Brian Cowen's dogged clinging on to power created a hopelessness that for two years dragged country down, writes JOHN WATERS
THE VERY fact that this election is happening is already changing things. Among the function of elections is periodically to insinuate a reminder that government is not the rule of the few over the many, but a sharing of energies and perspectives with a view to the collective exercising of power.
The prospect of having a say appears already to have dissipated some of the simmering cynicism, impotent resentment and unfocused rage that have gripped the country for nearly three years.
Although the campaign so far has been dullish, it has been characterised by a sense of relief, underlining the disservice inflicted by the Cowen-led Government in refusing for many months to dissolve itself and allow the people to speak. The anger has not disappeared, but it is changing form, becoming perhaps more coherent, and therefore more constructive.
Hope, of a kind, has re-entered.
The non-involvement of Brian Cowen has changed the mood completely, as though his disappearance has altered the fundamental conditions of our existence. His problem was not just that he became too much associated with our misfortune, but that he lost sight of what a mandate is. Towards the end, Cowen, who over a long career had never been less than a committed democrat, appeared to have become disconnected from an awareness of the People. As his political career went into meltdown, he lambasted in the Dáil those who accused him of lacking a mandate. The Taoiseach, he explained, is always elected by a majority in the Dáil, and so those who referred to his lack of a mandate were showing their ignorance of the Constitution.
It is, of course, true that the Constitution sets down a range of procedures for the orderly operation of power. Politics, though, is but in the slightest degree a technical matter. Cowen was really drawing attention to the factors that enabled him to continue in office since the summer of 2008 without being arrested for impersonating the head of Government. Nobody, however, had suggested that he had not properly been elected Taoiseach. What was suggested is that at no time did he set out his stall before the people to canvass their views or support.
That fact did not, as Cowen intimated, change the constitutional situation, but it certainly contributed to the mood of pessimism that was infecting the country (and which in turn resulted in Cowen’s final and definitive political undoing).
For more than two years, he had sought to persuade us that the approach of his administration was the best – the only – way forward.
We had no choice. While there was occasionally some administrative or political sense in this doggedness, Cowen appeared not to understand that his strategy of holding on to power was adversely affecting the national psychology, generating a sense of hopelessness and cynicism that dragged us ever further into the mire.
The hope being generated by this election is not, however, that things can be restored to the way they were. Rather, the playing out of the electoral drama seems to be enabling a process of coming to terms with the new realities, to an extent that remained impossible while the Cowen administration remained in place.
Over the past week, I have spent time with each of the leaders of the three major parties. (I’m waiting for Sinn Féin to come back to me.) On the basis of these encounters, I find myself unexpectedly buoyed up, not by any specific promise or policy but by the human qualities I perceive in all three men.
To remark favourably on the impact in the campaign of Micheál Martin as the new leader of Fianna Fáil is not to speculate on the outcome or his party’s fortunes. It is difficult to envisage Fianna Fáil emerging other than dismally from the election, at best achieving a respectable base camp from which to begin a massive reconstruction.
But Martin has already done his country some service by bringing a new tone and mood to the political drama. For several years seeming as if his best prospects were behind him, he now emerges as a reassuring figure who, having endured much pain in his own life, is able to communicate beyond the rituals of politics why life is resplendent with hope.
Enda Kenny and Eamon Gilmore, too, seem to understand something of these deeper realities. Kenny, almost certainly the next taoiseach, places great store on personal contact, and it is likely that this quality will influence the style of any government he may lead.The impact of Gilmore’s insistence that the bailout deal can/must be renegotiated should not be underestimated either, in particular his emphasis on the importance of obtaining a mandate for renegotiation, which in effect means getting the moral power of the people behind the idea of exercising Irish independence.
Already, something has lightened in the national mood, by dint of the invocation of the most central and sacred process of democracy. Whatever happens over the next four weeks, we will go forward from March 10th with a new purpose. A line will have been drawn, behind which the less productive elements of our rage and grief may at last be discarded or contained.