From top: ‘Whiner In Chief’ Monaghan councillor Hugh McElvaney; Dan Boyle

Tackling local government corruption is easier said than done.

Dan Boyle writes:

There were many reasons why The Greens wanted to be in government in 2007. High on the list was to try to do something about political corruption, especially at local government level.

Many of us had had a decade or so experience on our respective local councils. Each of us had knowledge of one or two councillors who just smelled dirty. They wore their being sly, smug and sinister as a badge of pride.

They gloried in their petty corruption. They were the experts in maximising expenses, in seeking to go to any ‘conferences’ anywhere. At these events they would sign in their attendance, not attend the seminar, maybe play a round a golf, but more likely return home.

They kept rum company. Builders and developers seem to take an unnatural interest in council meetings. The corridors were frequented by those engaged in close headed, whispered, conversations.

Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael were the parties that seemed happiest to count these these councillors in their number. This was their Praetorian Guard.

Their devotion to their party gave them the right, they felt, to behave how they liked in public office. The ever loyal party vote would elect them time after time, without questions ever having to be asked. Politics was about tribe, rarely about a better society.

Led by the experience of those of their ilk in Leinster House, many of these sadly all too stereotypical councillors thought this council lark a great laugh. Money for nothing and your (stone) chips for free. Buoyed by this sense of entitlement they felt nothing would ever change. For the most of the time nothing did.

On becoming Minister for the Environment and Local Government, John Gormley immediately made himself a hate figure with these self(ish) made men. Spending on conferences, codified as training, was capped per member. It certainly wasn’t a strategy to elect future Green senators.

He acted upon public complaints on how local authorities were, but more certainly were not delivering services, particularly in relation to their planning departments. He initiated six separate inquiries into differently identified local authorities.

The nature of the wrongdoing varied from failing to provide public information, ignoring public processes altogether, to tolerating built structures bearing no resemblance to the granted public permission.

He encountered many layers of resistance. Firstly from senior officials within his department who didn’t want any inquiries. Negative findings might reveal that as regulators of local government they had been negligent.

The second line of resistance was from city and county managers. Not really accountable to the department or to their elected members, many managers resisted ministerial interference into their bailiwicks. They should be, they believed, the sole arbiters of what was ethical in local government. The blind eye had always served them well.

Then there was the mudguard of the revolution, the members of those councils whose feigned outrage was raised to an art form.

Whiner in chief was Cllr Hugh McElvaney. Monaghan Council had form. John Gormley had already rejected their County Plan, which had zoned many more housing units than they had people. For these councils the ultimate cash crop had become cash.

But what of those inquiries. They still haven’t seen the light of day. Curious that.

Dan Boyle is a former Green Party TD. Follow Dan on Twitter: @sendboyle

From top: Enda Kenny addresses the COP 21 climate conference in Paris; Dan Boyle

Taoiseach Enda Kenny’s address to the climate change conference in Paris this week was insipid, cowardly and an utter embarrassment.

Dan Boyle writes:

Damn right I’m going to write about Climate Change. Maybe I’m coming from a well defined, and pronounced, perspective on this. Probably enough, too much, has already been written about it. None of that changes the fact that it is the issue that affects all life on this planet.

Slowly, too slowly, it has sunk into our collective consciousness that we have a problem. Some, motivated it seems out of contrariness and obtuseness, want to quibble with the nature of the problem. Others want to believe that it’s someone else’s problem, so let them deal with it.

Our esteemed Taoiseach has placed himself in both these camps. His speech to the Paris Convention this week was an utter embarrassment.

It should be considered the ultimate embarrassment of a term of office that has seen him stagger from prevarication, to outright lies spun from folksy, but untrue, tales of people that didn’t exist and events that never occurred.

This should be considered the Taoiseach’s ultimate embarrassment but it won’t be. The street savvy Mr. Kenny is all too aware that Climate Change as an issue rates, if at all, quite low on the pecking order.

We’re three months away from a general election where being honest about this won’t help him or his party achieve re-election, and possibly the prospect of being able to govern on its own (may the Lord protect us all!).

There are precious few votes in climate change. It is an issue that of itself is a political poison. The first law of politics is don’t tell voters what they don’t want to hear.

The fact is that it is our profligate use of fossil fuels in the ‘developed’ World has bought us a standard of living denied to most others on this planet. It has come with a potential cost to end life here within an historically short time frame.

