The dinosaurs of Irish politics don't go away easily. Fianna Fáil will be back, no later than 2017, eight years away, writes VINCENT BROWNE.
LET US pray for the repose of the soul of Fianna Fáil. “May the angels lead you into Paradise. May the martyrs come to greet you on the way. May they lead you home to the holy city, to the new and eternal Jerusalem. May the choirs of angels come to welcome you. May they take you to the arms of Abraham, where Lazarus is poor no longer, and there may you find rest, rest eternal.”
I wrote along similar lines after Fine Gael’s debacle in the 2002 general elections – and look at them now. These dinosaurs of Irish politics don’t go away easily. Fianna Fáil will be back, no later than 2017, just eight years away, and if they play their cards right they will be back sooner, as brash as ever. Unless . . .
The Greens won’t be interested in the angels and probably don’t want to go to Paradise anyway, because it hasn’t got planning permission. But they are, to use a Green-friendly colloquialism, brown bread. The whistling in the dark over the party’s agenda remaining relevant is hardly convincing even to them.
The Greens believed “office” was important, rather than influence, influence not on the holders of office but influence on the people.
Labour has repeatedly made the same mistake, and is set to do it again. It didn’t matter that Labour was in government from 1992 to 1997. Fianna Fáil might as well have been there on its own, aside from a few bits of legislation on what is called ethics in public office (that stuff about ethics in public office has become a diversion from ethics in public policy, which is what matters).
Let me explain.
I think part of the outrage over the abuse of children in residential institutions, as revealed by the Ryan report, centres on the humiliation, degradation and belittlement of the children, the treatment of them as though they did not matter. Yes, the sexual and physical abuse was horrendous also, but, in many ways, these abuses arose from the mindset that the children did not matter.
It would not have crossed the minds of the abusers that the children were human beings who had equal entitlement to respect and concern as they themselves.
Yes, that was atrocious, but isn't our society built around a similar disrespect, humiliation and belittlement? There is little in our political culture – indeed our social culture – that regards people as equal, except in a formal legal sense of equal before the law. The hundreds of thousands of people who live in the poorer areas of our cities, who earn a fraction of the average income of us Irish Timesreaders and a tiny fraction of what the top earners earn, by any standard – are they treated and regarded as "equal"? How is it that their subsistence gets cut – the Christmas social welfare bonus – at a time when many people (ie us) still can afford lavish holidays, fancy cars, yachts, fine homes, Brown Thomas clothes and accessories? How is it that further diminution in their resources is being planned as part of the coming budget, when all of the necessary adjustments could be achieved by taxing everyone earning over €80,000 at around 35 per cent of their total income – when taking all taxes into account?
It isn’t the poverty that is so important – although for many it is hugely so – it is the social status. People who earn relatively little are afflicted with low social status. They come way down the pecking order, and that matters hugely. It matters in terms of respect, or rather disrespect, in terms of belittlement, in terms of humiliation. The belittlement comes across in all kinds of social interactions that convey the distinctions between the “masters” and “servants”, between the elite and the disregarded.
People down the ladder of social status die earlier, they have poorer health, inferior education, far worse life chances, and they are belittled by programmes designed to “lift” them out of their predicament, whereas it is society that needs to be lifted out of its endemic inequality.
What is needed is not just a few initiatives to improve chances in education, or better access to healthcare, or a bit better policing. What is needed is a structural change to our society. Where equality means what it means – not in terms of opportunity (which is fairly vacuous), but in terms of outcome.
The only hope is that those committed to genuine equality mobilise themselves and begin a campaign to explain how we can create a far better, fairer and happier society than we have had. A campaign to persuade people to opt for equality, a campaign that explains how equality can lead to a happier and more stable society, based on equality, free social co-operation and mutual respect.
That will not happen of its own accord, nor will it happen by the jockeying for position that has characterised much of left-wing politics for so long.