All the talk in political circles over the summer, notes Fintan O'Toole, has been of a change in the Government's image. Out will go the arrogant, hard-faced disdain for those who are not favoured by the gods of the marketplace.
In will come a warmer, more caring Government that feels our pain and serves us tea and sympathy. As an exercise in rebranding it has all the hallmarks of such marketing triumphs as Guinness Light and New Coke. Changing the style won't change the substance. A serious commitment to social justice requires two things that are not available to the Government. One is a profound change of mind. The other is simple competence. The two are intimately related: passionless politics dribble away into aimless drift.
Let's take two small examples from the last week, two cases where senior Ministers have shown themselves to be all at sea. Depressingly, the Ministers are the standard bearers of the bright new Fianna Fáil, the members of the Cabinet who would seem to have the strongest social conscience, Noel Dempsey and Micheál Martin. Their Departments - Education and Health - are the ones that intersect most closely with ordinary people's lives.
In the last week both have shown themselves to be bobbing around in the doldrums, waiting for a breath of media wind to puff them up into an appearance of action.
If Fianna Fáil was even slightly serious about watering its working-class roots, it would be making a huge issue of the staggering situation in Limerick. At least 16 boys from less privileged parts of the city have been unable to go to secondary school because they can't find a school to take them. Half of them are actually going into their second year without a school. There could be no starker manifestation of the social apartheid behind the façade of equal opportunity. Even at the most cynical level of enhancing his claims to being the conscience of Fianna Fáil, Noel Dempsey ought to have seized on this situation. Yet only yesterday, a year after it first made headlines, did he show up in Limerick to find out what's going on.
Because the Limerick situation has become a media story again, Noel Dempsey was all over the airwaves last week. His comments were grimly revealing. It turned out, for one thing, that he had never, in the last year, bothered to establish the facts. Last Tuesday, he said on Morning Ireland he was going to Limerick yesterday "to try to find out what's at the back of this". His information at that point consisted of "a whole lot of anecdotes . . . a whole lot of stories being told to me". He had failed, in other words, to even send one of his officials to compile a report for him. Is it any wonder that last year's scandal has been replayed this year?
The other astonishing thing about Noel Dempsey's radio interviews was that between Tuesday and Sunday he completely reversed his position on a basic question: whether he would use his powers under the Education Act to force schools to change their admission policies. On Tuesday, he dismissed calls for him to use these powers as tantamount to "suggesting that the State takes over the running of all schools". Yet by Sunday, he was telling This Week he had the power to intervene in this way: "That is an option that is open to me and I won't hesitate to use it." This complete reversal in his position over six days suggests that he simply hadn't thought about it in the 12 months since the story first emerged.
If Noel Dempsey was flailing around, Micheál Martin was drowning in contradictions. The issue was relatively straightforward: should there be a statutory inquiry into the retention by hospitals of the organs of dead children without the consent of their parents? The range of answers Martin has given is dizzying. In 2000 he told the group Parents for Justice that after the private inquiry conducted by Anne Dunne there would be "a DIRT-style inquiry. It's a statutory inquiry. In other words, if people are compelled to attend, they have to attend."
Last week, the Breakfast Show with Éamon Dunphy programme on the Dublin radio station Newstalk asked the Department about this and was told that the Minister "had always said that unless Dunne had come to him and said she was having difficulty compelling (witnesses), he would not institute a statutory inquiry".
Micheál Martin had now "ruled out a statutory inquiry on the basis that Anne Dunne has never indicated that compliance is an issue". Next day, when the programme revealed that it had a tape of Micheál Martin promising a statutory inquiry, the Minister's tune changed completely. He issued a statement that "the investigation into post-mortem practice and organ retention issues will have a statutory phase". On Wednesday, Micheál Martin's policy was to have no statutory inquiry. On Thursday, his policy was to have a statutory inquiry. The only change in the meantime was the prospect of being embarrassed on the radio.
These are just two specific examples, unfolding in one particular week, but they point to the fundamental malaise of a jaded Government that has been in power too long to know what power is for.