the work performed.”

Tim Pat will kick off a series of debates on Ireland’s economic woes when he delivers the annual Mac Lua Memorial Lecture for Irish Writers’ Month in Hammersmith, London.

The event, with a Q&A to follow, will take place on Wednesday 6th June, 7pm.

» For full details go to www.irishculturalcentre.co.uk.

Tim Pat will be speaking at the 2011 Percy French Summer
School, to be held at Castlecoote House, Co. Roscommon, from 11th–15th July

The Athlone Advertiser reports that the headline talk “… is one of many that aims to address current socio-economic issues… Some of Ireland’s leading academics will gather to celebrate the work of Percy French and debate issues such as ‘The Irish conscience’, ‘The Female education debate in 18th century’, ‘Trades, crafts and people of old Fuerty’, to name but a few…. Tim Pat’s talk is of course taken from Percy French’s well known song ‘The West Clare Railway’”

Question and Answer Session – Thursday 14th July, 12.15pm

Sure we’re not right Michael, Sure we’re not!

A reflection on the contemporary political and economic crises with apologies to ‘The West Clare Railway’ by Percy French

Tim Pat Coogan
Luke Ming Flanagan TD CHAIR

Throughout the summer Ireland explodes with summer school mania. Indeed, these schools or festivals pop up amongst the Irish across the world, and I would like to take this opportunity to wish success and good cheer to the good people who will be staging their annual event at Butte, Montana, in a few days time. But it is on two Irish festivals that I wish to focus.

The two are being held North and South of the border, and accurately sum up both the country’s present preoccupations and the frequently over-looked, but central, identity problem facing contemporary Irish society.

One, to be held in Ballina next month at The Humbert School, asks a stark question: Can Ireland be redeemed? As it normally does, the Humbert lists an imposing cast of participants, ranging from John Hume, to Judge Ryan – who produced the recent Report into clerical child abuse – and European and Irish political and clerical luminaries. Over the weekend of August 23, the School will hold a think-in on the issues of the day – banking and political skulduggery, the Lisbon Treaty, child abuse, and Ireland’s diminishing response to world poverty.

The only major Irish institution to escape scrutiny is the GAA, and given the fact that Mayo are doing particularly well at the football this year, it too may come up for mention. If it does, it will be the only influential force in Irish society which can reasonably expect a kind word.

The thirty two county GAA has historical roots in the subject matter of the other Summer School, The Tom Dunn School, held in Rostrevor, County Down. The school was named in memory of the United Irishman Tom Dunn, who was flogged to death in 1798 without betraying his comrades.

I have just taken part in this remarkable event. It combined magnificent Irish music, a moving tribute to the late Paddy O’Hanlon, a founder of the SDLP and a behind-the-scenes architect of the Good Friday Agreement, by his uncle, Dr. Rory O’Hanlon, the former Fianna Fail Minister whose father was one of Michael Collins’ squad.

The highlight was a banquet, at which 18^th Century costumes were worn. The menu was the same as that for a dinner held in honor of Wolfe Tone in Dunn’s time. The toasts included the President of America, of France and King George. The event attracts both Catholic and Protestant support and, while honoring the memory of the United Irishmen in general (and Dunn in particular),  it also seeks to promulgate the Republican doctrine of uniting Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter in a common sense of community.

These admirable objectives should command widespread support in the Republic also but, given the anger, cynicism, pessimism, and sense of betrayal, that now permeates  Ireland, anyone who stood outside the GPO today advocating anything which smacked of idealism and a United Ireland would risk either been beaten over the head by a copy of the An Bord Snip Report, or run over by a shopper heading north attracted by prices far lower than those obtaining in the Rip Off Republic.

For at the moment there is nothing left in Irish public life that one might term a tent-pole philosophy around which a sorely beset people could group.

Back in the eighties, not long after I had left the Irish Press in 1987, I began to get worried about the prospect of such a lacuna arising and became so angry at the direction of Irish life, and the clear indications of corrupt relationships between the rich and the would-be rich, and the political elite, that I broke a vow which I had made to myself to shun newspapers and devote myself solely to book authorship.

I rang my old Irish Press colleague, Damian Kiberd, who had earlier left the Press to found the highly successful Sunday Business Post, and arranged to write a blistering article on the theme that Ireland needed to develop a sense of national outrage. In my best Cassandra mode I pointed out that the Irish lack a sense of outrage.

