Sarky Sarko

Way back in early 2000 Brian Cowen was made Minister for Foreign Affairs. I was editing Magill at the time and wrote a long profile, with Damian Corless, about Cowen (yep, Fianna Fail’s dauphin as the French might say).

A friend of his, a sharp-witted Labour politician, mocked him kindly. In a general comment about his social habit and dress sense, he said, yes, there have been times when Brian has spoken in the Dáil sporting a tie that had been dipped in a pint of porter the night before.

There was a bit of metropolitan snobbishness about Biffo, the original bruiser politician from Offaly, moving to Iveagh House and doing the round of formal dinners, good wines and Ferrero Rocher. There was no need to worry. Cowen was absorbed into Foreign Affairs more thoroughly than the Norman who invaded Ireland who later became ‘níos Gaelaí ná na Gaeil féin’. He went native.

It will be strange to see Cowen alongside the ultra-sophisticated Nicholas Sarkozy at the Bastille Day celebrations in France today. That’s because we still haven’t got used to him in the statesman role. But then it took a while for us to get used to Bertie in that role too.

Sure, there’s no such thing as a shallow end when you become Taoiseach (please refer to Lisbon and to the economic downturn). But there’s still a buffer period. With the exception of the Sunday Independent, most others have bided their time. The first serious assessment of a new leader or new government is made once the psychological landmark of the first 100 days has been reached. Cowen still has some 40 days to go to reach that mark, but already you can hear pencils being sharpened.

For all that, it’s still too early to see how Cowen will disport himself on the international stage. One aspect of commentary over Lisbon that has has been the recurring theme that our EU partners are angry with us, or are in a huff with us, or now want to punish us for our ingratitude. What’s perplexing about it is the acceptance that they are right and we are in the wrong for rejecting the referendum.

In other words, will Sarko be sarky about it all?

Well, there’s been no evidence to support that. We were the only EU member state that was constitutionally obliged to hold a referendum. And what people were being asked to accept was an imperfect, complicated, rambling hard-to-follow proposition, which dealt with a multitude of often disconnected issues, a lot of which were dealing with back office functions. Sure, the net effect of it was, on the whole, benefecial but…

It was the constitution cobbled into a treaty, or mutton dressed as lamb.

The rejection of it should not be accepted by Irish people or the media as a source of shame, or that we are ingrates who bit the hand that fed.

In fairness to Cowen he has not got into the mode of blaming the population for their stupidity. He has recognised that the failure in selling the treaty was more complex than that.

And Sarkozy, of all European politicians, understands the many - and sometimes contradicttory - motivations behind the vote, having gone through the same process in France three years ago.

Did the treaty attempt to do too many things, thus sewing confusion into the minds of people? Any EU Treaty will, by definition, have implications for a country’s sovereignty. Rather than making the self-defeating argument that there will be no change, should not the pro-treaty people say, yes it will bring about all these change, but, hey! those changes will be for the good? We need a Europe that is fit for purpose when biffing it out with the Yanks, the Chinese, the Russians, the Indians and the new South American powers like Brazile.

A kind of revolution in terms of thinking is needed. It’s called selling the treaty for what it is. And as for the other revolution… Happy Bastille Day.

Summer Holidays

Check this out also at The Irish Times site

It must be terribly hard for TDs and Senators. Being bundled like that out of the public eye for the whole summer. We all felt so sorry for them yesterday, to see them look so obviously glum and heavy-hearted as they nosed their BMWs out of the gates of Leinster House and headed off for ten weeks of idleness. They will be deprived of work and will have nothing to do to occupy thier time between now and September 24. It’s a hard station, we know. But (deep mournful intake of breath) it’s the life they have chosen.

My own first week working as a specialist political journalist was in August 2003. Arriving to work in Leinster House was like a GAA correspondent being assigned to Croke Park the Tuesday after an All Ireland football final. The political atmosphere was as spent as the PDs. We still had a paper to fill. It was thankless. Scrounging around for stories. Hoping that the odd TD playing golf at Playa de Nouveau Riche or at their Atlantic-hugging holiday home might have bothered to leave their mobiles on.

That autumn and the following spring a couple of the parties produced very impressive policy papers calling for Oireachtas reform. In the Senate, Mary O’Rourke was driving an all-party initiative to refrom that often entertaining, hugely interesting, but ultimately next-to-useless talking shop, the Seanad. It was great. And they kept on coming, the reform papers, throughout the period of the 29th Dáil. And how lovely they looked on the shelves. The same shelves already piled high with reform proposals for the 28th and the 27th and 26th Dáil…. ad infinitum.

Look at the Programme for Government. Look at the promises (included, the Greens say, at their insistence) to reform the Seanad and the Dáil. Note that a year has passed. Note that four years remain. Note that almost the exactly same promises will be contained in the next Programme for Government, for the 32st Dail whenever that might be.

