2 weeks Ago
“That’s exactly what’s needed to speed up getting power restored to homes in the west – a debate in the Dáil. Come off it.” Ah yes.
Barely a week earlier the same gentleman had worked himself into quite the lather over the way the Opposition disrupted the solemn proceedings of our national parliament on the admittedly flimsy grounds of a row over speaking time for a few Independent TDs. The new Taoiseach, you’ll recall, dubbed it “a subversion of the Constitution”. Pearl-clutching was the order of the day.
In fairness, as outlined hereabout last week , I thought they had a point about the Opposition going way over the top. But you can’t whine about the disrespect shown to the Dáil one minute and then sneer about requests that it should hold a debate on a topical issue the next. Debating the issues of the day and holding the Government to account for its management of them is exactly what the Dáil is supposed to do.
Of course, Ministers were not “on holiday”, as some of the Opposition attacks charged. But nor were they running around the west of Ireland in hard hats reconnecting people’s electricity supply. And actually, you may be sure that if a Minister or the Taoiseach were scheduled to answer questions in the Dáil, it would concentrate the minds of their officials and the agencies that work for them.
As it was, the Government struggled all week to shrug off the perception that it was ill-prepared for the storm and then slow to react to it. There’s no doubt that Ireland faces particular challenges – a very dispersed population, with many people living in remote areas that are especially vulnerable to extreme weather. But that is not something we just found out this week.
And while I think few people would necessarily agree with the woman who told the Taoiseach in a widely reported exchange (though this bit wasn’t so widely reported) that what people in the west of Ireland should all get is a grant to buy a residential wind turbine, two solar panels and a battery, there is clearly a lot of work to be done to prepare for more severe storms in the future. Climate adaptation – preparing for the inevitable consequences of a warming world – is an urgent task for governments everywhere. Ours hasn’t given it remotely enough attention.
There will be more storms. Some of them are likely to be worse. They may even hit Dublin.
It was hardly the only problem for the Government this week. The truth is that it has been a pretty awful start for the reformed Coalition. It is one of the great cliches of political journalism to declare the opening period for every government to be “the shortest honeymoon ever”.
But actually, there was no honeymoon at all. [ Two weeks on, the Government’s housing targets are already in tatters Opens in new window ] Sins of the past are coming back to haunt the two big government parties pretty quickly. This week we found out that the number of new housing units completed last year was not the 40,000 repeatedly cited by the Government parties during the general election campaign but instead just broke 30,000.
Opposition parties and pesky interviewers all questioned the 40,000 figure during and before the general election campaign but their doubts were pooh-poohed by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael (and the Green Patry), who confidently asserted the 40,000 figure. In fact, the 40,000 figure seems to have come from a report from the research arm of Deutsche Bank, which speculated that housing completions could exceed that number. But other estimates, including the Central Bank, were repeatedly much lower.
The Central Statistics Office numbers – it counts the actual completions, rather than projects them into the future and its figures are released quarterly – suggested they were going to be much nearer the 30,000 mark. But the parties were having none of that kind of talk during the election – it was 40,000 or bust. That enabled them to claim that their plan was delivering.
Numbers were on the up. They had turned the corner on housing, and 50,000 units a year didn’t seem too far-fetched. But it does now, when we have the real figures.
At the most benign possible interpretation, this is extremely sharp practice. To many people, it will look like deliberately misleading them. Meanwhile, the Government is appointing record numbers of Ministers of State to keep the Independents on board and their own backbenchers – other than the female backbenchers – happy.
New allowances will be piled on top of old ones to boost the take-home pay of people who are not badly paid as it is. I am reasonably relaxed about politicians’ pay; it’s a rough job and should be well paid. Many people are not so relaxed.
Surveying the numbers this week, I counted up all the pay rises that TDs have received in the past five years: 13. In fairness, these were under pay agreements that applied to all public servants. But it’s not bad, is it? Remember, the Government has been in office for, um, nine days.
It normally takes a bit longer to look so out of touch..
