Cowen – you think it’s all over?
Harry McGee
Event: The Lisbon Treaty falls.
Implicaton: Brian Cowen’s reign as Taoiseach is off to a rocky start.
Event: The economy plunges south.
Implication: There are serious question marks about his leadership qualities and decisiviness.
Event: Cowen shows leadership qualities and decisiveness by announcing swinging cut-backs.
Implication: There are serious question marks about his leadership qualities and decisiviness.
Event: Brian Lenihan makes a gaffe. So does Mary Coughlan (a couple in fact).
Implication: Cowen’s judgement in selecting two naive novices is dodgy
Events: House prices plummet. Interest rates creep up. Unemployment shoots up.
Implication: Cowen’s leadership begins to look precarious.
Event: Pay talks fail.
Implication: Cowen’s rickety-leadership future is hanging on by a thread.
Brian Cowen has had a lousy start as Taoiseach, the job that has been predicted as his station in life for over a decade. Yep, there has been a great deal of ‘events, dear boy, events’ to his first three months in the job. But there have been several instances in which also shown surprising indecision, for somebody who was for so long seen as the natural successor.
Already a lot of the profiles being written about Cowen are going way beyond doubt. To the extent that they are reading like political obituaries. And when anything goes wrong – no matter how trivial – the story is no longer taken on its own merits. It’s tied into the fate of Cowen – becoming another nail in the coffin; another of the thousand cuts.
Therefore, it was deeply unsurprsing to read a couple of headlines over the weekend linking the failure of the pay talks with Cowen’s future.
Of course, he’s in some bother right now. And he’s also getting an early taster of what Bertie Ahern learned after ten years – about the mortality and obsolescence of political careers.
But it’s still too early to make any real judgement on Cowen. It’s not unknown for teams (especially Offaly hurling teams) to make very slow starts. We have also been quick to forget that most Taoisigh in the past 20 year have had traumatic beginnings. Take his immediate predecessor. Ahern wasn’t very surefooted in the beginning and had to deal at a very early stage with career-ending allegations surrounding his choice as Minister for Foreign Affairs Ray Burke.
It’s not to say that Cowen should be given some kind of dispensation for the first three months. Sure, he had enough time as the apprentice to know what was entailed. Sure, he should have known exactly what to expect. But for all that, it’s still too early. The time to start making judgements is in the autumn when he formulates the Government’s response to Lisbon and in December when Lenihan announces his first Budget.