This is not cynicism. It’s just stating a reality. A long time ago a Fine Gael TD Alice Glenn said that getting political parties to reduce the number of TDs and Senators would be like asking turkeys to vote for Christmas. The first instinct of the political class is self-preservation. It is undeniable that the life is precarious. But the buffer zone they have created for itself is breath-takingly impressive. The Dáil sat for a total of 94 days in the 2007-2008 period. That total of sitting days has stayed unforgibably low (93 days in 2005; 96 in 2006 and 74 in the election year of 2007) despite promises each year to increase them. The House of Commons sits an average of 130 days each year. The US Congress is in session 160 days a year, almost twice as much as the Dáil. By the way, the Seanad sat on only 86 days in this political year.

The Oireachtas is also the legislature. A paltry total of 25 Bills have been passed since the Government returned a year ago. And some of these were standard bills that crop up every year like the Finance Bill, the Social Welfare Bill and the Motor Vehicle Duties Bill, all which give effect to budgetary changes. Some were necessary to give statutory effect in Ireland to European directives. Two of the bills corrected legal flaws in earlier bills. So we had the law-makers come up with a desolatory handfull of bills this year - the Immigration Bill, the Dublin Transportation Authority Bill, the Intoxicating Liquer Bill.

We don’t need to go into pay and expenses but the average basic salary for a TD is now well over €100,000. We have a total of 35 minister, 166 TDs and 60 Senators, pro rata way way more than any of our EU counterarts. And there are only two established Government backbenchers (Ned O’Keeffe and Jim McDaid) who don’t get some extra stipend for chairing or whipping committees.

Oh sorry, the committees sit during the summer, we are told. Erm, most of them will sit once, if that. That means that members (and they don’t all show up) have to come in one or two days during the summer just to show Joe Punter out there that it’s still ticking over, that the show is on the road.

Recession? What recession?

Promise versus Experience in the wake of Texas and Ohio

The Hillary Clinton campaign's dive bombing of Obama's campaign in the past week shows up some of the unavoidable pitfalls of politics.

And after months where people said that Clinton's negative campaigning would backfire on it, it's now clear that her furious shaking of the apple tree has finally forced some fruit to fall.


Candidates have three major commodities to offer to the electorate - personality; their record; and their potential. Obama's record (three years as a Senator)isn't exactly replete.

So he has traded on his charisma and his potential, encapsulated in his message for change. The problem is that a lot of this is aspirational and non-tangible - the 'vision thing'.

Tony Blair did a lot of it. So did Clinton. It was never Bertie's strongest suit (Once nested into government during a boom, FF could easily sit on its record - it won't be so easy next time out as economic fortunes go south). But if you parse any of the Ard Fheis/National Conference speeches from any parties here in the South, you still get oodles of this prose.

An example thrown out from the top of my head:

"I believe in an Ireland of equality, an Ireland of prosperity, and Ireland where people can walk safely on the streets without worrying about being mugged or stabbed. I believe in a strong economy, where there is respect for the individual while we still cater for the needs of society as a while."

It's rhetoric. Pretty vacant and empty. And to a certain extent Obama has been getting away with spewing out this stuff - that sounds incredibly impressive but contains precious little. It's like candy floss - it looks substantial and enticing but turns out to be the next thing to having nothing at all.

Dan Sullivan, in his comment on the last post, was talking about Sinn Fein's constant references to 'equality', one of those catch-all words that sound great but ultimately mean little, unless you are prepared to do the slog-work and define exactly what you mean.

I think if you compare US politics with that of Britain and Ireland, the Americans tend to value the aspirational higher than we do, which is why Obama's rhetoric may eventually outflank Clinton's experience.

Here, experience and record have been the driving factors behind Fianna Fail's facile victories in 2002 and (in the circumstances) facile victory in 2007. Of course, it was easier, as times were good. The 'experience' over the next five years will be undoubtedly rockier. Which will mean that the alternatives will have a real shot at it, irrespective of who the new FF leader will be. But FG and Labour will not get away with vague rhetoric and half-promises - besides showing that they have the 'grist' for the challenge, they will have to spell out all their policies, to almost wonkish detail. And that kind of rigour can only be good. S

INSIDE POLITICS - CARBON BUDGET

It wasn’t very dramatic in the end - after all carbon emissions is just above a double physics class on a Monday morning when it comes to excitement – but yesterday was the day during which the Green Party proved that it has what it takes to play its part in Government.

If its carbon budget was a revolution it was very much one with a small r. It’s the first budget of its kind every attempted in Western Europe and yesterday John Gormley admitted that in a sense, he was taking a shot in the dark.

"The concept of the carbon budget is new, and this year’s format can be seen as a pilot. I will consider how its content and format will be developed and improved in future years," he said.

What Gormley secured in the budget was the go-ahead for the much-touted 3% reduction in carbon emissions. And in his carbon budget yesterday Gormley essentially painted a picture of where we are now and where we need to be in 2012. And most importantly, he announced the first of the measures that need to be taken to get there.

n a complicated table that is strictly for anoraks, there were enough statistics and figures to tell us how it can be done. The broadbrush picture is as follows: The 2006 figures will show that Ireland emitted 70 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent that year. To meet the 3% annual reduction and to meet our Kyoto targets, we need to reduce that by an average of 6 million tonnes each year. And the first of the new measures to help us reach that target include initiatives in energy; industry; and residential. As each year goes on, more measures will be added.

