It was a week that brought warnings about the necessity for good government, if you knew where to look.
The Coalition’s most comfortable and consistent double act, the one between Minister for Finance Paschal Donohoe and Minister for Public Expenditure Michael McGrath, kicked off on Monday with their Summer Economic Statement, and with it an intense few months of budget negotiations.
McGrath is from Cork, so doesn’t need to go far for his holidays; Donohoe has been known to knock about west Cork for a bit during August. But both men are likely to be back at their desks earlier this year because the budget has been moved from October to late September and there are many hungry mouths to feed around the Cabinet table.
The two men announced an impressive-sounding €6.7 billion budget; but even with the extra money that they’ll magic up on the day – at least a billion extra for immediate cost-of-living measures, says one Cabinet Minister confidently – it won’t go remotely far enough to keep the ministers around the table happy. The truth is that McGrath and Donohoe are trying to do two things at the same time – adjust to a normal fiscal environment after Covid and simultaneously deal with a cost-of-living crisis. Either one would be difficult; to do both at the same time may be impossible.
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Ministers and interest groups will spend the next two months badgering the budget-makers for a greater slice of the pie; the only people concerned with keeping the Government spending plans on a sustainable level are in the departments of finance and public expenditure. It’s hard to conclude that our budget-making process is conducive to good government. All the incentives, actually, work the other way.
The following day in the Dáil, the Government announced it would rush through a plethora of legislation before the recess next week. Five Bills, including the Bill to provide for compensation to homeowners affected by mica and the emergency legislation to deal with the European court judgment on retention of phone records by gardaí in the Graham Dwyer case, were pushed through their committee and final stages in five hours on Wednesday. Labour leader Ivana Bacik complained loudly. “Not good enough and not acceptable,” said Brendan Howlin in his contribution, and he’s right: rushing through controversial legislation without scrutiny is not providing good government.
Mind you, we should put these failures in some perspective. Compared with next door, Irish politics is a beacon of rationality and reasonableness. There are many things about public life and – don’t we know – public services that do not work as well as they should. But there are lots of important things that work okay.
Accountability
After a long time when we didn’t, we now have a mostly well-scrutinised political class. And we also have a trusted and independent means of deciding whether they have broken the law. That hasn’t seemed to matter that much in the UK of late, when lawbreaking has been ignored, politicians have played fast and loose, and accountability was for other people.
Leo Varadkar was caught by an old-fashioned scoop on the leaking of a government document to a pal – in truth, a venial sin at worst and one that by definition was authorised by the head of government (ie, himself). The gardaí were called to investigate and did so at great and tedious length; they concluded their work and passed a file to the Director of Public Prosecutions; she considered and decided no prosecution was warranted. Varadkar had not broken the law.
This is how the system is supposed to work, and it will be enough for most people. Not enough, never enough for the splenetic political guerrillas who fight their campaigns on social media. But it should be good enough for the rest of us. If we get to stage when it’s not good enough, then we have cause to worry about our democracy. As, right now, do our nearest neighbours.
The collapse of the British government this week was watched in Ireland with a mixture of amusement, horror, hope and fascination. Westminster politics has teetered between tragedy and farce for a long time now, but as the resignations rolled in on Wednesday evening and Boris Johnson holed himself up in the Number 10 bunker, his minions surfacing only to issue forth messages of mad defiance, it looked decidedly more like the latter.
More seriously, it became clear that the UK – the world’s fifth largest economy, a nuclear power, a permanent member of the UN Security Council and a country looked to by much of the world for its standards in politics, government, law and leadership – did not have anything that could remotely be termed a functioning government. Even now, two days after Johnson was amputated out and forced to declare he would resign, it’s touch and go as to whether it has a viable executive.
The degradation of Britain’s observation of its own values has direct and real-life effects in Ireland, of course. But far beyond that, too. Last week, at a seminar organised by the European Parliament office in Dublin on the awarding of this year’s Sakharov Prize to the imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, London-based Irish human rights lawyer Caoilfhionn Gallagher related how when she is arguing with repressive regimes about the detention of journalists, politicians and human rights defenders, she now often hears back from them: but your government is breaking international law – what right do you have to lecture us?
Eternal vigilance, said Thomas Jefferson, is the price of liberty. He might have said the same about democracy and the rule of law. And, for that matter, about good government.