We put up with both the doings of the faceless mandarin and the political poltroon with equal indifference. The stroke-puller, the corner cutting financial whiz kid, the lengthening dole queue are all either tolerated or lazily over-looked until we suddenly find ourselves joining the dole queue, with a mortgage and kids in fee-paying schools.

As a result, twenty years after I wrote that Sunday Business Post article the sense of outrage is all too obvious. Thatching on a windy day has always been an Irish political tendency. But today the thatching is being attempted in the teeth of a howling gale.

To return to the question posed by the Humbert Summer School: Can Ireland be redeemed? The government is hoping that by setting up something called NAMA (National Asset Management Agency) it will calm the tempest. NAMA is supposed to take over the management of the banks’ property loans at a discount, to preserve the ailing Irish banking system. It is a perilous venture.

Nothing definite is known of the extent of the banks indebtedness but guesstimates range from twenty to forty billion. However, in the course of an action brought against a developer last week for a relatively small sum, it was revealed in court that a so called ‘asset’ in Sandyford Co. Dublin, a development site against which 22 million had been loaned, is worth only a half million in to-day’s conditions. That is to say forty four times less than its supposed value.

Just what is the scale of the debt being assumed by the Irish tax-payer, their children and seemingly, their children’s  children? The short answer is we don’t know. But we do know that there are Sandyford-like situations all over the country, and that  the loans involved in them run not to millions but  billions .

However, the government is persevering with NAMA because it fears that if not, Irish bonds will lose their attraction to international investors and the country will go bust. Perhaps so, perhaps not. Most of these bonds are held by international pension funds that have already made provision for bad debts. There is a serious school of thought which says that Ireland is ultimately going to be forced to default on its commitments, because of the real debt situation, and the banks will collapse anyhow.

Better let them go broke now, and allow healthy banks to emerge over the next few years, runs the anti-NAMA argument. How the argument will ultimately be resolved no man can say, but if ever there was a time when the Irish Republic could do with a return to the idealism, and sense of identity, which inspired the Republicanism of Tom Dunn, George Washington and the French revolutionaries,  it is today.

- First published 27th July 2009 at IrishCentral.com

“This will take an awful lot of hardship.”

“It doesn’t take much.”

Both of the foregoing contradictory statements are true of Ireland’s economy and mood of the moment.

On the one hand there is the demoralizing game of pass-the-parcel being played by the politicians with the report of the popularly-termed An Bord Snip Nua which contains the horrific list of cuts which the economists say are needed to get the economy back on track.

On the other is the clearly observable mood of national cheerfulness brought on by a combination of welcome ephemera which have nothing to do with the economy.

The fine weather, the success of the rugby players and U2’s Barcelona opening are helping to offset the gloomy impact of the incessant flow of news bulletins about job losses and yawning trade deficits.

It is many years since Thomas Davis wrote that there was no nation on earth over whom music had such power over as the Irish. He was writing in an era of famine, but he had hit on an essential truth of the Irish character which has carried them through many a fearsome trial and may do so again in today’s circumstances.

Priceless gift

The race does have a priceless gift of being able to seize the moment if an instant of distraction or of uplift beckons. The sun appears briefly and, from God knows where, people flock to the beaches. A famous horse runs at a race meeting, and the punters forget the dole queues to spend money no-one knew existed.

The gift of laughter and an ability to make music out of spoons and bones helped the Irish to survive the horrors of mining or ditch-digging in disease-ridden swamps. The obverse side of the medal is of course depression and alcohol and substance abuse.

But here, in the now, where I am on the Aran Islands the sunshine is causing the Irish to revert to tradition attitudes. Instead of going abroad for the sun they are flocking to the Aran Islands to enjoy its spectacular beaches and incredible cliffs. In place of Germans and Scandinavians I now meet clouds of cyclists who pay me the compliment of taking me for an Islander and addressing me in half-forgotten, school book Irish.

But for how long will the sun shine? The sportsmen enthral? The day of reckoning can not be postponed indefinitely. And the passing of the parcel will have to stop sometime.

No soft words

The government somehow managed to get the IMF to tone down its recent report on the Irish economy so that while stigmatizing Ireland for creating the most overheated economy in the developed world, at the same time it still managed to sound vaguely complimentary about how it was dealing with the consequential crisis.