It is politically impossible to sell the message that those of us who live well need to live our lives less. That is if you equate living with consuming. There is the prospect of far better lives being lived merely by living differently. This is an even harder political message to sell.

Those who want to defend the status quo, or deny the need for change, invoke those with less in our society the homeless; the widow woman. The very people they have ignored consistently and constantly.

It has never been argued that those without would be asked to live with even less. There is a fear among the more prosperous that dealing with climate change might bring about a more equal society, a more equal World. Damn right it will.

A more equal society doesn’t fit into the Fine Gael world view. These are the interests that Enda Kenny seeks to represent. If the country was to seriously live up to its global responsibilities, a consequence of that would be a more equal society.

Something our vested interests would not put up with. If anything indicates the failure of our politics it is the weight that the special pleading of vested interest groups is given, with the antipathy against those with real needs who then suffer further.

I didn’t think it was possible to think less of Enda Kenny. I was wrong. His speech in Paris revealed that he could never be taken seriously as a leader. He may convince enough to sidle back into office. He is likely to benefit from a disparate opposition.

He’s probably right in thinking he will win more votes by going for the ignorant ‘no surrender’ vote on climate change, even if such thinking is dangerously short term in nature. The democrat in me will continue to respect the office he holds. However, given his insipid and cowardly speech I could never respect his conduct in government.

Still he will always have Paris.

Dan Boyle is a former Green Party TD. Follow Dan on Twitter: @sendboyle

Who needs to think when your pre-ordained prejudice has been catered for?

Dan Boyle writes:

Last weekend I was thinking of starting a hashtag #KillUsAllNow, but thought the better of it. Not because it was an idea I didn’t want to convey, but my too long presence on web platforms has taught me that it would be selectively interpreted.

In the web world of opinion, where the polar opposites of hyper sensitivity and mega insensitivity seem to hold greatest sway, the expressing of a view is rarely understood, or taken, the way the opinion holder believes it to be.

It’s as if an updated Humpty Dumpty from Alice Through The Looking Glass has decided that it is context, not words, that means what he wants it to mean.

For many internet warriors content is incidental. Tone is king. My outrage is stronger than your outrage. Yours is superficial. Yours is misdirected.

This is usually followed by the exercise of whataboutery, or its corollary components of whydidn’tyouthenness or wherewereyouthenology. None of these have anything to do with whatever comment was originally made.

Those adept at these practices don’t like the World in general, but don’t like you in particular. They intend to poke and prod, where possible getting under your skin.

If you’re a public figure this is grist to the mill; part of the territory or any other cliche on acceptance that’s meant to apply. For my part I have accepted most of it. Although I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that the intensely personal hasn’t breached my defences on occasion.

Despite that, it is the impersonal that most riles me about the virtual reality world of the web. A world I all too willingly choose to inhabit.

Facts that aren’t true. Conversations that weren’t ever held. Promises that were never made. Votes that couldn’t ever be given.

All of this can be lived with, but I lose it in that place of The Web where conspiracies come alive.

For those who exist merely for revelations exposed on www.itsreallyreallytrue.com, it will come as an enormous shock to learn that the conspiracies they obsess about are cock ups that have gone out control. The actual conspiracies are created by those seeking to distract attention from the cock ups they have made.

The obvious is invariably the more likely explanation. For the most part, at the wrong moment, the lunatics do take over the asylum where bad things happen.

Who needs to think when your pre-ordained prejudice has been catered for? Why tease out things any further when the most fantastic narratives have already been constructed?

Still I will continue to indulge. This is our modern day equivalent of community. For many it’s the closest that is had to company. Now that is sad.

Dan Boyle is a former Green Party TD. Follow Dan on Twitter: @sendboyle

From top: The ‘Civil Servants’ as depicted on RTÉ’s Irish Pictorial Weekly, from left: Tara Flynn, Barry Murphy, Colum McDonnell and John Colleary; Dan Boyle

Real political courage means taking on the invisible, unaccountable government.

Dan Boyle writes:

It’s never talked about. It isn’t meant to exist in a country that styles itself a republic, but whisper it, Ireland has a caste system. Elites who believe themselves to be, and know better than, most of the citizens of the country.

Recent years have seen a crumbling of the undue deference sub-elites had come to expect as their entitlement. Priest, politician and profiteer have lost their glitter as a Brave New World brought about by rapid economic change, in both directions, has made a real republic somewhat more likely.

