Noel Whelan: The British government is dangerously out of its depth

Last weekend Harry McGee, political correspondent of this parish, wrote a personal piece about how he broke his back after a serious fall while rock climbing in Dalkey Quarry during the summer. In a follow-up interview with RTÉ’s Seán O’Rourke on Tuesday, Harry described vividly the moment, about four meters up from the ground, when he realised that something had gone wrong.

He got into difficulties putting some gear into the cliff, and then says “I did what you shouldn’t do – I started to panic” .

He described how dangerous panic is in such a situation.

“When you are on a cliff edge and you start to panic your body begins to shut down, your legs begin to quaver and quiver involuntarily, they call it ‘Elvis leg’. You suddenly get a mind storm, and you are not really thinking straight.”

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He pointed out that as an experienced climber there were things he could have done and should have done to save himself, but he didn’t do them because panic had set in. He began to sense the purchase give way and he began falling.

I know nothing of mountain climbing, but I heard Harry's description of the moments before the fall as a useful analogy for what British politics is currently experiencing. Westminster and Whitehall are having a pre-fall panic attack. There is a very short window within which to save the situation and avoid a no-deal Brexit, but they are quivering involuntarily, suffering their very own version of "Elvis leg".

Lack of control

The sensation of panic and lack of control experienced by a climber before a fall must be something akin to what a swimmer feels when being swept out to sea. Indeed, McGee’s account echoed a piece which Mary McAleese wrote some years ago about how the onset of the financial and economic crisis in Ireland felt to her as president in 2007. She gave her account in a collection of essays on the career of Brian Lenihan published in 2014.

McAleese described how those months in 2007 were underpinned by a sense of panic in a way that reminded her of a potentially catastrophic swimming incident she had suffered some years earlier.

She was on a beach on the Canary Islands, and immediately when she waded into the water she realised “oh, oh, I shouldn’t be in here”. She could feel that the undertow was too powerful. She turned to come back, and missed the fact that a 30-foot wall of water had just formed.

“It came over the top of me and the next moment I was about a quarter of a mile out to sea, having been dragged through what appeared to be like an underground rollercoaster.”

Ireland is tethered to a British political system which is in full panic mode at a most precarious moment

She thought surely she was going to die. Luckily two lifeguards on shore spotted that she was in trouble, and swam out and brought her in.

McAleese wrote about how to this day she remembers the sense of panic in the water. “When it was happening I had no control, there were forces at work that were beyond my control.”

That, she wrote, was exactly her sense of what was happening, economically and politically, at the time the financial collapse came. “It was a scary blurry period when all of the presumptions you make on a daily basis about government, such as that decisions are made with access to the best of information, were shaken.”

Sustainable growth

Before the crash we in Ireland had presumed that as a nation we were on an upward trajectory based on sustainable growth. We assumed this was underpinned by a strong education system and by globalisation. “Then all of sudden it emerged that those presumptions were evidentially not solid, and we found ourselves caught in the irresistible undertow, being dragged away unsure about how it was going to end.”

In a similar way Theresa May’s government is dangerously out of its depth and is flaying about. It has opted for a “project terror” approach seeking to frighten ardent Brexiteer rebels into supporting the withdrawal agreement. Ministers particularise the detail of potential economic catastrophe next spring in the hope of moving Westminster votes.

It is not going to work.

The DUP in particular is impervious to such talk of economic crisis. It remains adamant that it cannot support the agreement without a substantial change in the legal text on the backstop, and that is not going to happen.

Meanwhile, the British Labour Party and its leader Jeremy Corbyn lack the capacity or the inclination to force or find a way out of the crisis.

Ireland is in the uncomfortable position of being tethered to a British political system which is in full panic mode at a most precarious moment. We are in a very strong economic position, and we enjoy relative political stability. These will go some way, but only some way, to help us absorb the collateral damage.