Mary OÕRourke takes on the ÔMadame DefargeÕ role

Date Published: {J}

There was one positively mad moment in the two-part documentary on the Cowen government which went straight back to the 1950s and the Communist Party annual conferences in Moscow.

That was when Bertie Ahern stood up and promised thousands of extra Gardaí, a cut in the income tax rate and the abolition of other taxes . . . a bit like Joseph Stalin who could promise 25 million new tractors and any number of billions of tons of wheat for the following year.

Unfortunately, the tractors never appeared, nor did the wheat, millions of more small farmers, known as Kulaks, were forced off the land or into Siberia. We have been forced into an economic Siberia where generations will pay for what went wrong in our economy.

The other extraordinary thing about the programme was the number of people who came on and appeared to suggest that they knew what was going on – but then didn’t do anything about it. In a series of blinding flashes Mary O’Rourke, Willie O’Dea, Mary Hanafin all came on, and appeared to say they had reservations at the time, but none of them did anything about them.

If O’Dea knew at the Árd Fhéis that he was listening to economic lunacy from Ahern, that no one had approved, how come he did not resign the following week while lodging a protest letter?

Meanwhile, in best television traditions, the job of ‘shafting’ Taoiseach Brian Cowen fell to O’Rourke, who was sitting at the foot of the guillotine knitting like Madame Defarge.

There was a time when Fianna Fáil became a ‘clam’ when in trouble, but O’Rourke fairly scuttled this tradition when she described Cowen as “always truculent”, she said the “lip would go up” and he would put his hand in his pocket. Then she added to it by saying “he was very shy . . . maybe drink helped him . . . it loosened his tongue.

Meanwhile, ‘pop economist’ David McWilliams had to do a neat side-step to avoid becoming a handy label for the crisis in the middle of the programme. It shows that if you mix with politicians, maybe you should take the old adage to mind “lie down with the dogs and you’ll get up with the fleas”.

The programme started to refer to the decision made about indemnifying banks and the rest of the so-called rescue package as the ‘McWilliams option’.

McWilliams in the programme jumped in fairly adroitly to point out that while he had pointed to the Swedish model of response to such a crisis, the Swedes had also fine-tuned that particular model with no rescue for the banks that had been simply stupid or reckless and that he had pointed out at the time, the qualifications he was putting around the solution.

For the rest, this television show was a bit like watching Reeling In The Years except that this time it was all too near in time and we were watching a crazy period “going down the tubes” in front of us . . . the only thing different was Ahern’s hair was a little darker, O’Rourke was a bit younger and people like Mary Hanafin looked like a potential Taoiseach, while Micheál Martin kept his head down.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.