The reader reels away from this extended polemic feeling like an exhausted participant in a long lunch with John Drennan, the Sunday Independent political journalist turned Renua spin doctor.
Its lengthy title, The Great Betrayal: How the Government with the Largest Majority in the History of the Irish State Lost Its People, gives the first hint that this book is a diatribe for the seriously disgruntled.
This particular author could never stand accused of being hidebound by political correctness.
Former minister for justice Alan Shatter is “capable of starting a riot at a Buddhist convention”, according to Drennan.
Fine Gael has recently pledged its troth to Labour “in the manner that would have left a gold-digging blonde who has found a 90-year-old billionaire with a heart problem in a Florida retirement village embarrassed”.
Drennan passes stern judgment on practically every action of the Government to date through a protagonist called “Paddy”, based on the Irish everyman infamously referred to by Taoiseach Enda Kenny in an extraordinary interview given late on the night of the 2011 general election count.
The phrase, “Paddy likes to know what the story is”, was memorably and surprisingly employed by Kenny when promising the incoming administration would not keep citizens in the dark about the State’s economic situation.
Drennan’s feckless Paddy is no saint. Although the catastrophic economic crash meant he was initially “so terrified of seeming to be foraging for food in dustbins” that he accepted severe restrictions to his previous lifestyle, he is certainly “not designed for long-term virtue”.
Paddy turns politically promiscuous as disillusionment with the Government quickly sets in and flirts with “that dirty Sinn Féin girl or those loose Independents”. He has an unfortunate propensity to take refuge in the pub.
The Opposition feels Paddy’s wrath, too, with Micheál Martin’s “blancmange” leadership style of a “clubbable, harmless” Fianna Fáil coming in for biting criticism, along with Gerry Adams and his Sinn Féin band of “political Scientologists”.
Written before Drennan’s departure from the world of journalism, the politically tuned-in reader will be interested to learn what he has to say about the fledgling party led by Lucinda Creighton which has recently employed him as director of communications and political strategy.
He does not shy away from criticism and can be clear-eyed about Renua’s shortcomings: “Lucinda is good, but she cannot be the goal-keeper, full-back, centre-back, centre-forward, full-forward and supply the ball.”
The new party has other key weaknesses, he adds, with competition from Shane Ross’s Independents Alliance and others, and the lack of grizzled political veterans in the party’s ranks giving Renua the air of a naive “children’s crusade”.
References to Creighton and Renua are scatted throughout the book, but one chapter, entitled “The Real Truth About Lucinda and How It May Well Be Trouble”, is devoted to Renua’s origins. Initial dithering by the Reform Alliance (as Renua was called before it briefly used the Reboot Ireland hashtag) “left the HSE looking proactive”.
Drennan contends that the break with Fine Gael had little to do with abortion, although Creighton and colleagues lost the whip over their objections to the Government’s Protection of Life During Pregnancy Bill 2013, but says it was part of a continuous ideological war that has bedevilled the party since the 1960s.
The author is at his best when energetically rattling through the various mishaps that have befallen the Coalition, such as Labour’s dismal performance in the Meath East byelection of 2013.
The Central Remedial Clinic charity scandal and other controversies perhaps currently fading from the collective memory are also entertainingly chronicled.
The book will appeal to those who believe Irish politicians to be hopelessly out of touch with modern life. Drennan’s irreverent turn of phrase can be a treat here, dismissing the “cloistered nuns of Leinster House” with many a damning line: “How could they understand a strange new world where working mothers talk about sleep like a hungry man talks about food?”
The book would have benefited from a more rigorous editing process. Small words missing from sentences can make the eye stutter and halt the enjoyment of the text.
Mary Minihan is an Irish Times political journalist