The common factor in their demise was that these were the elites that engaged with the public. The elites that remain are those that have had to deal with the public least. Amongst such elites the highest echelons of the civil servants continue to reign.

Of course it is dangerous to generalise. I’ve known some excellent civil servants, some of whom were Secretary Generals of their departments. However, operating without any real accountability mechanisms, there exists in this caste an overbearing arrogance that without their say the country cannot exist.

Civil servants are meant to implement policy and be apart from the political process. In my experience of government I’ve seen examples of both principles being breached.

Take the area of local government ‘reform’, reducing and merging local authorities. This was never proposed by any political party. It was instigated and implemented within the Department of the Environment strictly for their own administrative convenience.

In Budget 2008 The Greens secured a measure designed to encourage greater use of public transport. This was to treat free parking, in designated city centres, as a benefit in kind on which a €200 annual charge would be made.

Despite being within the Finance Act of that year, Department of Finance officials were briefing journalists that the measure would never be implemented. Which it wasn’t as it would have impacted on them. Civil servants deliberately impeding legislation.

None of this was too surprising. The longer the political involvement the more cynical your world view becomes. Towards the end of that government I had an experience, which in its audaciousness, stunned even me.

We were preparing for the last budget. A budget that would be the worst of budgets in the worst of circumstances. We had succeeded in making previous budgets, all dismal in their own right, to be progressive. Having those with most paying most. We wanted to have as many compensating measures as we could in a budget we knew would be despised.

The meeting was on one side of table were the two Green Ministers, Donal Geoghean our programme manager and myself. Sat across were Brian Lenihan as Finance Minister, his Secretary General and his two most immediate lieutenants (both since promoted).

We were proposing refundable tax credits, at €100 a year, for the lowest paid workers who didn’t qualify for tax. Brian Lenihan was quite favourable to the proposal, but it seems the decision wasn’t his to make.

“We won’t do that” barked one of the officials, looking nowhere for approval of his opinion. Then the penny dropped. We had never been negotiating with Fianna Fáil. It was always with the civil service.

It will remain so, however future governments are composed, until senior civil servants are made understand the meaning of the word ‘serve‘. Of course for any politician to see through such a change they would be need to be ‘courageous’.

Dan Boyle is a former Green Party TD. Follow Dan on Twitter: @sendboyle

From top: Fianna Fáil ministers Dermot Ahern (left) and Noel Dempsey; Ajai Chopra (centre) and  Ashoka Mody (left) of the IMF with Jerome Hughes of TV3 in November , 2010

The fifth anniversary of the bailout prompts some overdue myth-busting.

Dan Boyle writes:

Greens don’t lack for apocalyptic anthems. In the 60s there was Barry McGuire with ‘Eve of Destruction‘. In the 80s R.E.M. were telling us ‘It’s the End of The World‘ as we know it. My own favourite piece of singalong depression is David Bowie’s ‘Five Years‘ from his ‘Ziggy Stardust’ album.

I make this tenuous connection, between half a decade and the apocalypse, because over the next month the phrases like these will be linked ad nauseam. I want to get my spake in first.

This month sees the fifth anniversary of the bailout of the Irish economy. A national embarrassment certainly, but also a course of events we are still many years away from understanding in its full context.

Let me try to put aside some of those myths. The first of those was that the government knew for a considerable time what was likely to happen. The Noel Dempsey/Dermot Ahern doorstep was offered as definitive proof. I hold no brief for either man, and had had severe run ins with both, but neither knew that the IMF was on their way.

Brian Lenihan may have known something but found it difficult to trust many or share information. Green Ministers were better briefed than many Fianna Fáil Ministers. As party chair and our finance spokesperson I was just as well briefed. The Green parliamentary party understood the situation far better than its Fianna Fáil counterpart.

The country was being bounced into the bailout. The ECB and the German government wanted this to happen. Their rationale was certainly punitive. The bragging of the Celtic Tiger era had come back to haunt us.

Patrick Honohan, who was the right choice to lead the Irish Central Bank, became bouncer in chief. His motives were right but I believe his intervention then was wrong.

Let me post a number of alternative scenarios. One is that the IMF should have come earlier, say at the time of the Bank Guarantee. The medicine would have been more severe but recovery could have happened more quickly.

