The Bertie Ahern situation reminds us that parties no longer stand for anything - their only desire is to get into office and to retain office, writes Vincent Browne
POLITICS IS debilitated here. No one and no party stands for anything. No principle, no policy, no politics even, just opportunism and careerism. The point of politics now is to get office or retain office - that's all.
Fine Gael thinks it stands for standards in public life. But before the election last year it hadn't a word to say about standards in public life, or at least about the glaring issue to do with standards in public life, because it seemed to the party that the best thing to do was stay quiet about it.
So too with Labour, which at one time, however briefly, did seem to stand for something, but now the inducements of office have obscured whatever principle the party once stood for.
The Greens have sold their soul for nothing. The new transport policy, as divined from the consultation document published on Monday by Noel Dempsey, commits the Government, including the Greens, to precisely those policies which the Greens professed to oppose a year ago - notably the favouring of road building over public transport in the capital programme for transport (total budget €34 billion between now and 2012 - €18 billion for roads, €12 billion for public transport).
Sinn Féin has been selling its soul for quite some time. Having waged a war - via the IRA - that killed about 1,500 people to achieve the unity of Ireland and the withdrawal of the British, Sinn Féin now accepts precisely the constitutional arrangement which the IRA killed to oppose.
Before the last election Sinn Féin abandoned any pretence to radicalism. It is now no different from the rest, except the rest do not have a recent record of murder. (Although both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have murder in their past incarnations, as has a bit of the Labour Party, and in that instance the past is not distant, but we are not allowed revive that now).
Which leaves Fianna Fáil. At least the other parties care about themselves but in Fianna Fáil they don't seem to care even about themselves, or be a bit bothered by evidence that has compromised the party's own interests.
There is copious evidence that Charlie Haughey helped himself to funds that were the property of Fianna Fáil, and also that Ray Burke did and Pádraig Flynn did. Now Bertie Ahern seems to have done the same. And not a bother on the party.
The party has known for years about the depredations of Charlie, Ray and Pádraig, and many of us were wondering how it could fail to exercise its fiduciary duty to recover those funds. Now we know. The current leader was helping himself too, so how could he be pressing the others to give back money that was properly the property of Fianna Fáil?
The dogs in the street and, I assume, the cats and rats (certainly the latter) knew there were rows in Fianna Fáil during and immediately after the 1987 and 1989 election campaigns. Party fundraisers would canvass contributions from various wealthy corporations and individuals, who would then give over the money to party luminaries who would pocket the money.
And it was known that the rows involved Ray Burke, Bertie and another who, because he is now dead, I will not name. Party fundraisers were annoyed. One of these is now a backbench Fianna Fáil TD, a fine fellow and certainly of ministerial calibre, but wild horses would not prise from his memory what he knows about all these shenanigans.
There are other matters aside from the Bertie money issue and the absolute determination of Fianna Fáil, aided and abetted by the Greens and what is left of the PDs, to refuse to acknowledge that there are questions to answer about all of this. These issues are quite apart from the tribunal report when it appears in 2020, or whenever.
I wrote that there is no politics any more. By which I mean there is no debate about politics, just about managerialism, how best to manage the country's affairs and who could do it best. There is no disagreement in politics. Everyone is ad idem, as they say in St Luke's.
The structure of society is okay, or at least there is nothing to be done about the structure of society. The fact that thousands die prematurely every year because of that structure is not acknowledged or even discussed. They fact that a tiny proportion of the population have a huge proportion of the wealth of society and, conversely, that a large proportion of the population have a tiny proportion of the wealth, is like the weather: nothing can be done about it.
Everyone has bought (forgive the phrase, as they say in St Luke's) into the "common sense" of our era - that huge inequalities are part of the human condition. Life was not meant to be fair, that's the way the cookie crumbles (there is an industry in the manufacture of cliches to mask this acquiescence in injustice).
Of course this "common sense" is hugely political, but there is no debate about it, no consciousness of how corrupted is this idea of "common sense", how our culture is debased by the realities of shattered lives, misery and early death.
There is no debate about politics, just about managerialism, how best to manage the country's affairs