From top: Hildegarde Naughton and an exasperated Miriam O’Callaghan on last Thursday’s Prime Time on RTÉ One; Eamonn Kelly
Confidence in the Crony System
This week’s confidence/no-confidence votes in Simon Coveney seem less about Coveney and more about confidence/no-confidence in the old ways of doing things.
The taoiseach seems to be sub-consciously aware of this, since he has accused Sinn Féin of playing “Old style opposition politics”. As opposed, presumably, to the new style agreeable opposition politics mentioned on RTÉs Prime Time the week before last, and discussed here last week.
A new style of agreeable politics that sees a Fianna Fáil taoiseach threaten Fianna Fáil TDs with suspension should they fail to vote confidence in a Fine Gael Minister accused of cronyism.
May we all live in interesting times.
Meanwhile, on Newstalk, FG Minister Colm Brophy was making the case for it being a waste of talent for Simon Coveney to resign, an argument never made by FG/FF when arts funding is cut, or people are denied access to Third Level education due to economic constraints, or the best and the brightest graduates are expected to emigrate rather than stay at home and compete with favoured cronies.
Please Stop Talking
One of the highlights of the week came when Miriam O’Callaghan on Prime Time, wading through a blizzard of accusation from Hildegarde Naughton directed at Pearse Doherty, framed on a big screen somewhere in Donegal, finally surrendered to exasperation and politely asked Hildegard to please stop talking.
Hildegard was relying on an old argument strategy, where you win by simply making so much noise that no one can hear the opposing view. In the blizzard of Hildegard’s words there was a denial that Katherine Zappone knew about the job on March 3.
There was also an accusation that Doherty was impugning the reputation of a senior civil servant, for reasons that were lost in the thick undergrowth of smokescreen verbiage, and it was into this that Miriam O’Callaghan, like a firm parent, finally asked Hildegard to please stop talking, allowing Pearse Doherty to return once again to the crux of the matter, that the entire Zappone appointment was a case of cronyism in action.
This is a proposition that many people are reluctant to accept, despite the fact that every soc/pol student in Ireland for the past 40 to 50 years has been informed, with stats, graphs and comparative academic musings, of this unfortunate and undeniable aspect of Irish cultural life, where the habit has leeched into all other systems.
Information
Prime Time also looked into another aspect of the political class that has been uncovered as a result of the Zappone case, the fact that so much official government business is “informal”, leaving no record, and that official texts are routinely deleted, which is the modern equivalent of the missing hours from Nixon’s tapes.
Prime Time also reported routines within government where possible problematical papers are marked for destruction should anyone ever request them. A solution to journalistic Freedom of Information requests that must surely have been borrowed from an episode of Yes Minister.
It is possible in all this that Simon Coveney, as Hildegarde Naughton has it, is an honourable person, and that he was simply conducting himself in a normal fashion by the lights of those old understandings, seeing absolutely no wrong in arranging a political posting for a crony. Because this is the way it has always been done.
In this sense, cronyism is an Irish political tradition, almost a conservative approach to public life that has likely arisen in the wake of generations of mass emigration. The best, arguably, always emigrated, while the mediocre friends of friends ruled the roost, owned the houses, rented the flats, sold the beer and so on. They’ve had it their own way for so long that they think cronyism is normal.
The Zappone story is not just about the Zappone appointment, or whether or not Simon Coveney is a good guy. I’m sure he is. The story is more about the unmasking of a political system of who you know, not what you know. About the example being set for how things are done, and the standards that are acceptable at official level in how appointments are made and how official documents are managed.
Spoilsports
The brightest are no longer emigrating. Instead, they are looking straight back at this sham of a crony show and they are not amused. A generation far too copped on to be taken in by those old spiels that once worked so well on what was essentially a rural peasantry.
But the real giveaway of a government out of touch with basic democratic ideas is that many of the ministers, including the taoiseach, genuinely appear to believe that the opposition are “spoilsports”, and not a valid democratic opposition to an entrenched conservatism. As if the mistakes of government are the fault of an opposition for pointing them out.
Because behind Hildegarde Naughton’s attempt to talk over Pearse Doherty lies the unspoken belief, essentially class-based, that some people have the right to speak and others the duty to listen. And that’s a problem in a republic. That’s an aristocratic attitude, concealing a litany of class-based expectations and sense of entitlements.
Owning Up
What the Zappone case has shown, is that the days when influential politicians could simply slip cronies into advantageous positions without being held to account are now over.
In this regard, the confidence vote in Coveney then becomes not a show of loyalty, as Micheál Martin appears to believe it is, but rather a denial that anything untoward has occurred. Ultimately, the confidence vote is a denial that the crony system even exists, despite all academic and anecdotal evidence to the contrary.
This ongoing denial and refusal to own up to such a glaring case of cronyism as the Zappone case, really is the worst form of political gaslighting on a fair-minded public, always more than patient with the often-dismissive attitudes of their comfortable political representatives and their equally comfortable media apologists.
Eamonn Kelly is a Galway-based freelance Writer and Playwright. His weekly round-up appears here every Monday.
Previously: Eamonn Kelly on Broadsheet
