The people have spoken: it's time for Cowen to go
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Saturday September 05 2009
CAN anyone govern this unfortunate country? One thing we know is that Fianna Fail cannot. The latest opinion poll confirms what we already knew, that the governed have withdrawn their consent to be governed by the Fianna Fail-Green coalition.
The overwhelming logic therefore dictates that Brian Cowen must throw in his hand, call a general election and go into opposition with whatever grace he can muster. But merely to make that statement evokes a series of nightmares, beginning with the Timetable from Hell.
This timetable goes as follows: One, the NAMA legislation before the Dail on September 16. Two, the Lisbon II referendum on October 2. Three, the Budget at the beginning of December. Any one of these, with its surrounding issues, could bring down a government much stronger than the present one. Taken together, they suggest that the coalition will not survive beyond the end of the year.
Lisbon is a special case which for convenience we may as well take first. Opinion polls aside, the bookmakers' odds say that its passage is as certain as anything in life. Even bookmakers sometimes get it wrong, but let us assume they have got it right this time.
Cowen is on a hiding to nothing. If he loses, he must go. But a win will not restore authority or confidence. He will not be praised for winning, but blamed -- rightly -- for last year's defeat and the crisis it caused. This week he seemed to have recovered some of his self-belief and ability to communicate, but very late in the day.
Will the self-belief and ability to communicate make themselves visible in the NAMA debate? We shall see soon enough.
In the past, he angrily and loudly attributed our financial and economic woes to the global crisis, and derided the alternative proposals put forward by Fine Gael and Labour. The first simply isn't true, since most of our troubles are homemade. The second will seem very silly in retrospect if the Government is forced to adopt some version of them.
But the Government's main problem with NAMA is that it is so profoundly unpopular. People see it as a bailout for developers at colossal public expense. And in the short term at least, there is absolutely no way to disprove that.
I, for one, am more than willing to believe Brian Lenihan when he says the developers can go to blazes. But Brian Lenihan will not be finance minister for ever. One whiff of economic recovery, one more indication of premature optimism from the European Central Bank, and Fianna Fail will want to go back to their bad old ways -- if we let them. That in itself is a good enough reason to put them out of office for a very long time.
In the meantime, and assuming that the Government lasts until December, Lenihan will have to bring in the Budget, complete with €5bn in public spending cuts which, as we all expect, will include social welfare cuts and the first serious onslaught on public service pay and numbers.
Here, he is up against the inability of the Fianna Fail backbenchers, the Greens and most of the population to comprehend the catastrophic condition of the public finances.
He faces a deficit of €20bn, perhaps more. He has to make a start on repairing it. But virtually every proposal from An Bord Snip Nua has met ferocious opposition. And you can bet your devalued house that the same will apply to the Commission on Taxation report when we see it next week.
We expect the commission to recommend a carbon tax. What shape this will take is anybody's guess. You can slap a tax on almost anything and call it a carbon tax. But two things look certain. One, it will put up the price of motor fuel and thereby damage the real economy. Two, it will annoy almost everybody, including the brave 17pc who still declare themselves Fianna Fail supporters.
Presumably it won't annoy the Greens. Indeed, it might give them an excuse to remain in the coalition and claim that it proves their influence and justifies their status as "a party of government". That, however, won't save them at an election. Nothing will.
The bigger question is whether anything can save Brian Cowen or his coalition. I think not.
Not just the backbenchers and the grassroots but a large proportion of the Cabinet have remained, at least partially, in a "state of denial" since the grim night of September 29-30 last year.
They cannot bring themselves to accept that Irish economic recovery is years away or that the "green shoots" visible in some of the major economies could wither before they flower.
They do not understand that the mad Irish property bubble and the equally crazy subprime phenomenon in the United States were only symptoms of a deeper malaise which at best will take decades to eradicate.
Governments and financial establishments everywhere have engaged in self-delusion. They are still doing it. And they are still failing -- they are not really trying -- to find a global response to the recession and its fundamental causes. A government unaware of these facts stands a poor chance of success.
When our leaders and supposed experts are so much at sea, ordinary voters cannot be expected to have a better grasp. But ordinary voters understand one point very well indeed. The Ahern government, in which Brian Cowen was finance minister, got us into our present fix. The Cowen Government shows no sign of getting us out of it. That is why they have withdrawn their consent.
It remains for them to confer legitimacy on someone else. But that, like Lisbon, is a question for another day.
jdowney@independent.ie
- JAMES DOWNEY
