People voted for George Lee to change Irish politics – neither he nor Enda Kenny grasped that, writes FINTAN O'TOOLE
IF YOU’VE had the chance to go around the country in the last few months discussing the state of the nation, you will have felt the rage that is out there in middle-class Ireland. You will have realised that things are so desperate that even media types are objects of some kind of hope. This has happened, not because the public has lost its suspicion of the media but because there is no one else to look to. The need for someone to trust is as palpable as the fury at those who have previously betrayed it.
George Lee’s sweeping victory in the Dublin South byelection last June was, of course, the most spectacular evidence of this phenomenon. It was an expression of both profound rage and of almost touching trust. There was, on the one hand, a desire for someone outside the system to get in there and give it a kick. And on the other, there was the notion that we needed someone who knew what was going on, who could make sense of the acronyms and unfathomable numbers that were buzzing around our heads like venomous hornets.
The union of these two forces was, for Fine Gael, a marriage made in heaven. It was a perfectly polite revolution, a radical gesture that was also a cry, not so much for an overturning of the established order, as for intelligence, integrity, competence and decency.
That this project has exploded in clouds of mutual bewilderment, sending jagged shards of shattered egos flying in all directions, tells us two things. The most important of them is that the political system has no idea what is happening. Even while the ground is shaking, it continues to run along the established tracks of thought.
Fine Gael, we realise, actually thought that George Lee’s apotheosis was about Fine Gael. They saw his triumph as being essentially nothing more than a particularly brilliant political stroke. Beyond its immediate nature as a morale-booster for the party and a beautifully embroidered pillow to shove over the mouths of those who whisper that Enda Kenny isn’t up to it, it had no larger meaning. Its concrete manifestation – George Lee TD – was just another bumptious backbencher. Beyond his celebrity function in recruitment and fundraising, he was simply a rival foot on the greasy poll. He must learn to serve his time, pay his dues and work the system.
This says a great deal about Enda Kenny’s ultimate unfitness for leadership, the leadenness that marks him, not as an alternative to a political culture that has failed us so disastrously, but as part of it. The unwillingness to use Lee’s obvious intellectual talents and to build on the trust he has built with the public points to a small-minded nexus of jealousy, caution and smugness. It reveals a party assuming that it will be in power after the next election and need do nothing except avoid trouble.
But the failure of the whole project also points to a lack of imagination on George Lee’s part. There was a certain naivety in believing, in the first instance, that a classic catch-all, conservative party like Fine Gael is particularly interested in a cutting-edge economic analysis that acknowledges what Lee surely knows – that the old orthodoxies cannot provide solutions to the crisis that they caused.
But there is also an apparent lack of understanding on Lee’s part of his own power. He seems barely to have understood what it was that made 27,000 people vote for him. They didn’t vote for him to be an economic adviser to Enda Kenny. They know very well that there are good and honest economists who could be hired for that role without being elected to anything. They voted for George Lee to change Irish politics. The two qualities they looked for and found in him were simple – he was an outsider and he could be trusted to speak the truth as he saw it.
This gave him immense power – and it also in part explains why Fine Gael couldn’t handle him. He was much bigger than the party and in a sense almost completely independent of it. No one gave a damn whether he did constituency work or sat on committees examining the minutiae of legislation. In particular, no one gave two hoots whether or not he was expounding Fine Gael policy. He was George Lee, tribune of the enraged and disorientated middle classes.
Walking away from Fine Gael is fine, but walking away from this much bigger, freer, more exciting job is not. He should have been thrilled to be free of a party that had begun to regard him as an exotic pet that it had been given for Christmas and wasn’t sure quite what to feed.
Paradoxically, the party’s misuse of him gave him the excuse he needed to leave it and actually represent the people who trusted him with their votes. They elected him to embody a new kind of politics – free-thinking, plain-speaking, honest, uninvolved in clientelism. By betraying that trust, he has added to the cynicism he intended to fight.