OPINION:IT IS great to have really good stand-up comics in the recession, eh? We all need a bit of a laugh, no? Didn't Brian Cowen's one-liner at the Irish Management Institute on Friday have you just rolling around the floor, clutching your sides with laughter-induced pain? It was his quip about the banks being in denial that really did it for me.
The banks! In denial! It’s the way he tells them . . . (Why am I thinking of that old 1920s music hall character, The Laughing Policeman . . . a fat and jolly red faced man, he really is a treat . . . as the appropriately named Charles Jolly sang it.
And then there was Mary Coughlan early last month on Morning Ireland insisting that the public finances were grand. “They’re under control, yes . . .”
God, but aren’t they a great double act? Her Tina Fey to Biffo’s Tommy Tiernan.
Okay. Let’s have a look at this denial business. Who was in denial for much of 2007 and 2008 when academic economists were saying the economy was in thrall to a property bubble? The construction industry for sure; estate agents too, along with the property buying public. But the Government was as well – dazzled by the alchemy of their toxic friends inside the tent.
Who was in denial for most of last year as bank shares went through the floor, crippling pension funds and wiping out the nest eggs of the little people?
The banks absolutely – and the Government, which sleep-walked its way to a woefully inadequate budget that blew up in its face and has been behind the curve on banking since long before that strange September ’08 deposit guarantee meeting.
Who was in denial that our financial institutions were adequately regulated and policed? Well, what little regulation there was was too much for Seánie FitzPatrick, who wanted less! He’s a scream, isn’t he? And where was the regulator? Asleep at the wheel, and the Government dozing in the back seat.
Tomorrow is going to be a lousy day for most of us and there’s not a lot that can be done about it. The question really is whether the crowd that let this happen is the crowd to fix it again. (And before you cry “but this is a global problem not of our making”, last week’s Central Bank stats indicate that the bulk of this year’s whopping €23 billion deficit is down to the Government.)
It will take vision and leadership, and the clear articulation of both, to get the country through this mess, and there’s a chronic lacking of both in Government. A little of what we need was on display in Strasbourg last week when the man from Washington wowed an assembly hall of students.
We can’t have our own charisma-marinated Obama, we know that. But can’t we have some of his moral clarity and decisiveness? While Brian Lenihan didn’t want to tell the board of Irish Nationwide to ditch its chief, Michael Fingleton, in the States, Obama bluntly told GM to sack its CEO Rick Wagoner, which it did. Pronto.
Here, Fingers was urged to return his €1 million (absolutely legal, as he insisted ad nauseum) bonus; there, the House of Representatives slapped a 90 per cent tax on similarly disgraceful AIG bonuses.
For vision and inspiration here, you have to look to someone like Orla Tinsley, the smart, determined and articulate 22-year-old who, actuarially, will be lucky to get much beyond 30 if our cystic fibrosis treatment facilities aren’t improved.
Outside the Dáil last week, launching the campaign to hold the Government to its CF funding promise, she got a call from a junior minister. “. . . well aware of the situation . . . fully intend to deal with it after the budget . . . will be dealt with . . .” went the blather.
“He realised he was getting nowhere, and the conversation ended,” Orla remarked.
Tomorrow, announcing a reduction of two or three junior ministers sometime in the future won’t be half enough. It won’t even be a bad joke.