If you want a video that aptly sums up the state of Irish politics in 2024, I would humbly submit that you can’t do much better than yesterday’s grand announcement on the Fianna Fáil social media feeds:
In Fianna Fáil, we want to protect retail workers.
Retail workers are often subjected to physical and verbal assaults. We want to protect them by introducing an additional offence of deliberately attacking or assaulting a retail worker.@malcolmbyrne @SenatorPatCasey pic.twitter.com/34YjO3aPFX
— Fianna Fáil (@fiannafailparty) April 17, 2024
Governments have basically two primary ways of shaping the society that they govern: The first is what we might call the operational method, achieved through the allocation of resources, for example spending more money on health by increasing taxation on the rich. The second is by what we might call the legislative method – for example by introducing a law saying that it is illegal to ask someone to work more than forty hours a week.
One of the trends in Irish politics is that our politicians regularly confuse these two methods and try to accomplish things that are worthy using entirely ineffective measures.
For example, it is already the law of the land that it is illegal to assault people. This is as true of assaulting a retail worker as it is of assaulting a homeless person: To assault somebody is against the law and carries a possible jail sentence, depending on the severity of the assault, of up to life in prison in the case of assault causing serious harm.
That assaults may be occurring on retail workers to the extent that it’s a problem in need of a solution, then, is an operational matter, not a legislative matter. You solve that by increasing the number of Gardai assigned to investigate such cases, or assigned to patrol retail areas, or perhaps you give grants or tax breaks to retailers to install private security systems or private security staff. The problem is not arising because of a lack of legislation, but because of a lack of operational resources to solve the problem that has arisen.
Of course, one of the problems is that the operational method of solving problems is much more difficult and complicated than the legislative method of solving them. It is much easier for a politician, asked what his plan is to solve a problem, to say “I am bringing forward legislation in this area” than it is for him to say “I have convinced the Department of Finance to allocate X million euros to fix it”.
That is why this kind of legislation – effectively “messaging” legislation in that its true purpose is to show the public that politicians care – is so common in this Government. One of the champions of such legislation, by the way, is not a Fianna Fáiler at all, but the Minister for Justice. Helen McEntee, over the past couple of years, has passed messaging legislation almost monthly. She is very proud, for example, of a new law creating an offence of unwanted sexual choking which will, she says, protect women in abusive relationships. The problem is that “unwanted choking” is basically the definition of the existing law around assault. And if it were to occur during sex, it is almost certainly covered by existing laws around sexual assault.
Yet despite this, the Minister believes that the problem she identified can be solved in part by effectively a new law saying “don’t do that”. Just as the Fianna Fáilers above appear to believe that there exists, in Ireland, a class of criminal who genuinely believed that the laws on assault did not apply to retail workers. The whole thing is absurd.
It relates, though, to a constant theme in my writing: Irish politicians have essentially given up, as a class, on solving large problems, which is why they relentlessly seek new, solvable problems to highlight instead. They cannot, for example, imagine any way to give us a working health service, but they certainly can give more people a medical card as a kind of bribe to keep them on side – even though more medical card holders likely means more demand on an already creaking health service.
Similarly, housing and homelessness cannot be solved, but the funding for some NGO or another can be increased as evidence that politicians care about the problem. We might not be able to give you a home, but we can certainly bail out the Peter McVerry trust as evidence of how much we care about services for those in need.
All of this works, to a degree, with the low information voter who hears politicians talking about an issue and assumes as a result that they must be working to solve it. In part this is the voter’s problem: Too many people hear “we’re bringing in legislation to protect retail workers from assault” and shrug their shoulders in acceptance that at least their legislators are talking about the problem, and further assume that because they are talking about it they must understand it.
When this happens every now and again, it can be forgiven. Politicians have a job to do, and can be forgiven the odd legislative boondoggle that’s designed to send a message about how much they care.
The problem in Ireland is that increasingly, they do little else. That’s a very big reason that the country has as many problems as it does.