If the Soldiers of Destiny are ever to regain the trust of the electorate, they will need to melt down this template and be recast from a new mould
IT has been a week of them and us: a week in which we witnessed senior Fianna Fail ministers weigh loyalty against justice — and justice was the loser.
According to the false measuring scales they used, Willie O’Dea would be a minister still today. Fortunately, the Greens obliged them to adjust their calibrations.
Key cabinet members, including the Taoiseach Brian Cowen, ran the rule over Mr O’Dea’s behaviour and gave it the all-clear. Senator Dan Boyle ran the rule a little more conscientiously, and the rest is history.
There are many ways of categorising Mr O’Dea’s behaviour, and that of the colleagues who supported him blindly.
One might be: “Oh, blindness of the great! They wander like gods … trusting in their power which has already lasted so long,” as Brecht puts it in his play ‘The Caucasian Chalk Circle’. Too long for Twitter. the Green senator’s “compromised” verdict did the trick more succinctly, if less lyrically.
Ordinary people, the ‘us’ of ‘them and us’, gaped at the spectacle of the Defence Minister attacking opposition politicians who, quite correctly, questioned his lapse in standards; we were further flabbergasted to see him play the victim card and appropriate the status of injured party for himself.
But Mr O’Dea is not the only officeholder compromised by Brothelgate.
Which brings me to ‘them’: the Cabinet. once entrusted with the constitutional seal of office, Fianna Fail ministers become Musketeers — committed to the principle of one for all and all for one.
Private reservations, if any existed, were sacrificed to unity, and the minister in the firing line was shielded by sandbags pushed into place by his colleagues. any sand left over, they used to throw in the faces of the opposition.
Several days of posturing culminated in their unanimous endorsement of a Dail motion, not just of confidence, but complete confidence in Mr O’Dea. Twenty-four hours later, he was toast. Burnt toast.
It appeared never to register with vocal supporters, including Mr Cowen, Brian Lenihan and Dermot Ahern, that defending Mr O’Dea was imprudent, misguided and inappropriate. their poor judgment is particularly worrying. But all that mattered to them was adopting the usual battle formations.
This is a pattern of behaviour in Fianna Fail, honed over decades. the party is convinced ‘l’etat, c’est moi’ — so its welfare becomes synonymous with the national interest. Self-serving nonsense, of course, but it continues to be pumped through members’ veins.
If the Soldiers of Destiny are ever to regain the trust of the electorate — and what an elephantine ‘if’ that is — they will need to melt down this flawed template and be recast from an entirely new mould.
But the lesson is slow to penetrate, even with bright, able people who ought to know better. it led to a spectacle which particularly saddened me: Mr Lenihan, a politician who made the leap to statesman status over the past 18 months, lowered his standards when he energetically supported Mr O’Dea. to borrow a newspaper headline about Jackie Kennedy’s marriage to Aristotle Onassis: Oh Brian, how could you?
I didn’t expect much better from the Taoiseach, who has a track record of mistaken loyalty, to put it kindly. or from the Justice Minister, though he is supposed to uphold the laws of the State. But I anticipated more attention to detail from a minister of Mr Lenihan’s calibre.
In the Oireachtas debate on Willie’s woes, Mr Lenihan used the threadbare line, much recycled within Fianna Fail, that Fine Gael was motivated by political gain and the desire to divert attention from George Lee’s departure.
It’s always attack, attack, attack with this party. And it’s all just smoke and daggers, in the immortal words of a previous recipient of Mr Cowen’s knee-jerk loyalty. Fine Gael’s reasons are an irrelevance: the only issue was whether Mr O’Dea acted in a manner unfitting to the role of minister. I think we all know the answer to that.
So today, I am less concerned with the standards of Mr O’Dea because he is no longer in the Cabinet, than with the standards of the Musketeers who supported him.
Is it a minor issue compared with our 12.7pc unemployment rate — likely to hit 14pc by the summer? I don’t believe so — we must have faith in our leaders to steer us through the recession. If they were convinced Mr O’Dea should stay in the Cabinet — and they said so, right up until his resignation — then I have no confidence in them or their discernment.
This is an administration which:
- Dragged its heels on a banking inquiry, finally insisting the investigation should be held in private.
- Was paralysed by inaction during the country’s frozen woes in January.
- Did a U-turn over top civil servants’ pay (more ‘them and us’).
- Tried to tell us it was acceptable for Mr O’Dea to smear an opponent, and then give a different version of events in an affidavit.
I could go on and on with this list — it worsens daily.
Last year, chief whip Pat Carey said getting out of the current crisis was more important than any one party’s popularity.
But that’s just a useful sound bite. quite simply, this party sees things differently to the rest of the country.
Do any of the senior Fianna Fail figures embroiled in the Brothelgate fallout even understand why Mr O’Dea had to go? their efforts to save him, come hell or high water, show they couldn’t — or wouldn’t — grasp the validity of concerns about ministerial standards.
The Taoiseach reacted as if he saw it as a challenge to his authority, when it was actually democracy under threat — a democracy he is charged with serving. At least this week’s forced resignation signals a refusal within the body politic to connive, look the other way, or accept dishonour as the norm.
Toppling Willie O’Dea was not about taking scalps, though every little helps, as Tesco helpfully reminds us. it was about recognition, belated though it was, that some actions remain beyond the pale. Even in the (only sporadically) democratic republic of Irelandistan.