However An Bord Snip contains no soft words. It is the day of reckoning. It contains the precise recommendations for slashing welfare and public service budgets which the government hopes will induce the international financial community to keep Ireland afloat.

Various drafts of its real or imagined contents have been well leaked. They range from cutting children’s allowances, reducing the number of Gardai, dropping some 10,000 superfluous civil servants off the State pay roll to removing certain appendages from members of the Cabinet (a particularly well-received rumor this last).

For some weeks now the publication of the Report’s contents has been expected almost daily. But what has been received instead have been circumlocutory official statements to the effect that: “It is expected that the Report will be presented to the Minister for Finance tomorrow.”

‘Riot Police’

So far tomorrow has not come and the statements about ministerial, presentations are being (correctly) interpreted as code for “Jaysus lads. If we publish that any savings we might make will go on paying riot police.”

This is not an entirely unreal forecast. Already the elderly have taken to the streets over the withdrawal of medical cards and at least one section of the trade union movement, the electricians union, has shown its willingness to disregard government urgings for restraint by serving strike notice, not over the now universal pay cuts, but for a wage increase.

The gardai and civil servants unions might well be expected to respond with demands for thousands of job cuts by exercising the nuclear option. Realistically speaking, a government which has already been ravaged in last month’s local government and European elections could be looking at near total extinction in any forthcoming general election.

And, fears for a general election apart, there is the looming question of the re-run of the Lisbon Treaty. It is generally accepted that a central factor in the electorate’s rejection of the last Lisbon Treaty referendum, which made Ireland the sore thumb of Europe, was anger at the government’s performance.

Sinn Fein

But there were other considerations such as fears about abortion being introduced to the Republic, the ending of the traditional policy of neutrality and the unlikely, and un-lovely, shared attack on the Treaty from the left-wing Sinn Fein and the right-wing Libertas party.

Since that referendum the Irish government has managed to secure remarkable concessions on the neutrality and other issues from the European Parliament. Moreover both Libertas and Sinn Fein suffered reverses in the recent European elections so there were strong grounds for supposing that in the Lisbon Treaty’s Second Coming, next autumn, the measure would succeed.

Ordinary common sense would appear to dictate that it would pass, if for no other reason than that there is a general realisation that the Republic of Ireland’s continuation as a sovereign State depends on the support of the European bank, but if An Bord Snip were to trigger a bloody-minded reaction on the lines of the electricians action then anything could happen.

And so the Awful and the Cheerful reign over Ireland at the moment. I’m afraid that as the summer fades into winter that rugby alone, or even the exploits of the great Kilkenny hurling team, will not sustain the national mood. But Davis’s words still hold true and after all the Irish spirit did survive the famine and the awful effects of building the canals through the dreadful, fever-infested swamps of New Orleans.

- First published 6th July 2009 at IrishCentral.com

The new celebrity politician of Ireland, George Lee, accurately summed up the implications of the rip tide that has run through the electoral triathlon, of which two legs have  been effectively decided.

In his victory speech, he said that the Government does not have a mandate to continue. The local government wipeout which seems to be in progress and the way the two by-elections to the Dail are going would certainly bear this out.

Nor are the early forecasts for the European Elections any more hopeful for the government. It’s too early to call these with certainty, but Fianna Fail could end up with no representative in the East (effectively with no one in Dublin), and Sinn Fein’s Mary Lou MacDonald could also struggle to retain her seat.

Both sides of the Irish Sea are swept these days with the prospect of electoral change, as England’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown could no doubt ruefully tell Ireland’s Brian Cowen.

But more soberly, what each leader could equally truly tell the other, is that electoral change could, very likely will, come without bringing major policy changes.

For the elephant in the Irish room the fact is, that to all intents and purposes, Dublin has ceded control of her economic affairs, no matter what new coalition of forces comes to power in the Dail, to the European Central Bank.  Whatever unpalatable medicine that institution chooses to dish out will have to be swallowed by us all.

Love affairs have to be paid for and Ireland’s fatal romance with the property developers has indeed proved a Liason Dangereuse.

The money for the dole and for bank bailouts has one thing in common – it has to be borrowed – and Brussels is the only place it can be borrowed from, that is if it can be borrowed at all.

A mini International Monetary Fund (IMF) regime of spending cuts and credit restrictions is already in place, and a much more stringent one, more closely resembling the full blooded IMF variety, is scheduled for the autumn budget no matter what government is in power.

