IMMA debacle leaves Enda with egg all over his face

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

We’ve all heard of pop-up exhibitions – but few have caused such hue and cry as the two-week wonder we have just witnessed at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, IMMA.

The furore it caused can be compared in the same breath to the first time the impressionists exhibited to the Academie; or to the first time Picasso’s Guernica was unveiled; or when Andy Warhol debuted his Campbell’s soup tin.

This exhibition wasn’t a painting, but rather an installation (as one Irish Times letter writer so accurately put it). Its inspiration is clear but the artist is unknown – however, there is a suspicion it may have been a collaboration between two eminent maestros: Enda Kenny and Heather Humphreys.

And almost as soon as it appeared in IMMA, the exhibition was closed down. But there are rumours that it may be appearing again after October 10 but this time in the fossil museum otherwise known as Seanad Éireann.

If there is one thing that all Irish political parties are particularly talented at, it’s taking a silk purse and turning it into a sow’s ear.

Here Fine Gael was last week looking in the best shape it has been in since the General Election of 2011. Michael Noonan made one of his weekly Friday apparitions in Limerick to tell his disciples that the CSO figures from the day before might result in growth of three per cent for ten years running. The figures were astounding and it was clear they were no flash in the pan.

The Government could say it had got rid of the Troika, dealt with some of the legacy debt – or at least the promissory note – and now brought the country galloping out of the recession it had been mired in for five years.

In politics, there are no stronger determinants than the economy. In other words, if the economy is performing strongly, it’s the ace up the sleeve. The Government party can throw it down on the table and say, with justification: “Now beat that!”

If you look back to 1997 and even 2002, Fianna Fáil was embroiled in its fair share of controversies over graft and political corruption but its overtures on the economy essentially out-trumped all the negatives.  I suspect it will be the same way for this Government if it sells its successes.

But if it keeps tripping up with seemingly small process issues like it did this week, it could end up taking a spectacular and not so pretty fall.

At the heel of the hunt, the self-inflicted fiasco over John McNulty’s appointment to IMMA removed at a stroke much of the good news on the economy from the week before.

I used stroke deliberately there because that was what it was – and not a particularly good one at that.

I spoke to a senior Fianna Fáil person last week and said to him that it must have filled him with nostalgia. “What, not at all,” he replied with a curl of the lips. “Don’t even begin to compare that stroke with ours. That was an amateur job. When we did strokes in the past we did them properly.”

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.