The Trib

by David Kenny

  Of course, they are two pretty big ‘ifs’ and it would be stupid to believe otherwise. But there is no potential solution to the current crisis – however alluring it might seem – that doesn’t involve a whole raft of what ifs and maybes. We’re long past the point of doing the right thing. It’s now about taking the least wrong option.

  Tighter than a too-small bathing suit on a too-long ride home from the beach? Not this coming election!

  2 January 2011

  There’s no question that the next general election will be seismic in terms of its impact on the political landscape. But for all that, there has never been an election where there has been so little doubt about the make-up of the next government.

  Opinion polls only really began properly in the early 1980s, so before that point, predicting the outcome of an election was the political equivalent of pinning the tail on the donkey.

  Even with access to polls, the outcome has generally remained in doubt up to polling day and often far beyond that, as various government formations were contemplated.

  The three elections in eighteen months in 1981 and 1982 were very close affairs, although the November ‘82 campaign could be clearly seen to be slipping away from Fianna Fáil from the off. In 1987, it was felt that Fianna Fáil would win an overall majority, but that didn’t happen. Ditto two years later when a totally unanticipated Fianna Fáil-PD coalition emerged. The 1992 election could have led to the formation of various governments (and ended up producing two different coalitions).

  The 1997 contest was, to borrow a phrase from Dan Rather, tighter than a ‘too-small bathing suit on a too-long ride home from the beach’. The Rainbow coalition should have won but didn’t.

  Fine Gael was obviously facing meltdown in the run-up to 2002, but there was doubt as to whether the next government would be a Fianna Fáil overall majority or a combination of Fianna Fáil with the PDs or the Labour Party (with most analysts plumping for the latter). Five years later most of the same analysts were predicting a Fine Gael-Labour-Green Rainbow.

  But this time around is different. Unless something truly extraordinary happens between now and March (and even then it probably wouldn’t matter), the next government will be made up of Fine Gael and Labour. The only questions are: how huge will their majority be? And what will the break-down of seats be between the two parties?

  As of now, it looks as if they will have 100-plus seats between them and that Fine Gael will have at least a 60:40 advantage – although both these assumptions could change significantly in the course of a campaign.

  But what won’t change is the enormous prize on offer for the two parties. If they play their cards right, they have the potential to be in power for at least ten years (the best either has managed before is four and a half) and relegate Fianna Fáil forever from its status as the ‘natural party of government’.

  However, to do that they must avoid the mistakes of the past, most notably their disastrous coalition of the mid-1980s. For four interminable and depressing years, divisions between Fine Gael and Labour meant that tough decisions were shirked and the already awful public finances continued to decline.

  Labour was the chief culprit that time around, refusing to countenance cuts in spending that were clearly unavoidable. But Fine Gael was not blameless either. A repeat performance a quarter of a century later simply cannot be countenanced, for their sake and for the country.

  Ideally, the long and tortuous, on-off programme for government negotiations between the two parties post polling day would be truncated. Certainly, what we don’t need right now is a programme for government long on aspirational and esoteric platitudes and short on the brutal economic realities.

  Of course, political realities will dictate that we will have the charade of the programme for government negotiations. Fair enough. But after that, the new government needs to quickly show that it means business. It’s about the economy, stupid, and it’s pretty obvious what needs to be done and most of it is not pretty.

  Right now there are large policy differences between the two would-be coalition partners, particularly on the speed in which the budget deficit needs to be addressed and the breakdown between tax increases and spending.

  These differences definitely won’t stop Fine Gael and Labour putting together a programme for government. But they do have the potential to lead to paralysis in government at a later date.

  In that regard, the choice of finance minister is critical. He or she will have to be both politically skilful and tough – with the latter characteristic more important than the former.

  In opposition you can wax lyrical about eliminating waste and taxing the rich. In government the reality is that spending is dominated by social welfare and public sector pay and the majority of tax revenue comes from the great mass of workers. Unfortunately, if you want to make savings, they’re the areas you have to hit.

  The common perception is that Labour will insist on the finance portfolio in the new coalition. But there is also a view within Labour that it should not do so because of what holding the job will entail. If that view prevails, then Michael Noonan will be the next finance minister and there is little doubt he understands what needs to be done.

  Whether the same will hold true for the electorate and the government backbenchers is likely to prove much trickier. As US voters found after Barack Obama replaced George Bush, a new administration does not suddenly make everything alright. The ABFF (anybody but Fianna Fáil) sentiment that exists at the moment will help propel Fine Gael and Labour to power but it won’t ensure their popularity for long when they have to make painful decisions.

  And that could be difficult for government TDs to accept, particularly when up to half of them could be first-time deputies, unused to the rough and tumble of national politics. With such a large majority, the temptation for backbenchers to rebel against unpopular measures will be enormous.

