Brendan Keenan: Welcome to the hotel of the past conditional
Partisan politics does not bode well for our economy: we've got to start pulling together
A CERTAIN Midlands town used to have two hotels in the main street -- of which, the locals would say: "Whichever of those two hotels you stay in, you'll wish you'd stayed in the other one."
I thought of that, watching the Government TDs being excoriated from all sides for getting all in a tizzy over stag hunting and puppy farming -- even as Anglo Irish Bank reported that its previous managers had destroyed €18bn of what is now our money, and the numbers signing on went over 450,000.
It was not so much the complaints (what else could one expect?). It was the universal assumption that the TDs could have done something about the Anglo losses, and unemployment. Metaphorically speaking, they could have stayed in the other hotel.
If they had done so, we might wish we were in our current hotel. We do not know what the consequences of letting Anglo collapse would have been. Various people claim to know. Some say it would be better than the hugely expensive policy of saving the banks. Others saying the entire system would have failed, and that would have been even worse.
The only thing which can be said with any confidence is that the untried solution is bound to seem better than the one chosen. If we had found ourselves in a frozen economy while the IMF, ECB, EU Commission and foreign banks tried to restore an Irish financial system, we would no doubt have cried: "Why on earth didn't they stop this happening?"
We might have been wrong about that. It might have been the better option. But it is in the past conditional tense, or whatever the dying breed of grammarians would call it. The circumstances of September 2008 will never recur. But circumstances look like they may present equally impossible choices.
Stag hunting comes into that. The Ward Union hunt will no longer be able to bring down stags (although they had stopped actually doing that). Could the stags bring the rest of us down?
There was a sense that the political revolt was so serious, not just because of the issues, but because it was something TDs could get their teeth into -- if you'll pardon the phrase.
It must be pretty terrible to find yourself unpopular -- maybe even with your seat in danger -- over things you did not have much say in, can't do much about, and possibly don't understand anyway. If something comes along that you do understand, and plays well in the constituency... well, the stability of government may have to play second fiddle.
Therein lies the danger -- and perhaps not just for the Government, but for all of us. It is no business of mine whether a particular government stands or falls. A journalist should keep his politics to himself.
He may, however, legitimately take a view over whether dissensions in the government, or a general election, are dangerous in themselves, irrespective of the merits of that particular government.
Such occasions are rare -- the last time such a case could reasonably have been made was the fall of Garret FitzGerald's minority coalition in 1982. But this is surely a moment when the case can be made again.
The fear back then was that Charles Haughey would return to his profligate ways if re-elected. Such a fear is not the problem now.
There is no reason to think that a Fine Gael/Labour government, for instance, would depart much from the current fiscal austerity programme. The fact of the election itself would be the danger.
On the basis that turkeys don't vote for Christmas, an election may not be the most likely outcome. A more apt description may be one from a real turkey farmer, who said the dratted birds spend their days thinking up different ways to die. There was a touch of that last week.
The new outbreak of partisan politics could not have come at a worse time. Ireland has joined Portugal and Greece as countries whose banks cannot fund themselves on the markets, and whose governments may not be able to either.
The crisis which this portends could be worse than 2008. It is impossible to say what form it will take. We should have learnt from that experience that the normal differences within parties, and between government and opposition, do not serve the country well in dealing with potential disaster.
This time, we must acknowledge the problems and construct a national response. Like it or not, we are all in the same hotel.
Originally published in
