The next election, Enda Kenny told us in his speech to the Fine Gael Ardfheis, will be a "transforming moment in our nation's history". That's a pretty big claim, and it implies a momentous choice. So what are the options? Fintan O'Toole writes.
According to Enda, we will be able to choose "between a tired old government that have brought us as far as they can, and a new government that will create an Ireland where . . ."
Where what? Where the power of the market will be directed towards the creation of a decent society? Where social justice and the quality of life will be the priorities of government? Where the ostentatious privilege of a small minority will be replaced by a republic of equals? Where the basics of life - housing, health, education, transport - are available to all? Well, actually, according to Enda, "an Ireland where our children can rear their children, confident of a bright future".
So this is the transforming moment that awaits us. Vote for Fine Gael and your children will be able to rear their children. Vote for Fianna Fáil or the PDs and your children won't be able to rear their children. It's not quite clear why this might be the case. Forced sterilisation? Compulsory communes with collective child-rearing? Sexual reproduction to be replaced by cloning? But it's obviously momentous stuff. Either that, or it's just rhetoric so vapid that it means nothing at all.
I don't know whether the leader of a would-be alternative government has ever made a worse speech to perhaps his last ardfheis before a general election than Enda Kenny did over the weekend. And if finding out involved having to read through any number of speeches even half as bad, then I'd rather not know.
It is, in any case, hard to imagine any combination of boilerplate rhetoric and macho posturing that could be quite so depressing. Fine Gael has rightly identified the current Government as tired, incompetent and directionless. It has rightly sensed a desire for a grown-up conversation about where Ireland is and where it might be. But its leader seems unwilling or unable to engage in that conversation.
Having tried and failed to project himself as John F Kennedy, Enda has now decided to project himself as Clint Eastwood. The most hideously revealing two words in his speech were "drunk tanks" - the places Enda is going to throw people who go on the lash and make a nuisance of themselves. Drunk tanks aren't Irish. They're not even British. They're American and we know about them from the movies. They're part of the argot of Hollywood crime-fighting: drunk tanks, black Marias, district attorneys, the boys of NYPD choir singing Galway Bay. And Enda seems to think he's in one of those movies. If we pin a star on the lapel of his pin-stripe suit, he'll ride into town and clean the scum off the streets. "I'm calling time on the thugs . . . When the law and order party is back in power, the thugs will be out of business."
This is the way the alternative taoiseach chose to frame the debate about the future of Ireland: not as a serious choice between opposing visions of a good society but as a bad movie in which Dirty Enda takes on the thugs. Every concrete idea he put forward was stupid or illegal or both, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing but desperation.
Drunken people will not be allowed into A&E departments. They will be put into Enda's "drunk tanks" and money will be taken from them. ("Fine them. Hit them where it hurts, in their pockets.") Never mind that nobody actually wants their 16-year-old daughter, when she's found wandering the streets after a drinking binge, to be locked up without medical attention. Never mind that medical ethics demand that people be treated if they're in danger, even if it's their own fault. Never mind that being drunk is not itself a crime and that people can't be fined for crimes that don't exist.
Enda's next big idea is that we will have tougher sentences handed down by the courts because "the prosecution will stand up and propose, in court, the sentence that reflects the people's view. The judge will hear the voice of the people." And the judge will promptly decide whatever the judge was going to decide anyway because judges don't like mere barristers telling them what to do, even if those barristers have now been mysteriously transformed from smug fat cats to the voice of the people.
But Enda has another idea: people granted bail while awaiting trial will be electronically tagged. Enda, as taoiseach, will personally give the orders in each individual case. "And if they do get bail, I will authorise that that person be electronically tagged so the gardaí know where they are 24 hours a day, seven days a week." This is unconstitutional on at least two levels: politicians can't impose criminal sanctions like tagging and even the courts can't impose criminal sanctions on people who have not been tried. It is, in other words, pure swagger, designed to get us all to vote for Clint Kenny. If I was Bertie Ahern, this vacuous posturing would have made my day.