Playing the blame game while country topples through the abyss

Date Published: 04-Apr-2012

When it comes to reform of the House of the Oireachtas, there might be a way to save the Seanad after all – and at the same time turn the Dail into the legislative assembly as originally envisaged by the founders of the state.

What we need to do is to officially recognise the Seanad as a retirement home for former and failed politicians - and then allow them to live out the rest of their days doing nothing more stressful than blaming each other for the sins of the past.

That, in turn, will free up our TD’s from this onerous task that currently takes up so much of their time, so that instead they can actually get on with formulating a plan to get us out of the quagmire.

As it is, they’ve just wasted another valuable week raking over the coals of the past – one side throwing mud about Mahon across the floor of the House, and the others flinging back allegations of inaction over Moriarty.

And in the midst of all, the country continues in freefall, with ‘Big Phil’ Hogan wreaking havoc on the little people with his ham-fisted household charges, fresh –if that’s not the wrong word – from landing himself in the sewage over septic tanks.

All of the bluff and bluster of last week’s three-day debate didn’t resolve a single issue, result in a single bribed politician packing his bags for prison or extract a single apology for the wrong done to the rest of us.

In other words, it solved nothing other than provide well-paid public representatives with the chance to trade insults at our expense.So if instead we gave the Seanad a brief to keep its eyes firmly on the past and the Dail a responsibility to look to the future, we would then have a way of facilitating this mud-slinging without it actually holding back our economic renaissance.

What exactly was the point of the Dail devoting three days to the Mahon Tribunal? It wasn’t as though they’d manage to enlighten us any further than a process which took €300 million and 15 years to reach some less than astonishing conclusions.

Instead we heard more mentions of Denis O’Brien in the Dail than we did of our dire economic straits, as Fianna Fail countered the Government’s punching by digging up the ghost of Moriarty and another dark period in our political history.

Maybe it’s because we love playing the blame game that we spend so much time trying to rewrite history instead of charting our own destiny – or maybe it’s just because you don’t need a lot of vision for revision, but you do to lay the groundwork for a better future. 

If public representatives want to spend their time dwelling on the past and talking of Charlie and Bertie and Pee Flynn, then they should stand for our new-look Seanad and leave the forward planning to those not bogged down by history.

Maybe the new Dail might even learn to move on from Civil War politics so that we remove the final historical difference between Fine Gael and Fianna Fail, as we move towards a real left/right dynamic in Irish politics.

Of course the Seanad suggestion is fanciful, but equally this preoccupation with revisiting the past is no joke either.

If we want to learn from recent history, let’s facilitate the state inquiry into corruption so that those who took bribes go to jail; let’s put the resources necessary at the disposal of the Gardaí and the courts so that those who caused our economic collapse face the consequences.

But let’s stop wasting Dail time and public money throwing mud from one side of the chamber to the other, when, at the end of the day, none of it seems to stick.

For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.