We would be more hopeful if we did not expect more from our political system than it is capable of delivering
PERHAPS THE greatest thing about Enda is that he is not a god, but one of us, a real flesh-and-blood man. It seems, already, to be his brand, noticeable in the way he says “our Government” when you expect him to say “my Government”. And yet he seems already to inhabit the role of Taoiseach far better than his previous one. Part of the wonder is that he is such an unlikely chief, someone so ordinary that he seems not quite to fit: the default choice after the more likely candidates have tried and failed.
Past taoisigh either arrived to the position with sundry godlike features – Dev, Lemass, Lynch, Charlie, Garret – or had these added during the process of coronation – Albert, Bertie and Brian Cowen. The result was excessive burdens of expectation, compounded in recent years by an abdication of responsibility by the sovereign people. With the last government, we didn’t just step back and let our leaders at it, but seemed to take a malicious delight in knocking them off the plinths we had built for them.
It is salutary to observe that, uniquely, the new Cabinet contains three former party leaders: Michael Noonan, Pat Rabbitte and Ruairí Quinn. It is interesting that all three, in a sense, failed to deliver as leaders when times were good, but are now called upon to deliver when times are worse than for a long time. The reason, in each case, for these past “failures” is that the voters rejected the alternatives offered under their leaderships in favour of governments led by Bertie Ahern. We would do well to bear this in mind – going, as it were, forward: that the Cabinet carries the imprint of the choices we made that brought us to where we are.
There is always a tendency, at moments of transition, to assume that things will, ipso facto, improve. Within the past two decades, we, as citizens of this Republic or the world, have participated in euphoric moments of expectation with the advent of, in turn, Robinson, Clinton, Blair, Ahern, Obama, Cowen. In every case we experienced a subsequent dwindling of initial hopes.
How many times will we re-enact the same narrative without reflecting on what experience teaches us about the limits of politics in satisfying human desire?
Nowadays, more than ever, the human consciousness, as expressed in political terms, seems to cling to the idea of a redeemer who will come to save us all. Surely we remember what happens to guys like that?
For more than a decade, we laboured under the collective delusion that the Celtic Tiger would deliver the outright satisfaction of our desires in every context. For three years now, we have fallen sway to the further delusion that this promise would have been delivered on had the politicians and bankers not screwed it up. A moment’s reflection should jerk us back to reality: we created the illusion of a utopia by plundering the future.
The past three years, by contrast with the Tiger decade, have seen the emergence of a form of dystopianism, a reaction to the surging utopianism of the preceding period, combined with an incipient sense that it is only because of the flawed nature of its personnel that the political system failed to deliver the satisfactions we craved. We react with rage to the discovery that – surprise, surprise! – human beings are weak and flawed, and man-made systems have not made us safe and happy ever after.
We, the people, want more than we can give ourselves. Perhaps the next stage of our national education is coming to understand the structural disproportionality between our wanting and what a political system is capable of delivering.
Hope is a strange entity. The very idea implies the presence of its opposite: despair. God, as John Lennon observed, is a concept by which we measure our pain. Hope tends to flourish in inhospitable conditions and often appears redundant when things seem to be going well. As it approaches its goal, it blurs into certainty, and then abruptly turns to despair when the mirage of satisfaction dissolves. But then, after a period of grief, hope reappears like a new shoot from the dying seed.
As my late friend John Healy might observe, we have overcome worse circumstances in our day. We have much to be thankful for. The founding fathers of America set about their task with little to work with apart from a belief in providence and their own determination to be its enthusiastic agents and to inspire their people to similar endeavour. They drew their hope not from a manifesto but from a belief in a higher order, in which the ultimate hopes of mankind were reflected as a glorious story.
What we should require from our leaders – beyond the obvious role of managing and representing – is not the deliverance of a system that will solve our problems, but the inspiration that will communicate that everything depends on each one of us equally, on our human desires and capacities, and on the quality of the hope that each of us can discover in his or her own heart. I feel more optimistic about this possibility than for a long time.