She won’t mind me, I hope, repeating the story, but my colleague Niamh and I were pondering yesterday whether the Government could tell the energy regulator simply not to allow energy companies to increase prices this winter. She is right, I think, that they could, but such a move would probably be deeply unwise, both politically and economically. Economically, because enforcing price levels on companies may end up imperiling those companies’ ability to survive: Their revenues would be fixed, even as costs rose. Yes, they might continue to make a profit for a while, if you consider them very greedy, but eventually, prices would rise to the extent that they were making a loss. We’d end up having to bail them out, like the banks.
And politically, because, well, once you do something it becomes easier and even necessary to do it again: The Government that said “we’re banning the ESB from putting up prices” would find that from that day forward, every single ESB price rise would be a Government decision. Not something that the ESB, or other companies did, but something Government allowed them to do. “You could stop this”, the opposition would say, “but you just don’t want to”. Set the precedent and gain yourself a permanent headache.
There’s also the matter of muscle memory: Once you give Government a tool to do something, it’s always the first thing civil servants reach for when a crisis hits. Here’s exhibit A of that phenomenon, buried, inexplicably, halfway through a report in the Irish Times by Jack Horgan-Jones yesterday:
Separately, internal documents show officials flagged risks about the “capacity to maintain societal function and civil order” in a worst-case scenario interruption to fuel supply. They outline how the “curtailment of normal societal functions” would be used as a response.
That’s very fancy civil service speak for a fuel lockdown, essentially. “Sure it worked for Covid”, is how the civil servants think. “We know how it works”.
That is, really, the most damaging legacy of the pandemic, socially speaking, though we are yet to really come to terms with it. I was at mass this weekend with my parents, who were down to visit. I am not, perhaps shamefully, a very regular mass attendee, so every time I do go it’s a culture shock. Mass in rural Ireland in late 2022 looks a lot like Mass in rural Ireland, when it was permitted, at the height of the pandemic: Everybody over the age of about 50, including the Priest, is masked. There are no handshakes. There is sanitizer where there used to be holy water. There is, perhaps unconsciously, social distancing. A very large chunk of people in Ireland, many of them older, will, I fear, never again consider it safe to mingle freely with their neighbours. That’s an unspeakable tragedy.
But it also shows how our society can be programmed. We must all do our bit. We must all make sacrifices. We must all pay the price.
These are instincts that the blob – that amorphous collection of high-ranking civil servants, academics, politicians, and broadcasters – know can be turned to their advantage, now. It is not especially surprising, then, that we should have Government papers responding to a potential fuel crisis with a Father Ted-esque “is there anything to be said for another lockdown?”
Nor is it hard to see how the script would play out: Fuel must be reserved for those most genuinely in need – for our brave ambulancemen and gardai and nurses getting to work. Electricity is needed for our hospitals, and front line services. We must all do our bit, etc: That means, potentially, a household ration on diesel and heating oil, a ban, maybe, on “unnecessary journeys”, and so on. High-priced adverts on RTE from the Department of Energy advising people only to turn their washing machines and dishwashers on after dark. It worked before, it might work again.
The media, too, would openly relish, I think, such a crisis, for two reasons: For one thing, there’s nothing like a good crisis to move eyeballs to the media. For another thing, as alluded to in the paragraph above, there’s nothing like a good crisis to generate bazillions in advertising from state agencies telling people what to do. Just so long, of course, as that advice doesn’t extend to switching off the telly on a Friday night at Tubridy Time.
Perhaps none of this will be necessary. Nothing in this article is a prediction of what will happen – simply an illustration of what could easily happen, because we made the mistake, as a country, of submitting to it when it happened before.
But if Government tries it, or something like it, it is absolutely vital, I think, that the attempt must be resisted. The answer to every failure of Government (and this, unlike Covid, which was not their fault, absolutely is a failure of Government) cannot be collective punishment of the people. The public cannot allow itself to become like trained hounds, quietly accepting that they cannot go outside because master says so. We deserve a better solution than the thing that worked in the pandemic, and that the public are used to anyway. Because make no mistake, that’s how measures like this are seen now, by the establishment. As the easy, and workable, way out. We’d be utter fools to fall for it again.