OPINION:It is impossible to have faith in a Government that won't acknowledge the damage it caused, writes BRENDAN LANDERS
IT SEEMS like every week there’s another kick in the teeth for an already punch-drunk Irish nation. If it’s not tax hikes, job losses and salary freezes, it’s mortgage interest rate increases, home repossessions and talk of cuts in social welfare.
We go about our daily business and we make the best of things but it’s getting to the stage where we go to bed at night wishing we wouldn’t have to wake up in the morning, wishing we could dream our way through these hard times. On top of all the stress and the hardship we have to put up with a slew of recession-proof pundits on the radio and in the newspapers telling us to think positive. They’re like the miscreants who were crucified on crosses in the Monty Python movie, The Life of Brian, and sang “Always look on the bright side of life”.
We’ve been slogging away through these dark days for more than a year now and I’m sorry to say that sometimes it seems that our leaders really just don’t care about us. It seems that they’re constantly huddled in meetings with bankers, economists and slash-and-burn merchants – many of them members of the same crowd that got Ireland into this mess. This is how, to us, the land appears to lie and if the truth is otherwise, well, nobody is bothering to tell us. Why doesn’t our Taoiseach talk to us, we wonder? Why doesn’t he apologise for getting us into this mess? It’s the least he could do. Why won’t he be straight with us?
Time after time he and his Ministers trot out the preposterous untruth that the dire financial straits in which we find ourselves were brought about by the international financial crisis, and not the irresponsible, hubristic financial policies of successive Fianna Fáil/Progressive Democrats governments.
At a time when Brian Cowen should be getting down on bended knee to beg our forgiveness, he begrudgingly acknowledges vaguely that “mistakes were made” but he insists that our current crisis can, on the whole, be put down to world affairs. He should know he’s not fooling anybody. When he talks such rubbish a sense of deja vu washes over a cynical nation and we are reminded of Bertie Ahern mis-explaining his “dig-outs”. Or Gerry Adams insisting he was never in the IRA. Or Bill Clinton claiming he “never had sex with that woman”. Some things are simply unbelievable.
The dogs in the street now know that Fianna Fáil and their cohorts wrecked our economy. All that’s left to fully enshrine the true origins of the current Irish malaise in the national consciousness is for Christy Moore to write a song about how the Soldiers of Destiny sold us down the river. Yet Cowen persists with his fiction. Does he think we’re thick?
Our nation is on its knees and badly in need of healing. Despair and desperation stalk the land. Many of us now live in dark and scary places. This crisis is not about the Taoiseach, or about the Government, or about Fianna Fáil. It’s about us. The people. We need hope. We need solace and confidence. We need leadership we can believe in.
Our Taoiseach is asking us to resurrect long-neglected virtues like thrift, sacrifice and forbearance. It’s not unreasonable for us to require that he similarly embrace qualities that haven’t seen the light of day in official Ireland for many a year. Humility, honesty and contrition would do for starters.
The people need plain talking. We need the truth and an apology. But all we get is arrogance, scorn and evasion. We can’t have any faith in a leader who persists in lying bald-faced to us day after day after day.
We have some sympathy for Cowen. People who went to school with him say he is a decent man. Our hearts lifted a tad in approval when he abolished the obscenity of the Fianna Fáil tent at the Galway races. But he was clearly traumatised by the sudden onslaught of our economic tsunami. For almost an entire year he was like a deer caught in headlights – politically paralysed and apparently incapable of action while catastrophe swamped the land.
We watched and wondered where he was. The country was in free fall and our leader seemed to be absent without leave.Only recently has he begun to look like he has regained his faculties, but we wonder if that year of shock and awe has left him damaged or unhinged. Who, for instance, does he think believes him when he says he’s blameless?
Or is it possible that he actually has faith in his own nonsense? If so, we should all promptly down tools and take to the lifeboats.
Perhaps he puts too much store in the snippets of Machiavellian philosophy he has picked up in the Dáil bar? I suspect that even the dark prince would, in this instance, conclude that the Taoiseach’s wisest course of action would be to hold up his hands, acknowledge his failures, say he’s sorry and try to move on.
Perhaps Cowen hopes against reason that time will pass, the world economy will pick up, we’ll be spun the glad tidings that it will only take three generations (as opposed to maybe 10) to pay off the mountains of debt we’ve been lumbered with; people’s memory will fail, their convictions will falter and they’ll re-elect the Soldiers of Destiny. But such hope represents the old, cynical, opportunistic politics that served the party so well down the years. The public won’t fall for the smoke and mirrors now. The Republican Party has done too much damage.
Right now we, the people, deserve better leadership than what we are being required to put up with. So I ask Brian Cowen to please do the right thing and face the puck-out.
Be a man.
Apologise.
Then resign.