Just a week ago, in the wake of a catastrophic result for his party in the Tipperary South by-election, the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, promised that Fianna Fail would "try harder and listen better". The tone was strikingly humble. The Taoiseach and senior colleagues like Mary O'Rourke and Noel Davern seemed to acknowledge that the Government had lost the plot.
The arrogance that had marked its collective handling of the O'Flaherty appointment was about to be replaced by some quiet soul-searching. The party stepped back, took a hard look into its own heart, and after mature reflection, faced up to the awkward truth: it was all the media's fault. Over the next few days, the public was presented with a Government so lacking in self-awareness that it thinks denial is a river in Egypt.
It now seems that what the Taoiseach really meant after Tipperary South was that he would listen better to the ineffable wisdom of Charlie McCreevy and try harder to make the obtuse critics of his Government understand how stupidly mistaken they have been. From the beginning of this week, minister after minister repeated the basic message that the public was angry only because, in its lame-brained innocence, it had been duped by a cabal of evil journalists.
It began to dawn on listeners to the week's current affairs programmes on radio and television that the people who run the country genuinely believe that they are not rulers but victims. Twice in one day (Wednesday) ministers painted the Government as a vulnerable minority persecuted by Nazi-like tyrants.
In the Dail, John O'Donoghue described accusations of sleaze as "fascism". Later, on Today FM, Jim McDaid, speaking of the attempts of newspapers and broadcasters to get answers to the many unresolved questions in the Sheedy affair, said that "a similar type of issue existed in Germany in the 1930s . . . I saw what happened there when truth and democracy were succumbed (sic) and people were forced by certain factions into something that was totally untrue." Were it not so grotesquely offensive to the victims of the Nazi concentration camps, this extraordinary outburst of self-pity might have been funny. The Alice in Wonderland logic through which a refusal to answer questions becomes a defence of "truth" and the imposition of a party whip to prevent a Dail committee from asking those questions becomes "democracy" has a certain surreal allure.
But it became clear that this was not an embarrassing rush of blood to the head. It was a thought-out, co-ordinated strategy, that had begun on Monday night's Questions and Answers when Noel Dempsey repeatedly suggested that the O'Flaherty controversy had been "generated" by the media and continued when two of the Government's most senior figures, Mary Harney and Brian Cowen, proceeded to put flesh on Jim McDaid's allegations of persecution by purporting to show two specific instances in which journalists had damaged the Government by distorting the news. One of the remarks which caused most public annoyance in the O'Flaherty controversy was Mary Harney's rhetorical question whether "three or four months from now, will anybody remember this?" On Wednesday, she strongly implied that the media had essentially invented this comment: "I never said that actually. I suppose if things could be accurately reported then one might have some chance of getting fair play."
Then, on Thursday morning, Brian Cowen went on Morning Ireland and made an even more serious allegation. He suggested that, having given extensive coverage to Tuesday's proceedings at the Moriarty tribunal when counsel for the tribunal had charged that Fianna Fail had withheld important information, the media had deliberately ignored Wednesday's hearings in which these charges were apparently modified. According to Brian Cowen, no reporters had been present at the tribunal on Wednesday morning: "There was no one there yesterday morning for some strange reason." This was much more than vague anti-media rhetoric. Here were two explicit allegations that, if true, would fully justify the Government's belief that its troubles had been caused, not by its own actions, but by a conspiracy among journalists and editors to engage in a black propaganda campaign aimed at destabilising a democratically elected administration.
If Mary Harney's claim was true, all organs of the media had conspired to manufacture and disseminate without challenge a damaging "quote". If Brian Cowen's statement was true, the same editors had instructed their reporters not to attend a sitting of the tribunal and not to report what happened. Again, a high-level conspiracy would have to be at work.
In fact, both allegations were completely and obviously false. Within an hour of her astonishing claim, RTE was playing a tape of Mary Harney's remarks about no-one remembering the O'Flaherty controversy in three or four months' time. And anyone listening to news bulletins on Wednesday or opening a newspaper on Thursday morning knew that the day's proceedings at the Moriarty tribunal had been reported fully, accurately and normally.
Much more surprising than this willingness to make outrageous and baseless charges against an identifiable group of journalists was the apparent belief that this strategy could work. The average 10-year-old knows that you don't use "the bus broke down" as an excuse for being late for school if there's a bus strike on. How do people supposedly intelligent enough to run the country come to use such transparent excuses as the centrepiece of a campaign to save their political lives? How did a Government that seemed to have everything going its way reach a point where its only response to a disaster is to compound it?
Whole teams of psychologists might spend years studying these questions without arriving at any definitive conclusions but a combination of two delusions seems to be at work. The Government thinks it is wonderful. And it doesn't think the public really cares about sleaze. One of these fallacies is the effect of unfamiliar experiences, the other of tried-and-trusted instincts.
That this Government thinks of itself as a phenomenon of unparalleled magnificence is obvious from the rapturous tone in which its members talk of their achievements. All governments put the best face on their own records. This one genuinely believes that neither history nor the present offer any parallel to its dazzling brilliance. John O'Donoghue, for example, told the Dail on Wednesday that this is "the most successful Government in the history of the State". Brian Cowen claimed that it has "the best performance in Europe".
It might be thought that a Government responsible for a health system in which two women have recently died in hospitals while waiting up to 14 hours for emergency treatment and another woman has been told that she may not have surgery to remove a goitre which leaves her scarcely able to speak or swallow, until 2005, has reason to be more modest. But the unfamiliar experience of presiding over staggering economic growth and having more revenue than it knows how to spend has evidently induced a dizzy euphoria in which such ugly realities are hard to discern.
If, though, you believe you are wonderful, it follows that those who fail to express unqualified admiration must be stupid, deluded or up to something sinister. Expressions of anger and disgust can only result from a bad-minded conspiracy.
These effects of false elation are compounded by an illusion rooted in long experience. Fianna Fail can look back over 10 years of sleaze and scandal. Some of the younger backbenchers and junior ministers have hardly known a time in public life when the party was not beset by some allegation of corruption. And yet here the party is, still in power. For all the apparent upheavals of the Haughey and Reynolds years, only the short period of the Rainbow coalition has interrupted the natural order of things in which Fianna Fail governed Ireland.
From this reality, the party has learned to regard scandals as passing storms. Though full of noise and wind, they leave the essential landscape unaltered. The media whip up outrage, the public gets swept along and sometimes someone has to resign. But when it all blows over, nothing matters except bottom-line economics. As Brian Cowen told us this week, issues like the O'Flaherty appointment are simply "not relevant to the everyday lives of people out there".
What makes this an exercise in wishful thinking is that, bit by bit, "people out there" have come to see that the corruption of State decisions by private influence is very relevant to their everyday lives. The ability of large sections of the business classes to evade taxes had consequences for the health and education systems in those lives. The distribution of privilege at a time of unprecedented change has been powerfully affected by the use of money to buy preferential treatment. The unequal access to the law that was dramatised by the Sheedy case and endorsed by the Government to promote Hugh O'Flaherty undermines the whole notion of equality in a democratic republic.
There is no evidence whatsoever that the Government understands any of this. The sheer ineptitude of this week's fight-back suggests that its survival of last night's vote of confidence will make very little difference. The gap between reality and the Government's perception of it is now so wide that it will take far more than a long summer recess to bridge it. And the longer the coalition survives, the more time there will be for the resentments of the last month to ripen in the public mind into implacable revenge.