It’s a huge ask and will mean some pain. Gormley accepted that we might not achieve it but he said it would not be for the want of trying.

"We are not making it easy on ourselves. There is always a danger we may fail. We have set the bar high in striving for a 3% annual reduction in the Programme for Government," he said yesterday.

And to that end, when you look at the chart produced, it looks very like the Government will have to rely on what is euphemised as ‘flexible methods’. In simple terms, that means a carbon fund. At the moment we have E290 invested in it. In opposition, the Greens railed against it saying that Ireland was essentially buying its way out of its Kyoto commitments. But even with the new political dispensation, we may still need to rely on it. Note the subtle use of language in Gormley’s Dáil speech:

“I recognise – as Al gore did when he was in Dublin last weekend –that the flexible mechanisms are an integral part of the Kyoto Protocol agreement and an important instrument in promoting low emissions investment in developing countries. Notwithstanding this, the Government is committed to ensuring Ireland is able to fulfil its commitments by emission reductions.”

The message is: we may have to resort (reluctantly, sure) to the fund.

There were positives yesterday. The new measures that will phase out traditional incandescent lightbulbs in favour of energy-efficient ones; the new motor tax system that will be based on emissions not engine size; and the mandatory environment label system for cars (very similar to the labelling system used for white goods).

But it’s partly Lord Make Me Green but not yet. The new system for light bulbs will not be introduced until 2009. And despite the changes in vehicle registration tax being flagged in last year’s budget, they won’t be introduced until July. John Gormley didn’t really have a decent explanation for this yesterday; nor did he for the fact that the new motor taxes won’t be introduced until July.

And it’s generally been recognised that to achieve a 3% reduction in Co2, the Government will have to introduce a carbon tax. This was in the 2002 Government’s programme but was ditched in 2004. Now it’s back on the agenda. But Brian Cowen announced on Wednesday that it that the issue has been kicked to touch, with a Commission for Taxation being established to explore etc etc etc. When will it decide? How long is a piece of string?

Still, yesterday was a good start for the Greens and for Gormley. It will mean that a person buying a gas-guzzling car will be paying the top rate of 36% in VRT and the maximum E2,000 in motor tax. That means that the VRT for a high-powered car selling for E75,000 will be in the region of E24,000 with a E2,000 per annum tax bill.

As the AA’s Conor Faughnan pointed out yesterday:

“A mid range car emits 173 grams per carbon dioxide per km (an example would be a Ford Mondeo 1.6 litre petrol which emits 177g). I suggest within a short space of time the general public will be as familiar with these figures as they are with miles per gallon.”

Faughnan made a fair point that the motor tax was also a revenue raising operation (raising E83 million for the local government fund), which he considered unfair:

“Because it was called a Green Budget the Government was able to get away with increases in car tax of between 9 and 11%. There was no environmental dividend but there was a revenue dividend,” he said.

It was an undramatic yet promising start. There is still a long way to go on the road to reach the targets but at least the Government has at last got its hands on a road map.

INSIDE POLITICS - GUNFIGHT AT THE O'KEEFFE CORRAL

Harry McGee
On Politics
“This is not personal”, Ned O’Keeffe wrote in the first line of the speech he never delivered on Wednesday night.

The phrase ‘It’s nothing personal’ has long been a cliché in Hollywood movies. It was usually uttered by a man wielding a gun just before he shot somebody. And the point of course was that it was always personal, as personal as it gets.

So when Ned O’Keeffe kicked off by saying it was nothing personal, you knew two things. Firstly, it was personal. Secondly, a political assassination was in the offing.

However, if Ned O’Keeffe’s one-man rebellion is seen as the first move of a political heave against Bertie Ahern, it’s going to be the longest shove in history.

Still, after ten years, there is the first whiff of cordite in the air. Ahern has had a lousy autumn and winter (both personally and politically) but it’s a testament to his complete dominance over his party that you can count the malcontents and mutineers on the fingers of one hand and still have a pinkie to spare.

Ahern has spread his anorak far and wide and given them all jobs to keep them happy. All of the TDS elected in 2002 and before were given some form of job and stipend (as a junior minister, committee chair, vice chair or a whip) with the exception of only two – Ned O’Keeffe and Jim McDaid. It reminds you of the old Balkan saying that goes: Keep your friends close but keep your enemies even closer.

Of course, there are other factors. The primary one is that Ahern – the classic consensus man - has united Fianna Fail in a manner not seen since Lemass and brought the party through three elections all of which provided a windfall of seats.

And his allies (of which he has many: paradoxically he has few close friends in the party) will tell you that the private grumblings of backbenchers are muted and passing – and more often than not relate to a single issue. And they’ll also tell you that the real dissidents are a tiny inconsequential rump. There are no gangs of four, or gangs of 22 or gangs of more than one within FF in the modern era.

His prime ally, naturally, is the man who Ahern has named to succeed him, in the grand Russian/Soviet style of Vladimir Putin and Nikita Khrushcev.

Cowen seems like he is happy to bide his time forever. But in the far distance there are storm clouds brewing and there are other pretenders starting to make subtle (and in Dermot Ahern’s case none-too-subtle) long-distance claim for the throne.

