The media, especially the political media, loves a political process story. These stories can last for weeks or months and always have some new twist to them. In the last few days, the political process story of the year – the Fianna Fáil Presidential Election fiasco – has provided everything the process-story-loving hack could wish for. We have had new revelations about who knew what and when. We have had some drama over what backbench TDs think about the process. We have had questions over when the report into the process will be released, and what it might say. We have had An Taoiseach getting very defensive when questioned about the process.
The problem is this: It remains, in the end, simply a process story. Other than Jim Gavin himself, there was not one person in Ireland whose life, wellbeing, finances, health, or education was impacted by the implosion of his Presidential election campaign. What we have witnessed is a common or garden political event that occurs with relative frequency.
Who, for example, with an interest in politics can forget the drama of the David Norris Presidential Election implosion in 2011? Or the Brian Lenihan meltdown of 1990? Presidential elections throw up such stories, and the media loves them.
Let me say something that is simultaneously contrarian and populist: It would be a travesty of the highest order if this, of all things, was the thing that forced the resignation of Micheál Martin or caused for his political career to finish under a cloud. It would be a travesty because of what it says about our national priorities and what our politicians and the journalists who cover them actually care about.
As I write these words, the week before Christmas, two hundred and forty-eight people in Ireland are on trollies in our hospitals because the health service – funded at a record level yet again this year – cannot provide them with the basic standard of care that they need, and that the public pays taxes to deliver. The new national children’s hospital is endlessly delayed and hundreds of millions of euros over-budget. Last month the number of homeless people in Ireland hit 16,700, yet another record high, and almost 6,000 of those people are children.
This year Government spending yet again reached record levels, and yet again exceeded the Government’s own budgetary limits. The state’s own spending watchdog says that the Government is risking the economic health of the country with its relentless splashing of the cash. I mention these facts without alluding to other areas of public administration where there are crises – the teacher and garda shortages, the immigration crisis, or the fact that just last week a woman sentenced to years in prison for dealing drugs was let out after a fortnight because the prison had no space.
None of these things, not one of them, have been enough to get our politicians or our journalists wondering about Mr. Martin’s job security. This is the actual stuff that affects us every day and for which he is ultimately responsible as head of Government.
We might say, of course, that there is reason for that: Those things are judged by the public at election time, when Mr. Martin can be sacked by the people if they are dissatisfied with his record. But of course the exact same thing is true of the Presidential fiasco. And consider where we are at: Mr. Martin’s job is potentially in peril because the Presidential fiasco may have cost Fianna Fáil €400,000 or so. Yet enormous eye-watering wastes of public money by the Government he leads are somehow of less interest to the media.
Speaking as a citizen first, and a writer second, the plain fact is that I simply do not care about Fianna Fáil’s financial losses. Those have no impact on me: That money was raised from the coffers of the kind of sucker who pays Fianna Fáil an annual membership fee. What I do care about on the other hand is the wholesale waste of public money on systemic failures across Government. Because that is my money. Close to 50% of my income goes to fund the state, far more if you count VAT and excise duty and all the other taxes you pay when you spend the money that has already been taxed.
But those stories are far less interesting to journalists: They are ongoing. Mundane. There is no revelations still to drop. There is no report that might contradict a Minister’s timeline of what he knew and when he knew it. There are no backbenchers grumbling about the health service or homelessness – not because they do not care but because the mindset of a backbencher is that public money is a civil service problem, but party money is a political problem.
And here we get to the crux of it, really: Micheál Martin is in trouble because his own party sees his primary responsibility not as being to the public or the stewardship of the state, but instead to their political interests and the stewardship of Fianna Fáil.
This is the real lesson of the Jim Gavin fiasco. We have learned nothing about it that we did not already know. We have learned that to Fianna Fáilers, the party comes first and sins against the party are much greater than sins against the public. That, and that alone, is why An Taoiseach now finds himself “in trouble”.
As I say, a travesty.