A POX ON ALL POLITICIANS

Like most reasonable people, am profoundly depressed by the results of the “election”.
That we may have a coalition based on two independent TDs, who were expelled from their parties because they are borderline criminal (Cooper Flynn and Lowry) but still get elected, beggars belief.
That people don’t understand that the only reason Bertie has anything to do with the country’s “prosperity” (plasma TVs and SSIAs for all) is that he is totally in thrall to big business and the building trade, who are ruining what remains of our country, is also deeply dispiriting. But then my overriding impression from this election was of a bunch of clammering, unattractive children trying to persuade us that they were grown-ups. A pox on the lot of ye’s!

* Nuala O Faolain below explains it all beautifully (the Sunday Tribune is at www.sundaytribune.ie).

THERE’S many a footnote to be added to the recent election, mild and consensual as it was. One might note how extraordinarily oldfashioned the campaign was. They ought to fly tourists in and take them around to watch, in one of the world’s wealthiest countries, old-style political parties running perfectly preserved old-time elections . . . Failte Ireland could offer general elections as events mixing folklore, faith and entertainment, something between climbing Croagh Patrick and the All-Ireland Finals.

Most of what was said in the campaign was so much hot air.

What the politicians want, as a good in itself, is to be elected. And what the Average Irish Voter wants is, in truth, to get into the Dail or keep in the Dail one of their own, by which they mean a person known, seed, breed and generation, to themselves. Or, at least, a local person. Having got him in (women are an anomaly), they want that man to ascend through minister of state status to minister status and come home in a big car like some great African chieftain waving a magic stick. And why? Local pride? No. Keen awareness of the person’s abilities and his suitability as a legislator for the nation? No.

Proud contribution to the political well-being of the state as a whole? Are you kidding?

They want it because . . . and I quote . . . “otherwise we’ll get nothing”. No bypasses. No ever-open hospitals. No four-and-a-half civil servants decentralised at huge cost. No prisons, underused arts centres, trips to Strasbourg to observe the European Parliament.

Nothing.

Yet again, this time, we failed to use an election for wide and important purposes, though that is what our neighbours to east and west are doing. For example . . . I was walking down a boreen from the hill behind Roundstone last Sunday when a lumbering SUV passed, pausing only for the canvassers to offer a piece of what is called election ‘literature’ starring the FF candidates for Galway West. Energy awareness, when there’s an Irish election on? Are you joking? Back in the city, the shoal of ‘literature’ . . .fiction . . . behind the door didn’t have a single piece printed on recycled paper, not even the Green Party flyer.

Small things, you may say. Yet the biggest non-ideological issue of today is that our planet is in trouble, and it is going to be in ever greater trouble as the Far East emulates the environmental excesses of the countries of the northern hemisphere.

It is in trouble from population growth; I read last week that just one state in India . . .a state which is four times the size of Leinster . . . will soon have a population of 242 million. How are our planet’s people to find food and work and education and shelter?

And, accepting that we cannot reverse the climate change our demands on the environment have already brought about, how are we to prevent further damage? The effects of global warming are now as much a part of everyday consciousness of the world . . . outside Ireland . . . as night and day. A man from Vermont remarks that the maple sugar industry is being destroyed by erratic weather. A woman says without thinking it anything out of the ordinary that her family are not going to buy a cottage in the Lake District because the coast there is very vulnerable to rising sea levels. The sales figures for Toyota’s mass-produced hybrid car rise all the time. Outside Ireland, that is.

Here, only about 1,000 Prius have been sold in two or three years.

Next door to us in the UK, Gordon Brown is pressing ahead with five new towns which will be environmentally friendly because, politically, he is trying to trump David Cameron on green issues.

Tony Blair, too has announced large policy initiatives in the area of energy and conservation as the crowning glory of his time in office. He’s going to set out plans for nuclear power stations. He’s going to set up a national ‘pay as you drive’ scheme. Here, such issues didn’t detain the candidates in the recent election for one second.

The universe appears to bore them. And us. As does, apparently, the big issue closer to home . . . the war between human beings which began with 9/11. It and what it led to have transformed electoral politics in our neighbour to the west so completely that the Democratic Party will very likely choose between a person of colour and a woman as their presidential candidate next year, thus two of the taboos that have shaped politics throughout recorded history. We ourselves are involved in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, through Shannon airport, through the EU, through our self-identification as ardent Christians and through the vulnerability we share with all other travellers. This mattered to some of the stalwart moralists . . . Michael D, for example. But it didn’t matter to the likes of Bertie.

“We’ll get nothing, ” people say. “I’m voting for X or Y because, otherwise, we’ll get nothing.” Whence this sullen, dependant, greedy, self-pitying attitude to the business of being citizens? Is it part of post-colonial damage, that we’re so good at entitlement and so bad at responsibility? If it is, is the post-colonial phase going to go on for ever? Elections are opportunities for a society to express its preoccupations and articulate its desires. But all we’ve learnt from this one is that though we now seem to be a wealthy, modern, well-educated country, underneath we’re still too frightened and parochial even to think about giving. All we want is to get.