The second scenario was that intervention need never have happened. The revised programme for government in 2009 had already committed to water charges and a site value property tax. If the government had served its full term until June 2012, most of the heavy lifting would have been done.

Neither Fianna Fáil nor The Greens would have received any political benefit, perhaps rightly so, but the country would be in a better, fairer place.

The final myth I’d like to puncture is that the opposition then, singularly and collectively, acted in any way in the national interest. The political interest was always foremost. I can’t deny that if the shoe was on the other foot that it would have been any different, but the ability to look beyond the next election has served us badly. Again.

A one term national government along Swiss lines, may have been the best option altogether. But then, as now, the political interest will always hold greater sway. The saddest fact is that it can all happen again, as if it had never happen before.

Dan Boyle is a former Green Party TD. Follow Dan on twitter: @sendboyle

From top: Minister for the Environment and deputy Labour Party leader Alan Kelly with Joan Burton after her election as Labour Party leader, July 2014 ; Dan Boyle

Labour’s dour deputy leader’s rise has been meteoric.

And he has managed to keep at least one principle intact.

Dan Boyle writes:

Alan Kelly to me was the journeyman Republic of Ireland goalkeeper in our dark days of international competition. That’s Alan Kelly Senior and not his son, who was to follow his father into that position.

These days I’m forced to accept that Alan Kelly, as most known and acknowledged, is Deputy Leader of the Labour Party and Minister for the Environment.

I have to admit a certain ambivalence towards Mr. Kelly. If political success is measured solely on electoral success then Alan Kelly’s performance has been stellar.

Elected to a local authority at the first time of asking, he performed the same trick in being elected to Seanad Éireann. There I served with him never impressed with his particular style of bluster.

In a climate of economic collapse and government unpopularity, election to the European Parliament was the next hurdle that was easily cleared. That no one believed his promise to serve a full term was immaterial.

Election to the Dáil in 2011 also proved to be a doddle. Being appointed a Minister for State on his first day was an added extra. Eamon Gilmore’s resignation as Tánaiste and Leader of the Labour Party opened up a new series of opportunities.

Identifying the Deputy Leader of Labour contest, his victory ensured he would be appointed a member of the cabinet. He would become Minister for the Environment, not because of any natural affinity, but because it provided a place at the top table. This is where it starts to unravel. The belief that electoral success is of itself essence of political success.

In management studies there is a theory known as the Peter Principle where people, especially those whose ascent has been meteoric, are promoted to their perceived level of incompetence. This is particularly true of politics.

Winning elections is one thing. Achieving positive political change another. The Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government offers many potential policies on which a ministerial incumbent can be measured.

Has a better quality of local democracy been produced; more effective planning; improved building regulations; increased housing supply? Has homelessness been addressed? Has the issue of water been put behind us? As a checklist it’s clear that progress hasn’t been made in any of these areas, and in some the situation is worsening.

And that’s before we get to consider the environmental aspect of his brief. Alan Kelly has been the Minister most indifferent to environmental issues since Ray Burke. Given that he is the direct successor of Phil Hogan that isn’t something to boast about.

Not that any of this matters to him. He is likely to maintain his perfect electoral record. He seems well positioned to be the next leader of the Labour Party. With that Irish politics will have produced a perfectly symmetrical example of the Peter Principle.

Dan Boyle is a former Green Party TD. Follow him on Twitter: @sendboyle

(RollingNews.ie)

Residents’ cars block a Dun Laoghaire/Rathdown Council digger from entering a site earmarked for victims of the Carrickmines halting site fire last Monday; Dan Boyle

Why do our leaders reflect rather than lead public opinion?

How do you cope with extreme views on the doorstep?

Dan Boyle writes:

I paid one of my increasingly infrequent visits to Leinster House recently. I was working close to there, and it was a convenient and useful place to break between appointments.

I had a coffee at the dock at LH2000. A number of people passed, from varying shades of what passes for political opinion in this country, to share how do’s.

The longest chat was with a member of the fourth estate, one of the better of that fraternity. I mentioned I was surprised that the Taoiseach had seemed to have gotten away with his comment that members of the ‘general’ public should be consulted with before members of the travelling community are moved to their area. This led to an interchange on whether politicians were meant to reflect or lead public opinion.

