Fintan O’Toole: Election of taoiseach will give us a do-nothing government

Whatever else you could say about our big political parties, they used to be rather good at one thing: taking and holding power. They hungered for power like famished wolves. And now they don’t.

The long and winding road to the election of a taoiseach is coming to an end, but it will give us, not so much a government, more a mere administration. We will have a taoiseach who was decisively rejected by the electorate and a cabinet made up largely of members of a party that lost an election. It lost it, moreover, for a good reason: it wasn’t very good at governing.

And this, remember, is a deliberate choice: Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael had a comfortable majority between them and could have formed a strong government. That they chose not to do so tells us something quite profound: at the heart of the political system, there is a loss of faith in the power of government.

There's a history to this: 15 years of bad government. The rot set in after September 11th, 2001, when the vast global boom of the 1990s ended. Ireland rode that wave of global growth with spectacular success. Rapid economic expansion, the return of migrants and the largely skilful handling of the peace process gave Irish governments legitimacy and prestige. They seemed capable of achieving big things.

Extravagant follies

However, when the wave they had been surfing crashed, they plunged back into cynicism and self-delusion. Government became an ever-more frantic effort to disguise the underlying problems by inflating what became, in relative terms, one of history’s biggest banking and property bubbles. With their vast salaries and expenses, ministers became mere puffed-up embodiments of the extravagant follies over which they presided.

When the bubble burst, sovereign government went with it. The cabinet became a Home Rule administration. The august room in which it met was simply the local wriggle room within the very tight confines of the troika’s instructions. Obedience was the watchword and the main job of Irish governments was telling us why they couldn’t do what they wanted to do and why they hated doing the things they had to do.

It was only when the troika retreated into a more discreet supervisory role that we realised how deeply debilitating this process had been. The Fine Gael and Labour administration proclaimed the joyous return of Irish sovereignty. But it also showed an astonishing inability to do anything much with that apparently restored governmental power.

The Irish Water fiasco is not an isolated case of the sheer inability to govern. The homelessness crisis seemed to come as a complete surprise to the Government. The flagship policy of universal health insurance dwindled into a vegetative state until Leo Varadkar finally took it off life support. The key education policy of divesting church control of primary schools was an abject failure. The banking inquiry was a flop. The long-term disaster of a near doubling of child poverty was allowed to unfold with no Government intervention. And so on.

Everybody knows that governments are limited in what they can do. But in what other developed democracy is it impossible to build a children’s hospital in less than 14 years? Where else it is impossible for a state to investigate serious allegations in the way that we are now being told cannot be done with the Siteserv deal and its layers of impenetrable confidentiality? Where else do health systems so ruthlessly proclaim the lives of the rich to be more important than those of the poor while a minister for health comments languidly as if he were a detached observer?

For the past 15 years, government has meant either the hyped-up strutting of the self-deluded or the hand-wringing and shoulder-shrugging of “hard choices” that were really soft options. Perhaps, then, it’s not all that surprising that we’ve ended up with this lack of enthusiasm for the wielding of power. The belief that governments can set goals for social change and then achieve them has evaporated.

Remarkable buoyancy

And it’s very hard to see that changing under Enda Kenny. He may be a nice man and he is certainly a canny political operator. But his skills are those of a survivor. He has that remarkable buoyancy that allows him to stay afloat even when the ship he commands is slowly sinking. There’s no evidence, though, that he believes in anything very much beyond his own survival.

And Micheál Martin has now turned government itself into a giant flotation device for Kenny. The point of the new government is not to wield power on our behalf; it is to keep Enda’s head above water until it suits Fianna Fáil to let him drown.

And remember: it is not in Fianna Fáil’s interests for the new government to really achieve anything. If the administration suddenly became dynamic and competent, that would be bad news for Fianna Fáil. Fortunately for it, nothing in recent history suggests it has too much to fear on that account.