However, despite the restrictions of the Brussels straight jacket, the Irish electorate have managed to make one important, independent statement.

It has said loudly and clearly that it is sick of greed, corruption, inefficiency and waste. In caning Fianna Fail as it has done, and may yet do further, it has issued a warning to the political class that some kinds of behavior can no longer be gotten away with.

The powerful Irish institutions of the Churches, the Banks and the body Politic are learning a new and threatening word, accountability.

There is a seeking of justice abroad; people want to see bankers in handcuffs for fraud, and clergy in jail for the horrors they inflicted on children in their care.

The electorate wishes to see decent people taken off dole queues to which they should never have been consigned by bankers and by developers’ greed and by political corruption.

All these goals may not seem important in Brussels, but they are also important to the people of Ireland, whose votes are being counted this weekend.

- First published 6th June 2009 at IrishCentral.com

Ireland is bracing itself for the Charge of The Right Brigade.

Right in the moral sense, as in wanting to severely chastise those who have done wrong, in this case the Fianna Fail government, at the polls next Friday.

But right also in the sense of the term Right Wing. Unquestionably the electorate are justified in feeling as they do under the first definition of right.

The tragedy lies in the fact that though it appears inevitable that the public will record a triple vote of no Confidence in the government in next Friday’s European, Local Government and parliamentary by-elections, thus leading to an equally inevitable General Election fairly shortly there after.

However, whatever combination of parties form the next government (presumably Fine Gael and Labour), it will have to continue with Fianna Fail’s present policies of Tax and Cut.

For the brutal reality of our present situation would appear to be that daily, the country currently spends some €50 million more on social services and the public service than it gets in revenue.

Unemployed

Daily also, the numbers of unemployed rise so that instead of being contributors to the exchequer these unfortunates become a drain on the public purse. So some belt tightening is obviously necessary.

But, at the same time, as dazedly, the long suffering Irish public gazes at the consequences of horrific job losses. People are forced to grapple with the nearly incomphrensible parallel reality that Fianna Fail is simultaneously spending billions on efforts to shore up banks whose directors’ reckless behaviour would appear in some cases to have been in breach of their legal fiduciary responsibilities.

Today’s electorate, their children and grandchildren are being committed to shouldering stratospheric debts in what is probably a vain attempt to shore up these irresponsible banks .

But these grim facts alone do not explain the depth of the public’s anger with Fianna Fail.

The public are well aware that there is an international crisis and that bank bail-outs are not confined. It was not better for either the country or the party that Fianna Fail endeavoured to make political supporters of builders and developers by inviting them into the infamous fund raising tent at Galway Races each year at so many thousand euro per scrotum.

The symbolism of the tent for the Irish public is that the unholy alliance of politicians, builders and developers pissed out on the rest of us by creating and maintaining an unsustainable property bubble which catastrophically worsened Ireland’s position in the face of the international financial tsunami.

The warnings of the few economists who spoke out were derided. Significantly, one of these commentators, RTE’s former Economics Editor, is now odds-on to defeat his Fianna Fail rival in one of the by-elections.

Corruption

Bertie Ahern, however, wondered out loud why people like Lee did not commit suicide. When the whiff of corruption forced Ahern himself him out of office, his departure took the form of a long goodbye of speeches and functions that went on for months, obscuring the growing threat of collapse in the building boom.

Brian Cowen, the Minister for Finance, whose ministry is supposed to prevent such collapses took office in a splurge of  congratulatory, down home celebrations in his native Offaly and throughout the rural GAA world he is most at home in.

This too went on for more months, contributing to the impression that all was well with the economy, unemployment was a thing of the past, Fianna Fail was in its heaven and all was right with the world. Who cared about talk of corruption, stroke-pulling, over-charging in pub, restaurant and supermarket? Everyone was making money.

Well, as the world knows, all was not well. The cranes fell lifeless across the country. The brutal, yellow earth-moving, landscape-defiling, building machinery, the tough-looking unshaven men in the day glow jackets, disappeared from the building sites. Half-completed apartments, boarded-up sites, bought at hugely inflated prices, be-spattered the land.

In the Dail, the bullying, hectoring style which Cowen had begun with in his opening jousts with the principal Opposition leader, Enda Kenny, gave way to a furtive, sweaty demeanor, which had all the inspirational leadership qualities of a rabbit caught in the glare of a head light.

