Courage and Conscience: O’Keefe and the Greens
Nov 29th, 2007 by Donagh
Genuine question: Is Fianna Fail’s Ned O’Keefe a man who acted with ‘conscience and some courage’ when he resigned his Party whip and from the FF parliamentary party Or is he just maintaining his electoral longevity as he knows his constituents feelings on the matter?
Of course the opposition would suggest that O’Keefe’s decision put the Green’s support of Mary Harney in a poor light. However, it could be argued that while it might ultimately be to O’Keefe’s political advantage to resign over such a matter, it would not be to the Green’s advantage to dissent against the Government line so early on in their tenure. It would show them as vacillating and weak, unable to deal with the hard decision making of Government – although I suspect that they using that argument to disprove Michael McDowell’s claim before the election that the Green’s are nothing but a bunch of lily-livered pussies.
In the debate John Gormley asked if sacking Mary Harney would help those women who have suffered because of the Breast Cancer debacle. The answer to this solipsistic question is, of course, no. These women have suffered because of incompetence within many sections of the health service, including the Ministerial level. The event is safely in the past and the uproar has lead to considerable PR work on behalf of the HSE and Harney. Gormley’s charged reference to a political scalp was an attempt to suggest that little would be achieved by such a sacking.
But is Gormley a politician? I thought the nature of politics was to use whatever means is available in the parliamentary system, which is designed specifically to arrest social and political change as much as possible, to your advantage in order to further you founding political aims.
Was not opposition to Co-location and the continuing privatization of the health service one of the principal tenants of the Green’s election campaign? Is not Mary Harney one of the architects of co-location?
Here was a golden opportunity for the Green to follow their political principles and put a dent in the Governments determination to press ahead with co-location, at a time when popular sentiment towards Fianna Fail is at its lowest since 2002. The reason they did, of course, is because they know that co-location has nothing to do with Harney. It’s a core policy of the Fianna Fail government. The Greens believe that they have to compromise in the short term to get some important changes in the long term. This is an illusion but we’ll leave that aside for the moment.
So the Greens are staying in government in order to bring about political change from the inside. Yesterday, Gormley announced his plans to reform the Seanad, and if this is not possible, to at least extend the franchise to ALL graduates. Hur (5 sec delay) ray.
This follows, however, the Minister for the Environments plan to reform local government. Both of these reforms are long overdue, so its encouraging that someone who has campaigned for such changes when in opposition is now getting the opportunity to bring about reform. Perhaps institution illustrate a serious deficit of democracy in this country and ‘root and branch’ reform – a phrase Gormley used himself in relation to the Health Service - is the only way that such a problem can be redressed.
But is it going to happen? Reform seems to be the buzz word of the 30th Dail. We are now hearing it constantly from both sides of the house, but details are not very specific. Also, when Mary Harney talks about reform of the Health Service she is talking about a revision of the egregiously unfair system extended to hospital consultants as well as an attempt to bring further privatization through co-location. Those who are resistant to reform, according to Brian Cowen, are the ‘vested interests’ in the health service. These vested interests are not only the consultants who take financial advantage of the two-tier health system, but also those who are critical of the Governments policy of plumping up certain sections in order to sell it off to private interests.
But no one says how fast reforms need to be. In many cases they are dreadfully, painfully slow. Local Government Reform, like reform of the Seadad has long been mooted, but has moved forward at the speed of a glacier. That is how parliaments work, keep political change to a minimum by dragging the whole process out.
Writing in today’s Irish Times (sub req) Dr Elaine Byrne, citing the revelations on Monday’s Prime Time into several disastrous planning decisions in county councils around the country, argues that Local Government Reform must include legislation which would allow anti-corruption laws used at a national level to be applied to local authorities.
“The ethics policy within local government has been one of autonomy. This has largely failed. National accountability mechanisms, such as the Standards Commission and the Comptroller and Auditor General, have been decentralised to the local authorities. This has facilitated unnecessary confusion, particularly in the public’s mind, regarding where responsibilities lie for the already complex network of ethics and electoral legislation.
The Green Paper presents an opportunity to redress this anomaly. The Local Elections Act, 1999 and Local Government Act, 2001 bypassed specific provisions of the Electoral Act, 1997. These should be reintroduced as a matter of urgency. As was originally envisaged, the Standards Commission, and not the relevant local authority, should be the responsible body for the disclosure of donations and expenditure.”
The Green paper is to be published after Christmas. That’s only the beginning of the process. I suspect that this is a poisoned chalice for Gormley. Local electoral reform is needed to reduce the power of County managers and the unaccountability of local councils, but if he does manage it I hope its enough to make up for losing out on taking political advantage of Harney’s (and Fianna Fail’s) currently difficulty.
In short, if O’Keefe was able to act out of conscience, why are the Greens not capable to acting out of principle?
I think the Greens are gambling that it is better for them to stick to the areas where they think they can make real change ( admittedly a very limited number of areas, but that’s all you can do when you have 6 TDs and aren’t even necessary to make up a majority ). So apart from these few critical areas - environment, carbon taxes, or whatever - they are just going with the flow, however reluctantly. Whether that is the right decision or not remains to be seen, but frankly the greens have little to gain by surrendering their offices now, even on the issue of health. Recall - they can make no difference to health anyway and if there is one area where their constituency and others will be looking to for some successes during their term, it’s environment. In that sense you could argue they are focussed on what is possible and not wasting time and energy on matters where they will be irrelevant.
Regarding local government reform. Sigh. Here we are stuck between county managers who are not democratically elected and local elected representatives who are, but who, between them, haven’t got a shred of integrity or even a faint notion of what civic responsibility means. In fact, at the moment, the county managers are one of the few bulwarks against complete, runaway clientelism. They don’t need to keep vested interests on side electorally. True, this doesn’t mean they are gaurdians of the public good - but sometimes they are the only voices opposing the most insane decisions.
It is one thing to have beefed up ethics legislation and strict codes of conduct. But these are meaningless unless they are taken seriously. They have to be policed - litterally policed. The cops have to pull these guys up if they break ethics law.
Sadly any hope of this happened rests on a “civic awakening” across the country. People need to be concerned about integrity. I discussed this with a friend at lunchtime - he said “but if the councillors are in the pay of the developers, why don’t the ordinary PAYE voters use their votes to oust corrupt councillors who are known to zone against planning advice or residents’ wishes?“. The answer is the mentality of Irish people and their the view of democracy. Here lies the real rot. Even locals who have nothing to gain from zoning and precious little else to gain, will vote in the same councillors even when they know they have no integrity. The view is “he is our man” and sure he’s a cute hoor. Until this vile infection can be scoured out of our collective mind, there isn’t a hope, not the faintest chance, of any meaningful change. Green papers can pile up to the rafters, but nothing will change.
You know, it’s not very optimistic but I think you’re absolutely right Tomaltach. I know exactly why the Greens won’t challenge FF on Health. I was being conceited and also a bit frustrated at the fact that they, for their own ends, are going to let Fianna Fail continue on and on until the next General Election. An election no doubt which will be arranged perfectly to suit Fianna Fails needs. The fact is that coalition government is here to stay, and it’s always the smaller parties in a coalition who have to compromise. But there has to be a way of challenging the dominant party in a coalition, especially when you disagree fundamentally with one of their central policies. I tried to acknowledge that there is nothing they can do to change health – but there has to be someway they can challenge it, apart from letting it be known that exchanges around the cabinet table were quite ‘robust’.
[…] as the bright boys over on Dublin Opinion suggest “But no one says how fast reforms need to be.” Indeed, and it would appear that […]