Irish politics – the art of turning big ships while mastering science of slow bicycles

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

The week after the Budget was the quietest and most uneventful week in Leinster House, possibly since the election.

It was not as if nothing was happening. The Government launched its long-awaited strategy on substance misuse, particularly its plan to reduce alcohol consumption in Ireland.

The major event was the EU Summit in Brussels. Taoiseach Enda Kenny was there, with an agenda to ensure that Ireland’s exit from the bailout on December 15 would not come with too many terms and conditions attached.

Instead, the summit was dominated by the admirably-robust response of Angela Merkel to the revelations from US whistleblower Ed Snowden that her personal phone had been monitored by the US’s National Security Agency since 2002.

But for those haunting the corridors of the national parliament, they were very much peripheral to all those events. The one thing of note that happened in Leinster House was Enda Kenny’s appearance in the Seanad for two hours, the first time he has visited the Upper House since the referendum defeat. That said, the conciliatory nature and lack of mutual recrimination made for a kind of nondescript afternoon.

Over the course of the weekend I was rereading The Power Game, the book on Fianna Fáil written by my Irish Times colleague Stephen Collins. The chapter on the arms crisis was fascinating, not least in the events following the sensational disclosure that Government ministers may have been involved in a plot to import arms for Northern militants. Collins described the atmosphere of turmoil and of crisis that gripped Leinster House.

That kind of carnival happened a few times when Charlie Haughey was Fianna Fáil leader, and when challengers heaved against him. The most recent examples of utter chaos came during Brian Cowen’s unhappy reign: the bank guarantee of October 2008; the loss of sovereignty and the IMF intervention in late 2010; and Cowen’s spectacular misjudgement in axing half his Cabinet in January 2011.

But those moments of high drama are very rare events. For the most part, the business of politics is humdrum and incremental: the scrutiny of legislation; the pursuit of policies that are important yet technical; committee work that takes up a huge amount of time yet is rarely reported.

In other words, it is often hard-to-explain and boring. The stuff the media veers towards is personality clashes or process stories – far more alluring, far easier to explain.

Quiet week and all that it was last week, there was one common thread that ran through all the four political highlights. And that is that change in a society, even a small society like Ireland, happens very slowly and very incrementally.

We are all familiar with the cliché about the big ships are the slowest at turning – and Irish politics is a port stuffed with those big ships.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.