Little merit in marking your own score card

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

When you have been covering politics for a while you realise that politicians have no hang-ups with false modesty.

This week the Government published the latest scorecard on its performance in office and awarded itself gold stars and all kinds of ‘gaiscí’ without the slightest blush.

It was incredible, shameless; with an election in the offing, it was also published two months early.

It is not that the Government has not achieved. It has had some great successes, not least with the exit of the Troika, the deal on the promissory note and the robust improvement in economic performance. And that includes rapidly falling unemployment figures.

It claimed that 93 per cent of over 700 targets it had set out for itself over the past five years had been achieved, or had been substantially achieved.

There was no real basis for that claim. You have to realise that the robust and independent assessment of the Programme for Government was carried out by the, erm, Government itself – so hardly an honest broker.

In addition nowhere in the 20-page document published this week is there a reference to any of the failures. You have to search very hard (and sometimes in other documents) to find the goals that did not quite make the grade or which were quietly dropped.

From the Government perspective, the media strategy harks back to the Pravda headlines during the Soviet era. Then they cheered up the comrades with news that factory production reached record outputs. It was pure propaganda.

This week Taoiseach Enda Kenny concentrated on the big-ticket success, that of economic recovery. He said this was based on a strategy based on jobs, exports and industry. He also contrasted the recovery with the state the country was in when the Coaltion came to power.

Similarly, Tánaiste Joan Burton referred to the members of the Troika walking from the Merrion Hotel to Government Buildings as if they owned it. The choice now was between the stability of the Coalition or the chaos and instability that would ensue if Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin joined forces.

An election is proximate. So the name of the game was electioneering, using the report card to score points against opponents.

There are legions of failures. They promised to burn the bondholders. That never happened. They promised to renegotiate the interest rates on the Troika loan of €67.5 billion. That did not happen either when they were rebuffed by Angela Merkel and Nicholas Sarkozy within weeks of coming to power. They got a bit of a break when they benefitted from the lower interest rates Greece got a year later when it went into a second bail out.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.