There have been similarities between Ahern’s third term and that of Tony Blair’s but there have also been differences. They have both taken massive hits. For Blair it was Iraq. For Ahern it has been a series of personal issues and uncharacteristic political blunders – especially his cack-handed defence of his extravagant salary.

The differences have been that Blair started his third term with the reforming zeal of the first; with new ideas on health and education reform.

Ahern is not a visionary, was never the creative force within FF (leaving that to others like Charlie McCreevy; Noel Dempsey and – in his one inspired moment on smoking – Micheal Martin). Ahern’s greatest attributes have been his skills as a consensus finder and his extraordinary strategic instinct – Ahern always knew what the party needed to do, and how it need to act, no matter what that situation. And in his third term he has continued on as he did in the first and second – but now there are real signs that that the Anorak that kept him in touch with the common weal is no longer working its magic.
His Tribunal woes could be capable of bringing his career as Taoiseach to a premature end. And we cannot be sure that he will survive intact from all the return visits to the lower yard of Dublin Castle (the next one takes place for two days just before Christmas), especially if new allegations are made.

His own credibility was serious challenged this week when former NCB stockbrokers head Paraic O’Connor told the Tribunal that Mr Ahern’s account of the dig-out loan was untrue insofar as he described him as a friend. That will create real problems for Ahern.

In fairness to Ned O’Keeffe, he had a speech in his hand on Wednesday night that the FF whips never allowed him to deliver during the no-confidence debate..
This is what he would have said: “The current health policy can now be summarised as confrontation, privatisation and Americanisation delivered by only two methods – the national treatment purchase fund and co-location, both, in my view fundamentally flawed.

"World class, centres of excellence, best practice and the messiah from Vancouver all sound great but they are no substitute for lack of capacity in existing hospitals which is the biggest single contributor to the present crisis."

O’Keeffe didn’t solely resign because of perceived slights to him. The health issue also struck a deep cord. Having said that, Ahern’s very generous reaction to his resignation (where he plied him with lavish praise) suggests calves are being fatted even as we speak. But to say that there was nothing personal in his resignation is like saying that if there was a dig-out for Bertie now, Dr John Crown and Tom Gilmartin would be the first two men queueing up to make their contributions.

INSIDE POLITICS - A WEEK CAN BE A LONG TIME BUT ALSO A STRANGE TIME

It's been a strange and exciting political week. It's so early in the electoral cycle that we shouldn't expect such drama.

It was almost like a buy one get one free offer. No confidence debates are comparatively rare events - though there was one launched against Bertie Ahern in late September. The debate reached moments where it was electric - especially the powerful catch-in-the-throat 24 minute speech of Mary Harney's.

Her speech was impressive on a number of levels. Its scope; the extent of her apology to the women damaged by the unforgivable mistakes; and her 'I put patients first' defence of her tenure as Health Minister.

Two other traits were widely reported. The first was that Harney delivered the speech without notes and didn't miss a beat. It was, simply, a tour de force. though I would warrant that the bulk of it came from a script that Harney had learned 'de ghlan mheabhar'.

The second was her raw emotion - she seemed close to tears a few times. Another female TD later told me that the tears were of anger rather than of sorrow. Later in the speech Harney didn't pull her punches when doling out criticism to Fine Gael and Labour. I think the past ten days have also proved that FG's Dr James Reilly will be a formidable adversary. He has been able to match Harney in emotion and tears; as well as in taunts that are as hard as iron girders.

The surprise was Ned O'Keeffe's decision to drum himself out of the FF parliamentary party. Ned said it was nothing personal bur of course all politics is personal. Ned had been building up to this for some time, like a balloon being blown it. It was almost inevitable that it would burst. And while Ned's speech (he never got a chance to deliver it) was from-the-heart, his abstention from the vote had deeper and more complex reason than simply having no confidence in Mary Harney - this particular head of steam had been building up slowly since the election when Ned received the first of a number of perceived slights.

And now today, another twist (and maybe a twist of a knife in the back). The Teflon anorak just doesn't seem to work any more when it comes to the sticky stuff in the Planning Tribunal. Paraic O'Connor of NCB's evidence is very damaging. Notice too how the opposition leaders have lost all their reticence compared to their scaredy-cat attitude prior to the election. Senan Maloney's scoop in this morning's Indo (which revealed the National Lottery was a sleeping partner in a bid for a casino in the Phoenix Park) will also have implications for Ahern.

Finally, my favourite two lines of the week came from De Diary of a Nortsoide Taoiseach, the Phoenix magazine's brilliant parody of Ahern.

"Tuesday. I'm beginnin' to tink we made a tactical blunder in winnin' de election. Not dat we had a choice. De oppositon were so shite dat if we had somehow managed to lose, we'd have been de subject of a steward's enquiry."

INSIDE POLITICS - THE BURNING ISSUE

This is my Irish Examiner column from this weekend...


WHEN I was a child growing up in suburban Galway in the late 1970s and early 1980s, disposing of our waste was a relatively simple matter.


The mindset back then was encapsulated by the catchy slogan of one of the private waste disposal companies: “Let O’Brien do the shifting”.

