Government stumbling around like lost tourists

Political judgment is like virginity. Once you lose it, it's gone for good. Or so it must seem to any observer of Irish politics in recent weeks.

Fianna Fail may have once had an almost telepathic grasp of what was going on in the minds of the electorate. The Progressive Democrats may have once been able to catch quite brilliantly the mood of at least one significant section of the public. Now, the leadership of both parties and of their coalition Government seems to look on the country they govern as a distant world where the language and culture are inscrutable and incomprehensible. They are stumbling around in contemporary Ireland like lost and bemused tourists.

It has become clear in the last fortnight, moreover, that this process has gone much further than even the harshest critics of the present administration can have imagined. Leaving aside all questions of principle, it was obvious that two sets of public appointments had acquired an extraordinary degree of political sensitivity.

One was the appointment by the Minister for Health, Micheal Martin, of six new members to the board of the Blood Transfusion Service. The other was the nomination by the Minister for Finance, Charlie McCreevy, of a replacement candidate for the vice-presidency of the European Investment Bank after the withdrawal of Hugh O'Flaherty.

Anyone with enough political acumen even to get elected to the committee of a local residents' association would have known that these were delicate manoeuvres, requiring sensitivity and skill.

Though there has been no shortage of rivals, the disastrous conduct of the BTS has been by far the worst scandal in modern Ireland. The Finlay and Lindsay tribunals have revealed mind-boggling failures of competence and responsibility, with horrendous consequences.

A significant part of that scandal was the failure of oversight on the part of the board and of the Department of Health. It certainly didn't help that the BTSB was loaded with political appointees whose relationship with the State was not quite the feisty independence that was needed. The chairman of the board for most of the crucial period in which patients were infected with hepatitis C and HIV, for example, was Noel Fox, the accountant who was centrally involved in Ben Dunne's payments to the then Taoiseach, Charles Haughey.

If the appointment of any State board was going to be subjected to close scrutiny, it was the BTSB. And if any Minister could be expected to understand the supreme importance of bending over backwards to restore public confidence in that board, it ought to be the Government's rising star, Micheal Martin.

Yet he still acted in the worst traditions of looking after your own. Of the five appointments he made to the board (excluding the formal reappointment of his own Department's representative), four were from his own Southern Health Board backyard and the fifth was the former Fianna Fail general secretary, Pat Farrell. While no one doubted the integrity and commitment of these people, it was clear that factors other than simple ability had been at work in their selection.

As an example of a complete inability to understand the public mood, the bizarre sounding out of Jim Mitchell for the EIB job was even more extraordinary. It was bad enough that such an approach would inevitably revive memories of Charles Haughey's infamous stroke in appointing another sitting Fine Gael TD, Dick Burke, to Europe in 1982. But it was almost unbelievable that Mary Harney should have used a "mutual friend", the private businessman Ulick McEvaddy, as the conduit for this exquisitely delicate piece of Government business.

Here is a Government faced in the O'Flaherty debacle with unprecedented public anger. The source of that anger is a perception that the actions of the State are being influenced by the operation of private, informal circles of intimate power.

And what does the Government do? It tries to deal with the problem through a private, informal circle of people who know people who know people. To deal with a crisis caused by a chain of favours among People Like Us, it puts itself in the debt of a businessman who regularly, and of course quite legitimately, has to lobby State agencies. After all that's happened, it seems, they still don't get it.

How has it come to this? How can it be that people who had enough nous to get into power in the first place can have transformed themselves inadvertently into political shock jocks whose stock-in-trade is offending the general public?

The most obvious, and popular, explanation is sheer arrogance. But arrogance is usually overridden by a more powerful instinct, self-preservation. Even those politicians who don't really give a damn what the public thinks find it expedient in times of crisis to pretend that they do. Somehow, the present Government has lost the capacity even to present that pretence.

This state of affairs has been a long time coming. The first signs were there in the 1989 election when Charles Haughey admitted on radio that he didn't know that the public was so upset about the state of the health service. By 1992, under Albert Reynolds, Fianna Fail's loss of confidence in its own collective judgment had reached the point where it hired a twenty-something English Tory to tell it how to run an election campaign, with predictably disastrous results. Even in 1997, when the present Coalition won the election, Mary Harney very nearly blew it with an ill-considered attack on unmarried mothers in the course of the campaign.

Yet, both his admirers and his opponents assumed that whatever else a Government led by Bertie Ahern might lack, it would not be short of basic political shrewdness. Here, surely, was a cute populist with an innate feel for public opinion, a man who would govern with a pint of Bass in one hand and a Manchester United scarf in the other.

Yet, though Mary Harney and Charlie McCreevy have taken most of the blame for the current crisis, the fundamental problem is that Bertie himself can no longer manage the man of the people trick. While his predecessor as Taoiseach, John Bruton, infamously promised to govern behind a pane of glass, he seems to govern behind soundproof double-glazing which is seldom penetrated by the word on the street.

The explanation may simply be that Bertie Ahern has been in government too long. It is easy to forget that he has held cabinet office for 11 of the last 13 years. For all his Ordinary Joe image, he has spent his late 30s and 40s surrounded by yes-men and being driven around in a black Mercedes.

Not a man of vision or passion, his style of politics depends crucially on gut instinct. The problem is that as the gut has got bigger, the instinct has become duller. Unable to sense the changes that were coming, he has lost his powers of anticipation altogether, so that every new crisis seems to take him utterly by surprise.

He and his cabinet colleagues have more surprises in store for them. Governments don't control events, and they don't have much time to react to crises when they occur. The successful ones rely on keen instincts and clever strategies. When there is no strategy and when the instincts have been worn away, events spiral out of control. This is what happened in the O'Flaherty debacle and what was still happening in this week's ham-fisted attempts to clear up that mess. The one thing we can be sure of is that it's going to happen again soon.