The changing face of Summer politics

I started writing specifically about politics 12 years ago around this time of year. I moved from The Sunday Tribune to The Irish Examiner to become its political editor.

Sure, I had been knocking around for a while but I had never majored in pure politics. What’s more, I had never worked for a daily newspaper. Newsdesks in the dailies are like hungry chicks in a nest, always squawking for more food. It was a tough initiation.

Anyway I started writing about Irish domestic politics at the start of August 2003, in the dog days of summer when nothing was happening. There were no politicians around. The corridors were empty. It was quiet as the Cork dressing room late last Sunday afternoon.

There’s a tour around Dublin called the Viking Splash, which forces its passengers to pretend they are Scandinavian invaders. Every so often the invaders are encouraged to let out an earthy roar. Inevitably, they all do it outside Leinster House. That regular sound was the only thing that interrupted the silence that summer – you could have set your watch by it.

In the good days, the politicians had all vamoosed by the middle of July. When you tried to get them there was invariably the long beep of a foreign ring tone – they were obviously keen to get among their constituents in the Costa del Sol or along the Algarve!

The main excitement in July came from following the Tour de France on television courtesy of TG4, knowing there was no breaking news story that would interrupt coverage.

Of course, we had to produce and that came down to a combination of pre-cooked interviews (completed in early July) and trawls through parliamentary questions and departmental documents in the hope of finding a news story that others may have missed. It might have been silly season but we still had to file – and often had to file lead stories built on a foundation of, well, a very silken thread.

Nothing like a recession to lift us all from the lethargy. I saw only one full day of the Tour de France this year (it was a day off).

For the rest, politics continued at a million miles an hour right up to the end of the month. It’s been like that more or less since 2008, though not was intense now as it was a few years ago.

Still, the Dáil sits longer and we now have the rather strange phenomenon of an Oireachtas committee (the banking inquiry) sitting right up to the month of August.

Besides that, the Government’s last weekly meeting took place only last week and there are two big controversies that have paid scant regard to the political calendar.

The first is Irish Water. The incoming Minister for the Environment, Alan Kelly, made a big effort to reduce the temperature on this political pot boiler and to take it off the front pages.

The all-round handling by Government of this new utility had been a disaster with massive public antipathy to what was being done. Kelly came in and tried to tie up the loose ends. The formula he came up with (including a €100 conservation grant) did manage to take some heat out of it.

But it wasn’t enough. Unlike the property tax, people didn’t have the dark shadow of Revenue hanging over them. They knew that the sanctions for not paying their bills was weak and it would take at least a year before any kind of a stick was wielded.

And so they refused to pay in their droves. When the figures came out showing less than 50% compliance for the first bill, the die was cast.

Now Eurostat has compounded the Government’s problems by saying that Irish Water can’t be considered enough of a separate entity to be taken off the Government balance sheet. That means the Coalition is on the hook for an extra €500m per annum.

Now it has said it provided for that when it issued its Spring statement – ar eagle na heagla. But still it is bad. Is this going to be an election issue? Of course it is.

The big beneficiaries will be the groups and parties that have campaigned most aggressively against the water charges. The Anti Austerity Alliance (the nom du guerre for The Socialist Party) will make hay on this one – excuse the mixing of metaphors.

For Harry's thoughts on politics and the Banking Inquiry see this week's Tribune here.