Cowen unable to lead us to dry land after the floods
Saturday November 28 2009
'MOST people know their community welfare officers" (Eamon O Cuiv, Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs Minister). "Things will get worse before they get better" (Brian Cowen, Taoiseach).
What an awful lot these inanities tell us about our stricken country.
In the first place, Eamon O Cuiv is wrong. Most people don't know any community welfare officers. Plenty of people don't know that any such job exists. The title seems to suggest an updated version of some appellation containing words like "outdoor relief", the kind of thing our former British masters used to go in for when they were trying to kill Home Rule with kindness 100 years ago or thereabouts.
We should not be interested in outdoor relief. We should be interested in getting on with our own lives by dint of our own efforts. And Irish governments should be interested in helping us to do that.
It's different at a time of emergency. No family, no farm, no business can cope with unprecedented flooding on its own. It needs the emergency services, and it needs the self-help attitude to which, thankfully, many still cling, in spite of all our woes. But it also needs some indication that it can trust the people in charge to prevent, or at least allay, such calamities in the future.
So enter our Taoiseach, clomping around the affected areas, showing his face, sharing the pain, but unable to utter much in the way of consoling words beyond "things will get worse before they get better".
When the floods abate, as they will, have we any guarantee that things will get better?
Not if the forecasts for what global warming will do to our climate are correct. Nobody can say for sure that we can blame the inundations in the south, the west and the midlands on climate change, but the predictions tell us that Ireland will become wetter and windier, and in the last few years events have borne them out. High time, surely, that we began to take some action.
But we had floods in, for example, Cork, Mallow, Fermoy and Clonmel long before anybody ever heard of global warming. These were not caused by climate change but by a combination of geography and human activity.
In the nature of things, low-lying cities are always at risk. Higher population increases the risk and spreads it far more widely. We cannot eliminate it, but we can avoid doing things that worsen it. For example, we could stop building housing estates on flood plains. How many brown envelopes, one wonders, changed hands in the interest of building those estates in inappropriate places?
And we could have learned from a proper look at our own geography.
Ireland, we were taught as nippers, resembles a big saucer, with mountains round the rim and a depression in the centre. That isn't entirely accurate, but it will do. In the centre of the country is a mighty river, with perhaps 100 tributaries, some of them considerable rivers in their own right.
The system as a whole drains one-third of the country.
As long as anyone can remember, "draining the Shannon" has been a national joke. It isn't a joke any longer. But "managing the Shannon" is a better way of thinking about it.
Who manages the Shannon? The Department of the Environment, two handfuls of county councils, the national electricity supplier -- and, of course, a few quangos. Like so much else in Ireland, this is a recipe for no management at all. And for no accountability.
It's easy to blame the ESB for mismanaging the discharges of water that have caused so much harm. But it may well be that the fault lies with the dams: they are simply too small. If so, we must put in place a programme to enlarge the dams on the Shannon, the Lee, the Blackwater and perhaps other rivers. This means a massive operation in terms of planning, labour and expense -- all the bigger because it would be daft merely to look at the dams and ignore whatever other work needs doing. In other words, manifestly a national effort, under the direction of the central government.
And who can believe that the Cowen Government is up to the job, or any of the other jobs that need doing, in terms of brainpower, imagination, or knowledge of the art of administration?
The coalition staggers on, literally from day to day, grabbing for sandbags to plug (these watery metaphors are unavoidable) holes in the dyke. In so far as it has plans, they apply only to immediate crises.
Lisbon and NAMA count as successes, though you would have to search far and wide to find someone who feels confident about NAMA. Ministers believe that the Budget will go through without a major upset, and that they will find means of placating the public service unions. But this is only one budget. Still to come are next year's budget, and the one after that, and the one after that again.
In times to come, we will marvel that the coalition survived the year 2009, and marvel even more if it survives another year or two. The remark that "things will get worse before they get better" applies to a great deal more than the floods. It's hard to imagine that a bunch of utterly exhausted ministers can summon up the mental or physical energy for their daily work, much less the harder task of reform and renewal.
A task for Enda Kenny? Or for a new political force, perhaps led by Pat Cox, in a country in which new political parties have a terrible record? Certainly not a task for community welfare officers, or the mindset that sees them as a solution to anything.
jdowney@independent.ie
- James Downey
Irish Independent