  It’s difficult to know what, if anything, Fine Gael and Labour can do to head off such dissent. Ideally, it would seek to manage expectations between now and polling day as to what will be possible (or, more relevantly, impossible) when it comes to power.

  With both parties striving for ascendency in the new government, that is probably wishful thinking. But that doesn’t alter the reality for Enda Kenny and Eamon Gilmore that winning the election is going to be the easy bit. The big challenges will come after that.

  Sean Dublin Bay Loftus was a lesson for the hurlers on the ditch. He didn’t moan or complain. He walked the walk instead of talking the talk

  18 July 2010

  Flying into our capital city over Howth and Bull Island, the natural beauty of Dublin Bay never ceases to amaze. In its own way, it’s as spectacular as San Francisco Bay, yet nowhere near as lauded.

  Part of the reason for that is we’ve never made the most of this extraordinary asset. Instead of having a beautiful harbour development, we have a huge area of brown-field development that is home to a major working port, an ESB power station and a sewage plant. In case that wasn’t enough, there will soon be an incinerator there.

  One of the biggest mistakes of the past forty years is that while Dublin expanded ever westwards, the opportunity to build a new city a mile or two from O’Connell Street was squandered.

  If some government had had the vision and the cojones to shift Dublin Port twenty miles or so up the coast and redevelop the area with high density, urban living – serviced by high-speed rail links and restaurants and shops – the impact on the capital would have been amazing. Think Sydney Harbour or even a much bigger version of Dublin’s stunning Grand Canal Quay.

  To be fair, the much maligned PDs did trumpet the concept five years ago but nobody was listening. No surprise there as planning, urban or rural, has never been of huge importance in Ireland. Unless of course, it’s about people demanding their right to build their 4,000 sq ft house wherever they want regardless of whether the land is suitable for a septic tank.

  Corruption has pla
yed a large role in devaluing planning, but it goes much deeper than that. There are 440,000 septic tanks in Ireland compared to 100,000 in Scotland, which has a bigger population. That statistic speaks volumes about the respect we give to good planning here.

  But amidst all the bad planning and chaotic decision making over the past fifty years, Sean Dublin Bay Loftus, who sadly passed away last weekend, stood like a beacon of light.

  Loftus was an extraordinary man and an extraordinary politician for a number of reasons. He was Ireland’s first environmentalist public representative. Without him, Dublin Bay – under-utilised as it is – would be far, far worse.

  Loftus, who lectured in planning law, was one of the few politicians who understood town planning. He campaigned over many decades to protect the bay from the same kind of thinking that bulldozed Georgian Dublin.

  At various stages, he fought plans for an oil refinery, a landfill to allow the expansion of the port and a motorway across Dublin Bay. All those crusades, mercifully, were successful and for that Loftus deserves much of the credit. He was a tireless campaigner and was light years ahead of his time in his use of PR. His decision to change his name by deed poll to incorporate the campaigns he was fighting was pure genius. When he finally won his Dáil seat in 1981 he was called Sean Alderman Dublin Bay Rockall Loftus.

  His campaign literature with his face imposed on a bulldog always featured the tagline ‘tenacity’ and ‘integrity’. Those two words summed him up. His integrity and sense of honour were beyond question – Loftus was a gentleman to his fingertips.

  But it was his tenacity that will probably live longest in the memory. One of the things that is most annoying about the lazy dismissal of politicians that is so prevalent today, is that it ignores the sheer guts it takes to put yourself before the people and have them judge you. Sean Loftus did that on literally dozens of occasions in local, general and European elections.

  He fought thirteen general elections, despite only being successful once. Undaunted, he kept campaigning, he kept fighting the good fight, he kept doing what he believed in. That tenacity deservedly got its reward when he served as Lord Mayor of Dublin from 1995 to 1996. No one has ever deserved the position more.

  He continued his crusades well into his eighties. He regularly visited the offices of the Sunday Tribune to personally hand in press releases about his most recent campaign to stop the expansion of Dublin Port.

  A few years back, I didn’t hear from him for a long period before getting a letter from Sligo from him telling me he had taken ill there while on holidays. He told me that, as he was still recuperating, his wife had helped him write the letter. I didn’t know anything about his family but I thought it was one of the most romantic things I had ever heard. I wasn’t surprised to hear his family speak in such loving terms about him last week.

  For the rest of us, Sean Dublin Bay Loftus was a lesson for the hurlers on the ditch who wring their hands and complain about politicians and a lack of leadership. He didn’t moan or complain. He walked the walk instead of talking the talk.

  In an era where volunteerism is constantly declining, his unstinting work on behalf of his community is a shining example of what one person can achieve and what is really important in life. It’s customary when such an esteemed person dies to use the old saying, ní bhéidh a leithéid arís ann (there will never be his like again), ach tá súil agam go mbéidh, because, now more than ever, Ireland needs more men and women like Sean Dublin Bay Loftus.