Ineffective cost-cutting

His ineffectiveness and that of his colleagues was encapsulated for me one night last year, after the government ushered in its cost-cutting program by proposing to take back medical cards from the over-70s.

I suggested to my TD, Mary Hanafin, the Minister for Social Welfare, that this was not the best way to go about winning friends and influencing people. She rounded on me: “We’ve taken a 10 percent pay cut. What more can we do?”

A few days later a grey tide rolled through Dublin, culminating in mass meetings outside the Dail. The Government promptly restored most of the cards, but the crisis deepened and suddenly there were solicitors and architects in the dole queues. Parents with a negative equity mortgage lay awake at night wondering how they could keep their children in fee paying schools.

Hanafin is the archetypical example of what ineffectual Fianna Fail has become. Her father was the Fianna Fail Treasurer, a post not associated with penury, her late husband a very prominent earner at the Irish Bar. She has no children, a ministerial salary of some €200,000, a State car and driver.

But, and it is a very big but, middle class Dublin to whom she once appealed has suddenly entered the world of the dole queue. The chattering classes are still there. But it is their teeth which are chattering.

People are worrying about the situation erupting on to the streets. I would assess that danger as being remote—as yet. A great deal of anger will be defused if  the polls are borne out and Fianna Fail does get a monumental kick up the backside next Friday.

But that €50 million a day still has to be found .

All sorts of new taxes and and savage welfare cuts are forecast for the Government’s coming budget in October, the third in a year. But even if the government falls before then the Charge of the Right  Brigade will go ahead anyway, fuelled in part by a Reagan-Thatcherite anti-Union, anti-Welfare vein in Fine Gael.

‘Cut social welfare’

Licking his lips one former Fine Gael Minister commented to me recently: ”This can be got right if we have the balls. Make it worth while for them to work. Cut out this minimum wage nonsense and cut  the social welfare payments.”

What work? Where will the money come from to pay the new taxes?

And oh! What about those billions for the banks? Who’ll pay them?

These are the questions and others like them which are likely to be drowned out initially by the thunder of the Charge of the Right Brigade.

But if they are not answered with discernment and sensitivity, Ireland has a history of taking its politics on to the streets and behind  barricades not easily breached, even by a charge of the Right Brigade.

- First published 2nd June 2009 at IrishCentral.com

Read Tim Pat’s opinion column in the Irish Times

“We have heard more words in a few days from disgruntled Fianna Fáil politicians objecting to their salaries being cut, or their ministries lost, than we got over the Galway tent/tribunal years from the combined ranks on both sides of the Dáil chamber on the risks of a property bubble. The Irish electorate have for too long tolerated the stroke-pulling, nods-and-winks culture of government by child or grandchild of former deputies.”

One of the oldest risqué stories circulating in Ireland  has become a political parable for our time. It concerns a group of Irish explorers whose  guides mislead them so that they unwittingly enter the territory of a dreaded group of cannibalistic pygmies known as the fukarwe tribe. As darkness approaches the Irishmen are surrounded by a horde of fierce little men who leap at them unexpectedly from the long grass, yelling, waving their weapons and jumping up and down continuously.

But, just as the explorers resign themselves to death, the grasses part once more and a bearded Belgian White Father emerges saying: "Relax gentlemen, I will protect you. Despite their reputation these people will not harm you. But as you can see they are very small and the grass is very tall, so they spend their lives jumping up and down calling out, ‘where the f— are we?’"

The similarity between to-day’s Irish electorate and the pygmies is  striking. The outlook is darkening by the moment and the economic grass is very tall. But there is  one unfortunate difference – there is no  Belgian  White Father. It is tempting to simply blame a deeply unpopular  government for the state of anger and  anxiety that pervades the Republic of Ireland  currently as unemployment rises , not merely weekly, but seemingly hourly.

As a historian I would hazard a guess that anti-government feeling is running at something not far off  the levels of the civil war. In my lifetime I have never known such a disconnect between the governed and the governed. And, without a shadow of doubt , the inept government hugely deserves blame  and condemnation. However I fear the  malaise goes deeper than the effects of one bad government.  The question is: Can the Irish political system survive this crisis?

