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Enda Kenny would do better to engage than retreat from debate
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5 February 2011
You don't need to be in Ireland for long to know there is an election on, and that politicians aren't exactly flavour of the month.
The Irish are into their politics at the best of times and with these, post IMF bailout, feeling for many like the worst of times, the anger is clear.
It was clear yesterday when, in advance of going on The Late Late Show, I asked for a few thoughts and observations re the election. Cue an outpouring, mainly but not exclusively against Fianna Fail.
I was saddened to see how Bertie Ahern, such a key architect of the peace process, was being described. But the economic problems have been real, so is the anger, and politicians are bound to cop that.
What I find odd, compared with the UK scene, is how little focus their seems to be on the bankers and the broader business community, in terms of sharing out the blame and the anger.
As it turned out, interviewer Ryan Turbity didn't raise the election, and we talked about key moments in the period covered by my latest volume of diaries, a bit of fun, and a fair bit on depression.
I was sure I would be asked about Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny's boycott of one of the TV leaders' debates because the host, Vincent Browne, had said in the past Kenny should lock himself away in a room with a bottle of Scotch and a revolver.
Browne has apologised. I have to say I have heard a lot worse from a lot of British journalists, and politicians have still gone out and engaged with them. If Kenny becomes Ireland's new PM, as many of the polls suggest he will, he will have to deal with far worse people than Browne.
Also, part of the purpose of an election is to see leaders being tested in circumstances they don't want to be in. So I think the election as a whole would benefit from him turning up to debate with his Fianna Fail and Labour counterparts.
If he sticks to his guns he is more than welcome to come to the Leviathan event I am doing with David McWilliams at the Button Factory at the same time on Tuesday evening.
Off now to prepare for the fulfilment of another ambition I had as a teenager - I am co-presenting a sports show on News Talk this afternoon.
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Can’t take credit away from Bertie on the peace process, but he presided over the ponzieconomic policies that have now engulfed Ireland. So in the eyes of the people all over the south, he’s cost them dearly.
Good points about the bankers. Public opinion here in Ireland is stuck somehow. And the politics are really stuck, with two right-ish populist parties with no principals beyond getting elected, and our Labour party, the third one, has no ideology to speak of, so it’s only slightly left of those two. Therefore these three parties drive the public discourse with sound-bites that don’t join up into coherent policies (Fine Gael is almost the worst offender in that regard!). You’ll hear all this from David McWilliams anyway! btw your host on tv was Ryan Tubridy, not Turbity – did you know he’s the scion of a Fianna Fail family and people say he’ll run in an election one day? (I don’t think he will).
I disagree. I think as the front runner he is entiteled to want to debate on his terms. Vincent Browne is notorious for luring people into traps in order to play gotcha politics. As the favourite, Browne would deliberately try to trip him up. Why should Enda give him the chance.
Irish make me laugh, so hypocritical. One minute they win Eurovision in Britain, next they are bombing it.
What can you say?
Wait a minute. Correct me if I am wrong but did Tony Blair duck out of a debate with John Major in 1997? Did you give him the same advice you are now giving Kenny in 1997?
The Irish had a Euro binge, property fuelled and led by a Government like our own who thought that all they had to do was sit on top of the financial services magic mushroom and grow with it. The Banks were encouraged to lend, lend, lend and tax breaks on property development heightened the “something for nothing, buy now whilst stocks last” illusion.
In the eyes of most of the public, Bertie Ahern, like Blair and Brown, will forever be remembered for career defining disasters which wiped away all the good things which were done by them over long careers.
As usual Richard you omit to mention the origins of the problem in the 1980s when Neo-Liberalism replaced Keynesianism as the prevailing economic ideology. The Conservatives under Thatcher and Major started and encouraged the process you describe in your first paragraph, a sizeable proportion of the UK electorate lapped it up, and, in order to become electable Labour also had to embrace it and start distancing itself from its socialist and trade unionist roots. I spent a lot of the 1980s and 1990s binning letters from banks and other financial organisations which tried to persuade me to get into debt. Unfortunately some people did not bin these letters.
I wonder about your memory sometimes. Don’t you remember ‘the bonfire of controls’ or ‘the big bang’? Yes we know Blair and Brown pinched a lot of Tory policies to get into government, just as Cameron and Osborne pinched a lot of Labour policies. At least Blair and Brown didn’t immediately revert to ‘Old Labour’ policies after the election in 1997, but Cameron and Osborne have reverted to same old Tory nasty party policies in record-breaking speed. They’re even trying that old trick about getting rid of the May Day bank holiday – so hostile are they to anything that smacks of organised labour. When it was tried in 1993 the excuse was that there are too many bank holidays bunched together, but this year they’ve added one for the Royal Wedding so that excuse is hardly credible. Instead we have utter rubbish about boosting tourism by shifting the bank holiday to October! What a bunch of amateurs are running this country!. .
