At about 4.25am last Monday, with the throngs milling through Dublin Airport like a crowd outside Croke Park on All-Ireland final day, I exchanged bleary-eyed greetings with a Sinn Féin TD. “Sure it’ll all be different when you guys are in government,” I joked. The look that passed across his face was not one of serene confidence that it would be so.
It is one of the functions that politicians least welcome — to be answerable for the failures of public bodies (and even in some cases for private enterprises, like banks) that they do not control. But it is one from which they cannot escape.
The relative powerlessness of Government over the day-to-day operations of Dublin Airport was emphasised by the fact that the response of the Minister for Transport, Eamon Ryan, was to summon airport executives to daily meetings. True, there are those who might view this as punishment in itself, but it underscored the fact that the Government does not control what happens at the airport — it has a commercially-run company to do this, albeit one that is State-owned.
The Government sets transport and aviation policy: the DAA runs the airport. This is not unusual — most other public utilities here and abroad are run on similar structures, not least because this affords them the freedom of commercial action that would not be possible if they were subject to direct political control. Theoretically, the independent regulator — in this instance the Commission for Aviation Regulation — safeguards the public interest; so you can judge for yourself how well that’s going.
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The catch for politicians is that they still get blamed when things go wrong. This is bad enough for Ministers; for Government backbenchers, who have no power but must answer to the public for its failings all the same, it is intolerable. No wonder the parliamentary party meetings were howling for the heads of DAA executives.
Worse still for the Government, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel for the Opposition. When Mary Lou McDonald demanded that the Government “take command and drive solutions” she was being artfully vague — but no less politically effective for that. She knows that an awful lot of people judge politicians not on the high politics of statecraft and national leadership but on how efficiently-run are the bits of the State with which they come into contact. That’s why the health service is always such a political issue. Parents of children blame the Government if they can’t get school places. (Conversely, forcing through the reopening of schools over the objections of teaching unions convinced many people that the Government was doing a good job on Covid.) If there are power shortages and blackouts next winter, people will blame the Government.
Keeping things running smoothly may be prosaic managerial tasks that are mostly delegated to public service providers, utilities and so on, but they have a direct impact on the daily lives of voters and many voters judge them through a political lens. This is politics not as competition between philosophies or values, but as an exercise in customer satisfaction. As Tony Blair said, what matters is what works.
In recent weeks, we have seen how this question of managerial capacity — rather than politics or policy — is quickly becoming one of the central dynamics of Irish politics. It’s also an irresistible media narrative. You have seldom seen fury like that among backbenchers, themselves besieged by angry constituents, over the slow pace of passport provision. Take a look at the list of topical items raised in the Dáil by TDs every week and see how it is dominated by the provision of State-run or funded services. Many voters just want the Government to fix these problems, and fix them quickly. If they can’t, then voters will find someone who will.
This is a political narrative that is not uncommon when a government is in its midterm: these guys couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery, surely anyone could do better. Something similar occurred in the mid-2000s. It is a politics of grumpy and uneven prosperity, and it has the potential to be lethal for the Coalition. Many in Government have a certainty that these failures of Dublin Airport and the passports and all the rest of it are directly related to the faltering opinion poll numbers for the Government parties and the soaring popularity of Sinn Féin.
Mary Lou McDonald isn’t actually doing anything to earn that extra support, beyond agreeing with frustrated passengers in Dublin Airport that the Government needs to do something about all this, and isn’t. But that’ll do for now.
Improving public services and overseeing the performance of public utilities such as the airport is difficult enough for governments during times of prosperity, such as Blair and Bertie Ahern enjoyed, when money is available to solve problems. In the worsening economic environment faced by the current Government, with difficult carbon reduction measures to come soon, it will be Herculean indeed.
I have rarely seen a mood so sombre as the one that pervaded the summit of European leaders in Brussels earlier this week. The expectation is that the conflict in Ukraine will drag on, the costs — in all senses — will increase and that Europe faces a long period of high prices and economic difficulty. The 27 politicians who lead the EU’s governments know what this means: increasing domestic political pressure as their citizens experience falling disposable incomes and declining living standards. Micheál Martin’s response was to insist that political leaders have to level with people and be honest about what lies ahead. Fair enough. But he should not expect the message to be well received.