You threw the lot out. Except for milk bottles, which you left out each morning, and soft drink bottles for which you got a tiny deposit back.

But everything else went out to a dump in Carrowbrowne in the north of the city. And by everything I mean everything.




I remember my father loading up an old fridge on a trailer and us making the journey out the Headford Road to dump it at the tiphead.

Even then, like the milk bottles, there was a form of recycling taking place as Travellers made a living by sifting through the rubbish for copper, other metals and reusables.

The mindset changed in Galway during the late 1990s when the city went mad for recycling. Every time I made the trip home, members of my family seemed to have added yet another for-recycling container to the dolly mixture of bins outside the front door. Where Galway led, everyone else has followed since then, except for Carlow and Mayo.

The latest figures, released in August this year, showed that both counties had shamefully low recycling rates of less than 7% each in 2005.

By contrast, Galway city’s rate for 2005 was an impressive 47%.

Dublin city lagged behind at 13%.

Best of all was Longford with 57%.

The good news about the sea- change is that the recycling target of 35% set for 2012 has already been surpassed. And so it is likely that the new recycling target for 2012 of 50% will be achieved.

That means that of the projected 3.4 million tonnes of waste that is projected to be generated in 2012, only half, or 1.7m tonnes, will go onto the next stage of the process.

There is bad news though and it also applies to another shift of culture.

During the 1990s — when it became increasingly apparent that landfills and super-dumps were no longer sustainable — the Fianna Fáil-led government began casting around for alternatives.

They looked to Europe and what they saw was incineration.

The current national waste strategy set out ambitious plans for eight regional thermal treatment plants around the country.

Now there has been another fundamental change of mindset and that has coincided with the Greens arriving in government for the first time.

In opposition, the party was a fierce opponent of incineration, and I think it’s fair to say that John Gormley’s opposition was given an added intensity by the fact that the biggest facility of them all was earmarked for Poolbeg, the visual focal point of his own constituency.

The political headache for the Green Party is that the new political shift has arrived too late — nine years too late by most estimates. No matter how gargantuan his efforts, no matter how persuasive his arguments, no matter how potent his promise, time is not on Gormley’s side.

For a worryingly high number of their core issues, the Greens arrived minutes too late — the train had already left the station.

Within a short time of arriving at the Department of Environment, Gormley flurried into a series of different actions. He commissioned a review of the national waste strategy and a new one may see the light of day by early autumn of next year.

He also parlayed up the Programme on Government’s commitments in relation to waste management. If you look at the document that was brokered between FF and the Greens, you will see all the key phrases. The three Rs (reduction, re-use and recycling) would be cornerstones and for the first time there was a concrete commitment to the introduction of Mechanical Biological Treatment (MBT) facilities.

Gormley took this and ran with it, as was his right as Greens’ leader and as Minister for the Environment.

He made a presentation to Cabinet and afterwards was emboldened to proclaim that incineration was no longer the cornerstone of Irish waste policy.

The assessment wasn’t exactly shared by Fianna Fáil or by Bertie Ahern, who has conceded we may have four or more incinerators.

Then in October, Gormley got experts within his department to estimate the amount of residual waste that would be left for incineration if recycling was at 50% and if MBT was fully operational.

The figures were startling.

Out of total municipal waste of 3.4m tonnes a year in 2012, you could whittle the incineration-only stuff down to a mere 400,000 tonnes.

Suddenly, we no longer need eight incinerators; no more than two.

The problem is that it has come too late in the day.

An Bord Pleanála said it could only rely on the written and extant policy and existing laws. It granted planning permission to Poolbeg. And within days, the Environmental Protection Agency granted it a licence, albeit with 109 conditions.

Despite this latest sea-change, despite MBT coming on stream, despite higher recycling rates, incineration is a reality that the Greens can only fight a fierce rearguard battle against.

Already it’s certain that four will come on stream — in Co Meath, Poolbeg and the twin burners in Ringaskiddy.

And unfortunately for them, the Greens’ continuing campaign against them may be as futile as Don Quixote’s tilting at windmills.

INSIDE POLITICS - BERTIE IN NEED

I know that there are other things going on in the world but the huge pay hikes are symptomatic of a creeping me-féin attitude and greed in Irish society. There were two excellent pieces on Bertie's pay in this morning's Irish Examiner, written by my colleagues on the political team. One, a sketch, was written by Shaun Connolly who is one of the best colour writers in the business. The other was a fantastic analysis of Bertie Ahern's obsession with money, written by Paul O'Brien. Shaun kindly allowed me to reproduce his piece here:

THE cost to patients of the health service jobs freeze: Unknown.


The cost to taxpayers of Bertie Ahern’s pay rise: €38,000. The comedy value of the Taoiseach’s embarrassing attempts to justify pay rise: Priceless.

As Mr Ahern swaggered down the central steps of the Dáil chamber yesterday to bleat about not having a yacht or butler like his world leader mates he was immediately followed by hapless Transport Minister Noel Dempsey, who was in turn followed by his hapless predecessor Minister Martin Cullen.





It was like a real life version of one those ascent of man graphics showing how we evolved from apes into homo sapiens, except that this was in reverse, and more a representation of the descent of manners from a government that no longer seems to care who it outrages.