He said it still shocked him that when he did pieces, accompanying politicians on canvass, how widespread racist and ethnically challenged views were spoken at the doors. The response of the politicians, of all hues, was always an embarrassing silence, lest the person who produced such bile be ‘offended’.

Of course none of these encounters or the empty responses were ever reported. I can understand why, but it is shameful that the etiquette continues to be practiced. I too have bitten my tongue too many times when I should have challenged. These are attitudes that sadly remain all too prevalent. They exist through ignorance and can only be banished as and when the political system, and the media, tackle their existence head on, showing the holding of these views to be virulently anti social.

I tried to compensate in my last general election campaign. I knew then that being elected was the slightest of possibilities. At the doors I told whoever came up with such hatred what I thought of what they thought.

My canvassers weren’t comfortable with this approach, but I didn’t think it was possible to dig any deeper political holes for myself or The Greens in 2011.

The traditional maxim of most Irish political leaders – these are my people I must follow them – needs to be well and truly buried. With it should be the axiomatic fear in Ireland that practicing ‘leadership’ can and does result in a lack of support, that further brings about a failure to achieve political power.

Some might argue that only when in power can such views be challenged, hopefully to be changed. This is another of the conceits of Irish politics. The same fear that exists when seeking power remains inculcated when attempting to maintain power.

The practice of political correctness is a myth. It exists only in a general sense, rarely in relation to one on one face to face conversations. Until it can do ignorance will continue to predominate.

A running joke in TV series ‘Yes Minister’ was when civil servants told government ministers their proposed actions would be ‘courageous’, meaning precisely the opposite. The term ‘leadership’ has developed similar oxymoronic connotations in our modern political lexicon.

Dan Boyle is former Green Party TD. Follow Dan on Twitter: @sendboyle

Top pic: RollingNews.ie

From top: Penguin classics; Dan Boyle

They read voraciously, challenge mediocrity, prick pomposity and drink moderately.

Every gang should have one.

Dan Boyle writes:

Growing up my ‘gang’ used to refer to ourselves as ‘The Heroes Club’. It was meant in a mock, ironic kind of way. Heroes was how we referred to many of our contemporaries, those whose life trajectories seem composed of drinking seventeen pints on a Friday, followed by a fluid regurgitation of same in the most public of places.

Now we drank. We watched and talked sports. Some of us even played, although the spindly and asthmatic amongst us never fared well. What we never could understand was why the moronic was so celebrated, while the ability to think was supposed to be kept hidden.

Much like the misheard Sermon on the Mount in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, as far as we were concerned not only were the cheesemakers blessed, but we also believed that the weak would inherit the Earth.

If the Heroes Club had a philosopher king it was TW. I’ve been thinking about him a lot recently. It has been twenty years since he has been in our lives, yet his presence continues to loom large for many of us.

I envied him. He was a good looking guy, there was that. He had a great record collection, there was that too. What I most envied was how in his tiny bedroom he had utilised every inch of wall space with shelving, upon which rested hundreds of penguin books. The publisher, not the non flying bird.

And he was genuinely working class. Most of us came from families that acted through our middle class sensibilities, even if incomes rarely justified such conceit. TW had little time for that. What he left me, never knowing the degree of disdain he was expressing, was his constant willingness to prick my own pomposity.

Yet I suspect that if he were around today he may have slipped to my level of cantankerousness.

Today we still celebrate the moronic. We also admire the superficial and adore the stereotypical. He would probably raise his eyebrows and sigh. In doing so he would say more than I ever could with any amount of tortured prose.

I know TW means nothing to most visiting here. Those of us who knew him were lucky to have known him. Every friendship group should have a TW, the more mature one; the one who instinctively knows the difference between enjoying the craic and the need to cop on.

To me he defined the New Nerd. Living life more outside than inside his room. Never in on himself, always prepared to challenge the mediocre, the mundane or the bland.

I miss him. What I miss more is that no one of his ilk is in any of our lives now. I suspect he would have little time for social media. He would mercilessly have teased those of us who live for it and through it. Embarrassing us for being sucked into that world of instant response, forgetting the need for consideration and patience.

He was that deep breath, that gaze into distance, that pause for thought, so many of us now lack in this over hectic world we have created for ourselves.

The ‘gang’ is now spread far and wide. We get to see each other far too infrequently. When we do meet we try to make space for our philosopher king.

Dan Boyle is a former Green Party TD. Follow Dan on Twitter: @sendboyle