Do we need a new Troika to keep tabs on Shatter?

World of Politics with Harry McGee – harrymcgee@gmail.com.

The most surprising turn-up for the books of 2014 is that a full quarter of the year has gone by and I haven’t written the words ‘troika’ or ‘bailout’ or ‘conditionality’ more than a dozen times.

At the beginning of April last year, we would all have been girding our loins for yet another quarterly visit from the Government’s ‘cigirí scoile’, with the delegation, the meetings and all the palaver that might surround it: the box-ticking exercises; the arguments over what State assets should and shouldn’t be sold; fights with Joan Burton over job activation; the internal European Commission staff reports that were always more critical of the Government than the public pronouncements.

That had always struck me as strange. In public the Troika praised the Government for meeting its targets. But in private they would criticise the fact that the Coalition always wanted to opt for the soft option.

I remember speaking to one of the senior officials from the outside agencies who explained that their presence in Ireland gave the Government political cover to take hard and unpopular decisions (to mete out tough medicine in other words) and succeed in achieving real reform.  When the citizens complained, explained the official, the Coalition could easily have deflected blame by saying: ‘we didn’t want to do this but the Troika effectively twisted our arms and left us with no choice’.

But perhaps what the Troika official missed is that people see through that. Or at least, they will blame the devil they known rather than the devil they don’t.

And politicians know that too. So this Government, like all Governments do, found that its room for manoeuvre was restricted by the Troika. Still, there was some wiggle room. And so they invariably chose the path of least resistance where possible.

Having said that, it was still a programme and they still had to comply with the conditions to ensure the trio of international bodies – the EU Commission; the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund – released the €67 billion in loans they gave to us over four years.

Ironically, last weekend, Minister for State at the Department of Finance Brian Hayes generated an awful lot of controversy when seeming to hanker nostalgically for the troika years. Hayes said two things: the people “like the idea of surveillance” from outside agencies and that there was “grudging support in the country for the Troika”.

While his opponents in the EU parliament election contest in Dublin went bananas, I’d guess that there is more than marginal support for what he said.

What he meant with surveillance, I guess, is that people liked the very transparent memorandums of understanding with their quarterly targets for all to see. For a lot of people this was a very effective, a very tangible, and a very democratic, means of the Governments showing what it was setting out to do – and us, as citizens, being in a position to evaluate whether they achieved those targets or not.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.