Famously that question was also posed during the 1950s in a cartoon in the Irish humorous journal  Dublin Opinion that showed Kathleen ni Houlihan  asking: “Have I a future?” In my first book, Ireland Since the Rising, published the following decade I included  an interview with the Belgian White Father of the day, the man who was motivated by the cartoon to answer the question in the affirmative, Ken Whittaker, the then Secretary of the Department of Finance. He described to me how, at the head of a group of gifted Civil Servants, he drew up a plan for economic development, that averted what at the time had seemed like inevitable collapse. What Whittaker conceived, Sean Lemass carried through.

But there’s neither a development plan, a Whittaker, nor a Sean Lemass around the Dail to-day. The situation cries out for a national government. But, after  an initial  daring initiative, as the international credit crisis struck, the move to guarantee bank depositors, the government  appears to have frozen in the headlights. It’s political nostrum would appear to be cuts, not development. It has already made an assault on the medical cards issued to over seventies and introduced tax levies. These will certainly be augmented by the findings of a report from a Committee set up to advise on pruning public expenditure, popularly known as An Bord Snip.

Psychologically and economically the people are crying out for leadership, for a plan. What they are getting is party politics and  bickerings across the floor of the Dail.  Part of the problem, like incest, is  relative. The political gene pool needs refreshment. Both the government, and the largest opposition party, Fine Gael, are heavily dependent on the children of earlier politicians. The principal Ministers, the Taoiseach, the Tanaiste, and the Minister for Finance are all children of earlier members of the Dail, as are the Fine Gael leader, Enda Kenny and many of his deputies. Another problem is the fact that the Irish governmental system, both local and national, is too large and too expensive for such a small country.

There are one hundred and sixty six TDs from whose ranks are chosen the Ceann Comhairle, and leas Ceann Comhairle, fifteen Cabinet members, 20 Junior Ministers and 23 Dail, Committees whose chairpersons receive an additional 20,000 Euros. The tax-payers pay 10. 5 million euro for the 215 constituency and office staffs employed by Ministers to help them stay in power.  The 187 staff employed by Junior Ministers cost over eight million euro. There are sixty Senators in  the now superfluous Seanad, which to-day has  virtually no powers, and is merely an expensive hangover from the early days of statehood when the first Free State government approved of an  Upper House as a means of assuaging the fears of the former Unionists.

At Local Government level there are 1,627 County and city councillors, Borough Councillors and Town Councillors. To give an idea of the vast cost of the unwieldy system of Local Government it might be noted that in Mayo alone last year the 31 members of Mayo County Council earned and average of  €32,670 each in salary and expenses.  One gentleman’s dexterous use of the expense account provisions brought his income to over sixty thousand euro in a single year. Not for nothing was the saying coined: "Mayo God help us."

All these men and women have something in common. If you examined their well cushioned bottoms you will not find a single bayonet mark. They all put themselves forward deliberately and will fight viciously to keep their seats. The inducements to do this are great. Before the new levy on public service pay  takes effect this month the following was the basic pay, in Euro, for the Irish legislators.

€100,190 – TD

€70,133  – Senator

€202,678   – Minister and Ceann Comhairle (Dail Chairman)

€139,266   – Minister of State (Junior Minister) and Leas Ceann Comhairle (Deputy Chairman)

€257,024  – Taoiseach

€220,290  – Tanaiste

I stress basic. Veteran political correspondents assure me that some TDs have made close on a quarter of a million euro a year through claiming expenses. I am inclined to believe them.

The figures I have given do not include huge expense account items such as the fact  that Ministers are provided with free Mercedes and state paid drivers. The Irish Taoiseach is paid more than Barack Obama. The Prime Minister of oil rich Norway drives himself to work, but Irish Ministers  can massage their egos by leaving their cars at Dublin Airport and having themselves flown about the country in helicopters at tax-payers’ expense. Symbolically the door of one such helicopter fell off recently as it was taking a Minister, Martin Cullen, back to Dublin from Kerry.

It later emerged that the combined cost of the helicopter ride and of his Mercedes for the day was 8,000 euro,  roughly three quarters of  the amount paid annually to an old age pensioner. As can well be imagined the exhortations of Mr. Cullen and his colleagues to the less well off in Irish society to accept sacrifice in a spirit of patriotism do not fall on  sympathetic ears.

The number of TDs should be cut by approximately a third, the number of  Councillors by half and the Seanad should be abolished altogether, along with at least a third of the Junior Ministers. These steps would not of themselves solve the woes of The Mouse that Roared (once facetiously known as the Celtic Tiger) but they would demonstrate that the Republic possessed what it now lacks – leadership.