Mr Cullen used to be a byword for arrogance and calamity, Mr Dempsey then surpassed his efforts over Shannon and L-plategate, and now the Taoiseach has evolved into the supreme example of self pity fused with a total lack of self awareness.

It’s sooo unfair: Not only do his buddies in Paris and Washington have palaces and yachts, but they get “prolonged holidays” too — this from a man who attends the Dáil for 60 days a year.

Jaws were merely on the floor at this point, they went subterranean with the rest of his self-justifying Tourette’s style outburst, as he stated most of the leaders he is compared with “would not pay for a cup of tea from one end of the year to the other because they have catering staff in their homes and can use jets for social occasions”.

“It would not be hard for a member of the media to write a glowing article about how poverty-stricken we are compared to other countries. I suppose I will have to wait for that,” he moaned.

Erm, yes Taoiseach you will. But haven’t we heard the cup of tea analogy somewhere before? Oh yes, it was at the Mahon corruption probe where Mr Ahern stated he hadn’t been offered the beverage by developers, let alone the £50,000 bribe alleged.

It was an unfortunate memory to drag up, especially as he then went on to attack leaders like the French President for not being “up front” over their finances.

You could almost hear every pot and kettle in a five-mile radius of Leinster House exploding into simultaneous blackness at the remark from a man accused of being, shall we say, evasive, regarding money matters to Mahon.

But we do really need to do something about our underprivileged €310,000-a-year Premier.

Surely it’s time we showed our national gratitude to the sacrifices he has made for us by having a telethon for him — Bertie’s In Need. It will be easy to set up — a quick phone call would panic RTÉ into clearing the schedules.

We would then be spurred on to bung Bertie a few more quid by heartfelt tributes to our Taoiseach in Trouble along the lines of: “I know the economy’s nose-dived since polling day and am resigned to losing a couple of the young ‘uns to the cold and hunger this winter — after all me and the wife can always have more children when the financial situation improves — but I just cannot bear the idea of my Taoiseach going without a butler for one day longer. That is why I have decided to sell my kidneys on the Chinese organ market to raise some cash for Bertie’s In Need — sure, it’s safer than letting the HSE get their hands on them.”

Mr Ahern topped an unforgettable Dáil performance by saying he would “gladly forego” the pay rise, but that would only make page 99 of the newspapers, so what would the point be?

Priceless."

INSIDE POLITICS - THAT OPINION POLL

The latest opinion poll tells us that Fianna Fail is on the way out and if we are patient enough to wait out the other 1,500 days between now and the next General Election, we can collectively wave them goodbye.

In one sense, the findings of the TNS mrbi opionion poll are meaningless in the greater scheme of things. We're all still descending to base camp after the tough high altitude exertions of the elecyion – it will be next year before we will see the ambition expeditions towards the next electoral Everest begin.
But having said that, the result is very illustrative of the internal dynamics within Fianna Fail and the party's complacency and mediocrity since the Summer.

Since forging its very cute and very clever deal with the Greens, the PDs and the four independent TDs, Fianna Fail's leadership has spent the last couple of months doing what it's become good at (making sure that it feathers its own
nest) and doing what it's become bad at (looking after the rest of us).

It has to be said that the timing of this poll could not have been worse for Fianna Fail. The sampling was taken in the immediate wake of the cringe- inducing reverse over provisional driving licences and a couple of days after they accepted Biblical pay hikes for themselves and the top brass of the civil service, universities, local authorities, army, gardai and the judiciary.

It also came a week after another farce, the Department of Transport report about who knew what about Shannon losing its Heathrow slots and why Noel Dempsey was the last to find out. And On top of all that, Bertie Ahern's remarkable filmic tale at the Mahon Tribunal encompassing amnesia and his experience with international money markets was still fresh
enough in some people's minds to be reflected in this poll.

There's no doubt about it, it's a stinker of a poll for Fianna Fail and for Ahern himself.

When it comes to pinpoint accuracy, opinion polls have the same record as the Limerick hurling team in the All Ireland final. The three per cent margin of error, plus or minus, is too often ignored by the media. So a party showing 12 per cent could be on 9, and equally could be on 15. So
they're not good at picking up small shifts in support for smaller parties.

The corollary of this is that polls are good at reflecting large shifts of support (ie outside the margin of error) for the larger parties. And so we can take it that nobody in Fianna Fail can quibble with its monumental nine per cent drop in support.

Nor can Bertie Ahern. His stock has fallen dramatically. What is unclear is whether this is a one-off (an immediate reaction to a dismal week for FF) or whether the Teflon coating on his Anorak is finally beginning to wear thin. My own
inclination is that that massive pedestal on which we put this remarkable political animal is finally beginning to totter and topple.

A couple of people said to me: what difference does it make? Sure, won't he be hanging up the Anorak at the next election? It makes a big difference. Ahern wants to stay on until he decides to go. And he has given no indication so far it's going to be earlier than 2011, even though most others within FF are thinking of 2009 (and before the European and local
elections).

So, if the figures for FF continue to slump at its core support figure of the low thirties and if Ahern's own popularity fails to recover, you will begin to hear sounds from the FF committee rooms not heard for many a year – the nervous shuffling
of feet and the sharpening of long knives.

