What a pity that such an incisive commentator is seeking to join the ranks of political wafflers, writes VINCENT BROWNE
NOT EVEN George Lee in his most sombre moments could have predicted George Lee would be one of the casualties of the financial crisis. We have all heard of someone shooting the messenger, but the messenger shooting himself?
He was our best economic commentator. He made sensible the insensibilities that drove Ireland into the catastrophe. He made the arcane intelligible. He had a credibility on economic issues no one else had because of his erudition, his superb broadcasting style and his eminence on the country’s foremost broadcasting station.
He was the real opposition, not in a partisan way but because he raised all the right questions, or some of them, and from a platform of such prominence. Now that’s all gone.
Assuming the optimistic outcome to this frolic – that he fails to be elected for Dublin South in four weeks’ time – he will be sin-binned by RTÉ for years, relegated to one-to-one interviews with business “leaders” broadcast between 2am and 6am. Worse still, maybe talking to personalities about the meaning of life.
The second-worst-case scenario would be his election to join the back benches of Fine Gael. From there he will remain silent, aside from the odd heckle and a 10-minute speech on an adjournment motion late on a Tuesday night which the media will ignore. He’ll have the odd intervention, perhaps at Fine Gael parliamentary party meetings; lots of invitations to radio and TV programmes where he will have the chance of participating in shouting matches with other TDs. But he will have no opportunity for the sober analysis at which he is outstanding. He will be protesting his support for Enda Kenny as leader (“a great team captain”), squirming over Fine Gael’s last election manifesto (“that was then this is now”). And soon there will be the waffle, the escape from hard decisions.
And the worst-case scenario: he gets an innocuous position on Fine Gael’s front bench. It can’t be finance for Richard Bruton has that and he is untouchable by Enda Kenny for all the obvious reasons. It can’t be Leo Varadkar who has enterprise, trade and employment – he is untouchable too for the same obvious reasons. It can’t even be communications; that is Simon Coveney and he too is untouchable. So what then? Community, rural and Gaeltacht affairs? Whatever the portfolio Martin Cullen has?
He would get on a few committees, maybe. The ones no one else wants to go on. But there will be no shortage of invitations to radio and TV programmes, the shouting matches and the waffle. Lee will have to waffle to avoid specifying prescriptions to the resolution of the crisis.
Us journalists don’t like being put under pressure by interrogators. We hate our integrity being challenged. George is no different, indeed he may be even more touchy than some of us, judging by his performance on RTÉ Radio One’s News at One yesterday with Seán O’Rourke.
What is most disappointing is the implicit suggestion in his nomination that the appropriate response to the crisis is a political stroke – getting a celebrity candidate on the ticket, almost irrespective of what the celebrity candidate thinks or believes. I do not know what George Lee’s politics are and I suspect nobody in Fine Gael does either, or even bothered asking him.
Neither am I sure that George himself has thought through what his politics are. What kind of country do we want to emerge from this crisis? How would it be different from the country we had during the years of the Celtic Tiger, aside from a bit better regulation and no property bubbles? Certainly there is no reason to think Fine Gael has thought it through beyond those platitudes.
Indeed, there is no reason to suppose that any of the parties has thought it through. Eamon Gilmore is putting on a great show as the tormentor-in-chief of Brian Cowen but what kind of society does he want to emerge?
Wouldn’t it be tragic if, after the pain now being suffered by well over a million people here and the pain likely to be suffered here by many more as a consequence of job losses, the loss of homes, the inadequacy of healthcare, the denial of educational opportunity and just sheer poverty, we emerge with broadly the same kind of society we have had since the mid-1990s – a society that is deeply unequal, one of the most unequal in the OECD and the EU; where social status and the denial of same is of central importance; where people die prematurely in their thousands and many many more suffer ill-health and disability because of the insidious nature of our society?
Don’t look to Fine Gael for anything different. Nor, of course, to Fianna Fáil or the Greens. Neither is there reason to hope Labour would be any different, certainly when the prospect of ministerial office is on hand with Fine Gael.
The so-called left is no better; just jargon and even more waffle.
And what a pity about George.