Ireland have had all the help everywhere to try and get their line of thinking on the straight and narrow. Now there might have been “outside forces” at work for them to carry on in the past, we just hope they don’t return to that, because they have suddenly got not much to do at the moment.
Always happens when we have a tory (led) government, say no more…
It’s doubtful if Northern Ireland would be as peaceful as it is today without Bertie’s enormous dedication and commitment; nobody will ever be able to take that away from him. But…..his government handed supervision of the financial markets over to the Financial Regulator and failed utterly to to give clear policy guidelines for regulation. The result was that the Regulator had to read the tealeaves and try to figure out exactly how tightly to regulate and supervise the markets. All the signals from Ahern’s government pointed at best towards loose regulation and at worst towards encouragement of the property boom. His government has while in office devolved executive responsibility left, right and centre to an unaccountable and practically unsupervised third force (HSE, HIQA, NRA, Financial Regulator, Taxi Regulator etc etc) The aim has been to be able to deny government responsibility when things go wrong. Well guess what? We’re not stupid. We can see through this deceit and that’s why Ahern is now widely viewed as a pariah. (And by the way, it doesn’t matter which government tries to pull the wool over our eyes – people know when they’re being deceived.) Bankers are in it for the profit, full stop. They, like a lot of people in and outside business will keep pushing the boundaries until they’re told to stop. People, especially business people are programmed that way! That’s why there’s less focus on the bankers and business people and why the real culprits are being excoriated – the ones who didn’t shout “Stop!” on our behalf.
Eh, Ehtch? Have you been at the communion wine again? Please explain your blog.
So you’ll give credit to Bertie & Bliar (yes, I spelt that right) for the ‘lasting peace’ in the North, will you?
Have you noticed, once all the bouqets & Nobel prizes have been handed out, that THERE IS NO PEACE IN THE NORTH !
There are still car bombs, pipe bombs & murders.
Your eloquent analysis of what happened does not go on to describe why, when New Labour had the majority it had in ’97, they did not impose discipline on financial markets which could be seen to be overheating. It suited them to sit back and take the taxes as they flowed. “No return to boom and bust.”
In France for example to this day any number of banks applied to will make identical mortgage offers by the way of applicant’s income to amount borrowed. Because it is regulated. And whatsmore they will all offer fixed rate mortgages for 15, 20 or 25 years. All of the mortgage, remortgage every 2/3 year etc, fixed rate deals that people spend so much time on in this country are totally wasteful. No regulation was considered to be the best way, and as in Ireland the consumer is the one who gets stitched up by the financial institutions.
Your defence of Bank Holidays in the current circumstances is fair.
Hold on a minute Alistair, now Vincent Browne didn’t add insult to injury by saying he should lock himself away in a dark room with a bottle of Scotch and a revolver.
He said he should go into a dark room with a gun and a bottle of Whiskey. Totally different.
Written with all the perspective of someone who comes here for weekends every so often, and even less accuracy. Contrary to the implied assertion that Enda Kenny isn’t debating, he is, three times, twice in English and once in Irish. Though in reality the Irish one will be more of a language fluency test and will scarcely get 50,000 viewers.
The financial markets impose discipline on national governments. If Labour had started getting ethical and regulatory in 1997 they’d have been faced with the usual line about financial organisations – ‘the wealth creators’ – upping sticks and moving to Hong Kong, Switzerland or some other happy land where there aren’t any rules and social responsibilities. But yes New Labour was too accomodating towards the ideological legacy of the Conservatives. Mandelson’s line about ‘people getting filthy rich’ and Brown’s line about ‘no more boom or bust’ were both ill-judged and bound to backfire at some time. They wouldn’t be saying things like that now!
Explain? It Six Nations season again – that is my excuse and I am sticking to it! Last minute drop goal by Ronan O’Gara will wind anyone up, even if it was Italy.
But, yes, lord knows what I was on about. And it was beer, actually!
My favorite Dubliners done take on “Seven Drunken Nights” on youtubb, what looks like the faithful from Boston, Massachustts, in “America”, it seems to me. Enjoy,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sANevOOsRUY
I disagree, there is a peace process and a path for peace, your view sounds like an old weather beaten unionist view, Northern Ireland has moved on and will continue to move forward.
Terrible acts still occur but will not derail the peace process and path the country is on.