A lot of FFers believe that the Irish Times is out to get them. Their paranoia won't be alleviated by the inclusion of Tánaiste Brian Cowen among the leaders for the first time.
One of their backroom people told me Thursday night that he believed Cowen was included deliberately to make Ahern look bad. I think the reason for his inclusion was simpler – he is, after all, the anointed one.

But his popular showing of 49% compared to 43% for his leader will have a ripple effect within FF – and may see some of Cowen's supporters (who are more impatient for
the big prize than he is) begin to make subtle moves nudging him in that direction.

I'd love to think that the poll was a reaction to the disgraceful pay rises the top brass got last week. It wasn't solely that. People expect politicians to do that – that storm was only a one day blow. I really believe the pay rises to politicians, higher civil servants, and other high-ranking state employees was an affront to democracy. Ahern said there was no review in seven years. In fact the body awarded an interim increase of 7.5% two years ago. And Ministers and
TDs like Ahern, Cowen and company have benefited from every single national award and benchmarking award over the past seven years. And the body is independent but for most of its world-of- business membership, big six figure
salaries are par for the course.

Have politicians made one personal sacrifice over the past decade? No. The new class that has grown up to run our
State and its institutions has become self-perpetuating - looking after its own interests first and foremost.

INSIDE POLITICS - NO BRAINER OF THE WEEK

Some weeks you find yourself scratching around for fodder for the weekend column. Mostly it goes something like this: what the hell am I going to write about this week? Should I gratuitously attack The Anorak for no good reason again (that's a joke by the way)or do another organ-grind of my favourite gripe that there are too many of them; that they're all over-paid; and that as our State has evolved, their main function has increasingly become to look after their own interests. There's an actual committee (chairman gets paid an extra 20 grand) called 'Members' Interests'. That for me says it all!

But not this week, like manna from Heaven, like the fatted calf for the prodigal son, like the loaves and the fish, the Irish Times opinion poll landed on our laps this morning.

Sure, there are only 1,500 shopping days or so until the Next Election. But this was telling in its own way.

The figures have been parsed elsewhere this morning (see the Irish Times main article here) Polls are crude instruments of measure at the best of times. What they are very good at doing though is recording big falls and big rises of support for the main parties.
So the rises for Fine Gael (+4) and Labour (+5) are significant as is the whopping nine point drop for FF.

The reasons for this: the debacle over provisional driving licences; the cynical pay rises they all accepted last week; and a first public verdict on Bertie Ahern's extraordinary account of his dabblings in international monetary exchanges.

The most interesting thing is that Ahern's own stock has fallen sharply. And what complicates this is that the Times decided to include the anointed one, Brian Cowen, in among the leaders for the first time. I spoke to a FF insider for whom I have a lot of respect last night who said that he was suspicious of the Times's motives in including Cowen and that it was deliberately throwing a cat among the pigeons.

But that's not really fair. Cowen is widely accepted as the heir to the throne and it's always good to get the public verdict on his performance.

The Greens? Holding up. Gormley will will be happy with his rating. 5% is what they got in the election. Their support rose up to near 10% on a couple of occasions but ultimately that was meaningless.

INSIDE POLITICS - SPLITS, PAY AND FEUDS

1. SPLITS
Saddo that I am, I was looking through the Programme for Government this morning (available at the Department of the Taoiseach here)to ascertain the details of the agreed policy on waste between the two parties.

This followed the so-called '2-4-6-8 what do we incinerate' split between the Government parties. Now John Gormley still says there is no conflict between himself and Bertie Ahern on incineration. But any reading of the Bert's contribution to the Dáil yesterday (and I know - sometimes it's hard to know what he's saying) would have to conclude that he is saying that four will be needed, not two.

The problem for Gormley is this. Planning applications for four incinerators are in the process and he can't turn back the clock on those. What he is doing is trying to fight a rearguard action that pushes all the alternatives hard and reduces the incentives for incineration to such an extent that promoters will walk away from it.

Instead, Gormley is stressing a higher recycling rate (50%) and the introduction of MBT facilities (Mechanical Biological Treatment). Now there is a commitment in the Programme for Government on MBT but critically there is no target date. The review of waste policy by international consultants will not start until the beginning of next year and take a year. Realistically, its going to take until way after 2012 before the all of these facilities are up and running.

A lot of the Greens input into the programme for government have either no dates or very long run-in times. They have already taken so many hits on compromise that they will need to show a whole lot of tangibles... and soon. (For my read on it from RTE's DriveTime yesterday click here

2. PAY
See my rant from yesterday on this. The details of pay awards for Taoiseach, Ministers and higher civil servants is being announced today. If they are sizable in any way, expect a whole lot of flak because it flies in the face of everything that Brian Cowen has been saying over the past couple of weeks.

That wonderful old phrase comes to mind: feathering their own nests.

