"They had been unable to get a taxi and had decided to walk the mile or so to the apartment." So ran the account in this newspaper of how the Richardson family from England came to be attacked last Saturday night.
Unable to get a taxi. What a wealth of information lies in those few words. For it seems to be State policy that late-night revellers must run the gauntlet of the violent lumpen-proletariat who make parts of Dublin so unpleasant after dark. It is State policy that the monopolistic cartel limiting the numbers of taxis in the capital be maintained, almost regardless of the cost in sexual and physical violence to the public.
Liberal Ireland
It is a real scandal, State-contrived and State-controlled; but instead of liberal Ireland - or indeed, the PDs - getting exercised about the failure of the Government to deregulate the taxi business, it has instead been feverishly tut-tutting over the utter non-scandal of Mr O'Flaherty's (to my mind) entirely proper appointment to the European Investment Bank. His earlier offence seems to have been that he was completely innocent of the charges that non-legal observers usually make of judges - that they lack the human touch, and that they allow mere procedure to come between justice and the plain public.
On this occasion, we had a wigged one taking it on himself to show consideration towards members of a clearly distressed family; and though his deeds might have been ill-considered, they were quite clearly not corrupt, nor self-serving, nor illegal, nor nepotistic. Should that inconstant creature, liberal Ireland, really have been hounding such a man from office? Was it not, in reality, finding a scapegoat for its own moral and political infirmity in failing to confront Fianna Fail under Charles Haughey for so many years? In this metaphorical bestiary, does not any Fianna Fail lame duck now become a convenient scapegoat?
And what makes a Fianna Fail appointee a lame duck lame in the first place? In part, the feigned anger of those who attempt to emulate the resignation ethos that exists in other polities. However, this isn't easy in an ideas-free political culture which subsists on a diet of high-protein clientelism and a complex network of personal loyalty. Yet word has reached the people who run this system that, on occasion, it is necessary to compel resignation on matters of something called principle. . .
Principle, eh? This thing, "principle", is an abstract, an almost meaningless rectitude which has no genuine resonance in the life of Dail Eireann. Yet the half-learned, half-garbled, liberal-democratic ethos from elsewhere which our political moralists have been able to pluck out from the airwaves on their badly tuned crystal sets seems to demand the occasional sacrifice of a political career, rather as perplexed Incas might occasionally toss a child to propitiate a god whose tempers they couldn't understand.
Political sacrifice
So the grounds for this political sacrifice hardly matter. It's more a question of who's to hand. Oh look, this lad O'Flaherty looks fair game. Chop.
But when the Fianna Fail party bosses took a good look at the bloodied corpse of the O'Flaherty career, they decided that maybe, after all, they'd been a wee bit hasty; which indeed they had. So then they passed special legislation to give the unfortunate fellow his pension, and upon deeper reflection, and very properly, appointed him to the European Investment Bank.
This was policy on the hoof, improvised and ill considered, managing to conclude with justice-of-a-sort. Conversely, the policy towards the taxi-plate owners of Dublin is not improvised or ill-considered, and manages to be the very reverse of justice of any sort. It is a studied and deliberate protection of the purely selfish interests of a hugely powerful cartel, most of whose members are not taxi-drivers at all. Indeed, many of them are (pause for belly-laugh) lawyers.
Dublin Corporation and the Minister for the Environment have pretended to alleviate the crisis of the appalling taxi-shortages in Dublin. Their priority, however, seems to have been not to antagonise the extraordinarily powerful lobby of taxi-plate holders; so they have released 2,500 new taxi plates - but only plate for plate to existing plateholders. A mere 500 plates are being released to non-plateholders. In other words, the more you have, the more you get.
Money licence
The result? Existing plateholders, who are being charged a flat purchase fee of £2,500 per new plate can then lease out plate and car for a minimum of £24,000 a year. It is a licence to print money. Even before a plate-hiring taxi-driver pays for a fluid ounce of fuel, never mind put a penny in his pocket, he must earn £450 a week in fares.
So, in the midst of the absolutely crippling Dublin traffic crisis, a huge State-created, State-policed, State-enforced taxi-shortage continues. The result is that fares are high and taxis are few. Other results follow. In desperation, people drive their own cars, so adding to the already unendurable traffic jams which are crippling the city. Others, without cars, are compelled to walk home in the early hours through unsafe areas. The authors of this policy might care to sit down with the Richardson family - and all its other victims - and justify it. Or they could resign in disgrace. They will, of course, do neither.