Government’s self-praise for big successes masks plethora of failures and half-truths

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

Like the Pravda headlines during the Soviet era that always intoned that tractor production in Minsk and Volgograd had reached record outputs for the 15th year running, the Coalition is  adept at churning out reports in which it gives itself gold stars, without even the slightest blush of modesty.

This week marks the third anniversary of this Coalition and it marked it with a scorecard of its performance on the over 200 items in the Programme for Government.

I am writing this before Enda Kenny and Eamon Gilmore launch the report but I as sure as night follows day it will be all gold stars, and self-congratulating and aren’t we the best little Government to do politics in by 2016.

The strange thing is that when you start to parse the Programme, you are struck by the fact that the failures run into scores. So many promises have bitten the dust but they have all been conveniently airbrushed from the ‘narrative’, as political types like to describe how they tell well-intentioned porkies to the world.

As against that, it must be said there have been some big wins. The promissory note deal last year was one. It might not add up to the sum of its parts in the long run but it was a very effective political manoeuvre, and the Government got a double whammy in by killing off Anglo Irish Bank with one fell swoop.

The other, of course, was the Troika exiting Ireland, with the Government bravely (some say foolhardily) resisting any kind of a second bailout, or a provisional back-stop. They would have involved new conditions and the EU continuing to “correct our homework”, to employ Pat Rabbitte’s nice phrase.

I must say I liked the transparency and openness of the Troika programmes. They were there for all to see. Everybody knew what goals the Government had to achieve every three months. And everyone knew if they succeeded in meeting the targets or not.

With the departure of the Troika it’s back to business as usual. There are a lot of overall targets set for 2015 and 2016 but the responsibility for meeting them will rest with the individual departments.

There won’t be a memo (or even departmental memo) so keeping track of them will become a bit like driving through a muddy field with broken windscreen wipers. But that’s the way Governments like it. The less Joe Public knows the better it is.

Anyway, in the week that is in it – and to counter the torrents of public propaganda and self-congratulation – it might be worth reminding you of some of the less than auspicious moments of this government over the past three years.

Of course a Programme of Government agreed between a party of the right and a party of the left will involve compromises and some deliberate fudges (to be a Sir Humphrey about it an issue is parked and the programme contains some generalities that might or might not translate into policy at some future indeterminate point – get the drift?).

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.