Politics steers safe course through the middle ground

Political World with Harry McGee – harrymcgee@gmail.com

I started working as a political specialist around this time 13 years ago when I became the political editor of The Irish Examiner. I arrived into Leinster House in early August – I might as well have dropped into a Trappist Monastery in a remote mountain region.

The place was deserted. Not a soul about. No parliament. No committees. No nothing. The only action that happened every day was the roar of the passengers on the Viking Splash Tour as they passed the gates of Government buildings.

That was pre-crisis Ireland when the Celtic Tiger was still prowling around with pomp. Parliament shut up shop in early July and we didn’t see our TDs and Senators again until late September when they returned for the laughably-titled think-ins.

For a journalist with a daily newspaper, nothing going on was a disaster. I was still expected to provide a page one story every day. That job had lain vacant for over six months and the two staff members took their summer holidays as soon as I arrived. With fewer political contacts than I thought I had, it was hard going that summer, faced with the daily task of making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.

That taciturn ship of Irish politics flowed along lazily for a further five years. Then the banking crisis hit.  It torpedoed it all under the water line. Since then, we have been rowing desperately through choppy waters in our life rafts.

This summer is the first that I have sensed that we might be beginning to return to that kind of business-as-usual complacency. We are just an election away from normal service resuming, with the big two easing their way back into the centre of things.

It seems strange making that kind of prediction, given the very complicated maths of our current political set-up.

On the face of it, the picture looks abnormal.

But, as a point of fact, it is far more normal than you might suspect. And certainly far more normal than the bizarre stuff that is happening in so many of our neighbouring countries.

I was in the US last week and got a chance to go to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, an attractive city nestling on the banks of Lake Erie.

While the city was attractive, the Republican presidential candidate was certainly not.

If his wife had cogged lines from the inspirational Michelle Obama (who delivered a barnstormer of a speech at the Democratic convention in Philadelphia on Monday night – “when others aim low, we aim high”) Trump himself seemed to have cogged his lines from Dante and his Inferno. His portrait of American read like a carbon copy of the Fifth Circle of Hell.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.