EDITORIAL : THE INDENDENT, IRELAND

           

 

The tail must never wag the dog

WITHIN three months of taking office with a record Dail majority and a promise to restore hope and confidence to the people, the Fine Gael-Labour Government has shown itself vulnerable to all the ills that politicians are heirs to.

In a way, that was inevitable. The Coalition inherited a calamitous legacy from Fianna Fail and the Greens. The country continued to face economic ruin. The EU-IMF bailout had deprived the nation of much of its formal independence, and the new Government of almost all its freedom of action. All the remaining choices were risky or unpalatable, usually both.

So the coalition could rightly seek public tolerance and support. It did seek it, and usually got it. But it seems that its leaders ignored or misunderstood a danger within their tent.

Excessive parliamentary majorities are a bugbear for political parties. They have seldom troubled us in recent decades -- we have frequently had the opposite problem -- but a 20-seat Dail majority troubled Jack Lynch in 1977. He feared dissent and disloyalty on the Fianna Fail backbenches. He was right. Two years later, he resigned as Taoiseach.

This time, the coalition majority is overwhelming, the opposition enfeebled. Fianna Fail has no credibility. As Energy Minister Pat Rabbitte observed yesterday, the independent deputies and Sinn Fein "are making a lot of noise", and no more. Mr Rabbitte fears that the real opposition will emerge from the backbenches of both governing parties.

Such a development at such an early stage would be remarkable, and could be immensely harmful. From the beginning, there were obvious differences between and within both parties. That they should have begun to sharpen instead of softening calls into question the leadership qualities of Enda Kenny and Eamon Gilmore.

The Taoiseach is aware that he has not fully won over his internal opponents. Was his strange choice of words, "a personal agenda", in relation to an initiative by Enterprise Minister Richard Bruton, an indication of that awareness?

The Tanaiste, for his part, is well aware of the threat to his left from Sinn Fein. In reality, most Labour supporters -- like most supporters of all mainstream parties -- know all too well the necessity to make hard choices and bear heavy burdens. Neither he nor Mr Kenny will thrive by fudging issues or denying reality. Both of them were elected by voters who hoped for a new and better style of leadership. The voters are still waiting.

A shocking waste of taxpayers' money

LAST month, Justice Minister Alan Shatter disclosed last year's provisional bill for garda overtime: €76.5m. Even in a country accustomed to gigantic bills for everything from bank debt to judicial tribunals, that seems an enormous sum of money.

In fact, it is a considerable improvement on what went before. In 2007, the overtime bill reached a record €135m. We can therefore welcome a substantial saving. But it is still far too high, and some of the reasons are dismaying.

Nobody can object to unavoidable spending to combat violent crime -- or white-collar crime, an area to which we will have to devote more sources. A very different picture emerges when we learn that €17m of the €76.5m represented payments for attendance at court cases which were simply not heard.

And one of the reasons why they were not heard is grotesque. There were too few court registrars to attend, because there are fewer registrars than judges. And the shortage of registrars arose from a ban on public sector recruitment -- designed to save money.

Well might the Director of Public Prosecutions, James Hamilton, say, as he did on Saturday, that "we don't really have joined-up thinking in the Irish public service".

Mr Hamilton told a conference in Galway that there is "huge waste" in the legal system. So there is, and in almost any other sector one can think of. But reducing it calls for serious "joined-up thinking".