More talk, less action is what we really need

John Boland was a doer and not a talker. As Minister for the Public Service in the mid-1980s he did more to reform the public service than had been done for generations. As Minister for Education, he abolished corporal punishment at a stroke. As Minister for the Environment, he set the groundwork for the rejuvenation of Dublin.

As a county councillor in the early 1970s he unwisely became embroiled in a rezoning scandal along with his friend Ray Burke but that, for him, was an aberration. He had an impatience with "talk". He thought politics was about doing things, not talking about doing things. He was much irritated by Garret FitzGerald, who was very much into talk.

In many ways John Boland would have been very much at home in the Fianna Fail of Sean Lemass. Lemass was also very much into action and very little into talk. an Lemass had an impatience with the talkers of politics, including the person for whom he professed an enduring admiration, Eamon de Valera.

The talking aspect of politics has fallen very much out of vogue, ail as a talking shop. But but politics is about talk, primarily about talk - the action is secondary.

Politics is essentially about changing people's minds, winning support for political positions that then enables action. And the process of changing people's minds involves talk, endless talk - the action comes later.

Take a contemporary example. What matters most in Irish public life (to some of us) is the redistribution of the wealth that has been created in such spectacular abundance over the past six years. The redistribution of wealth that regenerates the ghettos of poverty, crime and drugs in our cities and in parts of rural Ireland. The redistribution that would see fairness to women, to the Travelling community, to refugees, to other vulnerable people such as those in prisons, in mental institutions, in old people's homes.

This cannot be done through action, at least not in the first place, because there is not now a political constituency to enable this to happen. Public opinion believes that the priority is tax cuts to put their "own hard-earned money" back in "their pockets". That strong sense of ownership of what is "earned" is a powerful barrier to redistribution.

There needs to be a lot of talk to convince enough people that there is no moral or political entitlement to what one earns in a market economy; that there is no logical reason why society's resources should be distributed on the arbitrary basis of who one's father was, or on the arbitrary contingency of whether one was born with skills that happen to be currently marketable; or the other arbitrary contingencies of whether one is intelligent (in the conventional sense), or literate (in the current sense), or whether one's family was a Travelling family or a refugee family, or a family from the ghetto areas of our cities. Action cannot divert enough resources to deal with such people without there being a political consensus, at least of sorts, to mandate this to happen. And for there to be political consensus there has to be talk, lots of it, preferably in a good talking shop.

The abolition of the slave trade in Britain and of slavery in the United States took place only after talk, volumes of it. It could not have occurred otherwise. The emancipation of women likewise.

TWO great talkers of the modern era, one in Britain and the other here, have had enormous influence. Neither did much, if anything at all by way of action; both achieved more than anything achieved by the men and women of action.

The British talker I am referring to is Enoch Powell. He held ministerial office only briefly but, on all the great issues with which he concerned himself, he had enormous influence, an influence that was perhaps in many respects malign.

He set the agenda on immigration with his infamous "rivers of blood speech" in the late 1960s. He was the first political apostle of monetarism, the ideology which underlay Thatcherism and now underlies Blairism. And it was on Europe that he has been most influential. Now the entire Tory Party and much of the Labour Party, has become Powellist on Europe.

The Irish talker has many similarities with Powell, although he would resile (or would he?) from any such identification. It is Conor Cruise O'Brien. It is hard to remember anything he did as Minister for Posts and Telegraphs from 1973 to 1977 but he said something then which has had reverberations since. He said he was no longer working for a united Ireland. Fianna Fail was outraged by the remark and his government colleagues much unsettled. But who is now working for a united Ireland and does anyone give a fiddlestick?

More than anybody else, Conor Cruise O'Brien transformed popular attitudes towards Northern Ireland. His relentless assault on the ideologies and propensities of nationalism in large part brought about the abandonment of Articles 2 and 3 of the Constitution in the referendum two years ago.

O'Brien has been wrong - wilfully and stubbornly wrong - about so much else (above all, the peace process and Sinn Fein's commitment to it) that it is hard to credit him with the most profound shift in public attitudes on what we thought was "a core value". But aside from that antipathy, there is also an antipathy to "talkers" - the scorn for all talk and no action, failing to notice that all important action is brought about by talk.

But for talk to be influential, it has got to say something. That, essentially, is what politics is about, not action. John Boland would have despised this idea. His nostrils had become allergic to talk because of the cubic metres of hot air he encountered in politics.