  CLAIRE BYRNE

  Spot the difference: female models and model females

  28 October 2007

  Katie Price, also known as Jordan, is a woman who knows what she is doing. She uses her body and her fame to make money. Jordan is not an ambassador for charities, nor does she claim to represent a liberated feminist viewpoint or indeed recommend her lifestyle to anyone else. She just amasses huge amounts of cash by being a celebrity commodity.

  The unfortunate side-effect of what Jordan does is that her persona is elevated to iconic status. The worst brand of celebrity magazine presents her and people like her as a representative of modern woman ... and the vulnerable, and perhaps the young, buy into it.

  However, the wider British media do not present what Jordan is as an aspiration or ideal for all women.

  She is broadly seen for what she is by most responsible publications and there is a distinct separation between someone who takes their clothes off for money and someone who should have social influence.

  Here at home, we have a comparable example in model and celebrity Katy French, but the lines between model and moral authority have become dangerously blurred. Katy is everywhere, most product launches want her as their public face because her picture gets in the paper. She is in high demand as one of the most recognisable faces in Irish media.

  That Katy French is sought-after as a model is no harm.

  Good for her that she is busy ... take the work as it lands in your lap, Katy, and charge them top-dollar for the privilege.

  More worrying is the recent development that has seen Katy’s opinion held up almost as the voice of a generation. Her admission that abortion would be a better option than sacrificing her career for a baby and her vulgar honesty in relation to her sex life recently became frontpage, broadsheet news. The credibility this exposure gives to the musings of a model means Katy French now speaks for Irish women as a whole.

  It is not necessarily what Katy says that is offensive, but that a responsible society gives her such a loud voice.

  Katy French is a model who gets paid for posing in her underwear in the tabloids when the Dublin football team is playing in a big GAA match.

  She should not be portrayed as a new feminist whose flagrant flaunting of her sexuality equals sexual maturity.

  Most intelligent women are not, as she recently claimed, ‘threatened by her sexuality’ but instead cringe when her pronouncements are presented as being a bellwether indicator of what women think or want.

  Even the most venerable in our society have fallen into the trap of using Katy as a role model. The aid organisation GOAL recently sent Katy French, the model, to Calcutta, where aid workers strive to alleviate poverty and rescue child prostitutes from the sex industry.

  Do you really want to hear a model talking about her sex toys and sexual exploits one week and telling you about the plight of the Third World the next?

  The use of Katy French by GOAL to garner some cheap publicity could be seen as compromising and it does devalue the real and valid work of the organisation. But perhaps modern society encourages such stunts because we want to hear how the trip affected the celebrity rather than the real issues behind the ongoing and dire poverty they experience.

  Katy French is a free woman in a democratic country and her views are as valid as those of the next person. I’d imagine most of what she says is done with tongue firmly in cheek in order to elicit reaction. But if her crass pronouncements are read as an indicator of wider female opinion, it becomes damaging. Katy French is a female Irish model, not a model Irish female and should be treated by the media and others as such.

  Media outpouring of false friendship is an insult to Katy

  9 December 2007

  On Thursday night I sat looking at a newspaper photo of Katy French taken exactly a week earlier. That image was now tainted with another – that of her desperately sad death in a Co. Meath hospital surrounded by her family. This outspoken, but perhaps naïve, young woman whose antics had so irked me just weeks before was gone.

  French’s promotion by the media as a spokesperson for a generation prompted me to write in this paper about what she stood for. In a fairly hard-hitting piece, mostly directed at the organisations who exploited her for their own gain, I explained how I believed her deliberately provocative opinions were designed to buy her column inches and how the press fell for it every time. While I said I didn’t object to her making a good living out of it, I objected to the media holding her up as repres
entative of Irish women and giving her views such a loud voice.

  Katy French’s honesty led her to a place where the very organisations she used to get her on the front page of every tabloid newspaper here were starting to turn on her. Her birthday party, held just over a week ago, was mocked and described as being more akin to a meeting of the National Union of Journalists than a birthday celebration. The list of high-profile people who weren’t there was published before the list of the attendees. It’s fair to say she began to be ridiculed; her policy of giving herself completely to the media was beginning to backfire.

  Until last week, media organisations continued to publish ever more daring photographs of Katy French and demanded ever more salacious soundbites. These were often accompanied by catty tales of gossip about her private life and her alleged cat-fights with her rivals.

  Indeed, in the wake of the personal comments she made about me in a Sunday newspaper, three tabloid journalists made contact asking for my response to the ‘outrageous’ and ‘disgusting’ attack.

  For the record, I didn’t regard the riposte as either outrageous or disgusting; it was amusing, and proved my substantive point. Since her death I have heard that she believed I wrote about her to garner publicity for myself. I wrote about her because I passionately believed young and vulnerable people were at risk of buying into the idea that it’s okay to recklessly say and do what you like, regardless of the consequences, and expect to be feted as a result.