*

3. FEUDS
In Ireland's multi-seat constituencies, the most heated rivalries of all are between so-called constituency colleagues. Witness the spats between the three FF TDs in Cork North West and the Fergus O'Dowd versus Mairead McGuinness battle in Louth. But none match the intensity or enmity between the two Fianna Fail TDs in Cork East. Below is my story about it from this mornings Irish Examiner:

The battle will go down in history as The Battle of the Tearoom, the latest episode in the longstanding, and poisonously bitter, feud between two prominent Fianna Fail TDs.
Junior minister Michael Ahern and former junior minister Ned O’Keeffe are ostensibly constituency colleagues in Cork East.
But the enmity between the two men is well known and catalogued. There have been a number of altercations, including one incident during the 2007 election campaign.
Constituency rivalries are one thing but as one other FF TD said yesterday, Ahern and O’Keeffe are involve din internecine warfare.
“These guys are the most bitter of rivals. There’s massive tension between the two characters. There’s nothing quite like it in Irish politics.”
The latest incident occurred yesterday morning, ironically around the same time as the Government was releasing its latest crime figures. The ‘action’, such as it was, happened near the door of the self-service restaurant when both men happened to arrive at the same time to get a cup of tea.
What is clear is that Michael Ahern addressed Ned O’Keeffe. The two men have not been on speaking terms for a long time and Mr O’Keeffe took exception to what Mr Ahern said. It led to an intense verbal altercation between the two men, a schemozzle of insults that lasted no more than 30 seconds, according to Pat The Cope Gallagher who was also present.
What exactly occurred after that is open to dispute. Ned O’Keeffe claimed that Michael Ahern pushed him. The Irish Examiner understands that that claim was strenuously denied by Ahern. Gallagher said that there was no physical dimension to it, other than one of the TDs (Mr Ahern) placing his hand on the shoulder of the other (Mr O’Keeffe).
The upshot was that Mr O’Keeffe made a complaint to the Superintendent of the Oireachtas, Commandant Paul Conway and also complained to Government Chief Whip Tom Kitt.
Mr Kitt later said that he had spoken to a number of people who were present when the incident took place, including the two protagonists.
“I am formally of the view, and my assessment, is that all that was involved was an exchange of words, he said.
Because he believed there was no physical aspect, he said he was not going to take the matter any further.
“I will advise both of them to avoid the possibility of such a situation arising again.”

INSIDE POLITICS - BRIAN COWEN SHOCKER

With all the furore over Aer Lingus and Committees and Bertie Ahern's verbal meanderings at Mahon, most people will have missed a highly significant, nay historic, moment in Irish politics.

It happened during a speech that Brian Cowen gave to the Dublin Economics Workshop Conference in Kenmare. It came as a huge shock, especially given Cowen's previous form.

For whenever Cowen goes into a new ministry he goes 100% native. Thus when he was in Foreign Affairs he became expert at uttering such roll-of-the-tongue sentences as:

As currently drafted, it sets out a holistic approach to security, going beyond purely military aspects. It reflects a shared view held by the Member States that global security can only be achieved through collective action by the international community as a whole. That is why support for effective multilateralism and the role of the United Nations is at the very heart of the strategy.

Since moving to Finance, he has shifted the prose and his speeches now sound like something from an economics lecturer who's bored with his job. To quote:

In relation to overall fiscal policy, more modest economic growth will result in a 'normalisation' in the growth of resources available to Government and it is essential that expectations regarding expenditure adapt accordingly...

So what's the shock then? Brace yourselves! Are you sitting comfortably?

Well, he told a joke.

A what?

A joke. A real joke. One that was actually funny. That was even capable of making you laugh.

You see, for all his ability and bruiser qualities, Cowen also has a knack of going so native in his Department that he can bore you to death with long-winded civil servanteese and meaningless twaddle.

Obviously, he lost the run of himself for once last weekend. And for the record here's the joke:

The former Us President Ronald Reagan was well known for telling funny stories and... I found myself reminded of one os his stories.

The story begins with Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev on the reviewing stand at Lenin's tomb, surrounded by underlings, watching the May Day parade. The Soviet Union's full military might is there on display.

First come the elite troops, impressive soldiers, marching in absolute lockstep. right behind them are lines of state of the art artillery and tanks. Then come the nuclear missiles - it's an awesome show of strength.

But after the missiles come a small straggle of civilians, unkempt, shabbily dressed, utterly out of place. An aide rushes up to Brezhnev and begs forgiveness.

'Comrade Secretary, my apologies. I do not know who these people are or how they've come into our parade.'

'Don't be concerned, Comrade,' replies Brezhnev. 'I am responsible for them. they are our economists, and you have no idea how dangerous they can be!'

Boom Boom

INSIDE POLITICS - TIME IS RUNNING OUT FOR THIS GOVERNMENT

THERE are four years, eight months and six days left until the next general election.


That means only one thing — the Government has left it too late to save their skins. They are toast already.

Ah yes, you say. A resurgent Fine Gael will become even more resurgent and will wipe the floor with them. Ermmm, no.

By the way they are shaping up so far, Fine Gael look like they will be merely spectators to the Government’s demise. I was speaking to a senior Fine Gael backroom person during the week and asked him about the state of play of its strategic planning for the next five years.




The answer I got was that there isn’t a strategy, not yet. The reasons?

It’s only a couple of months since a tough election. The new front bench needs to bed itself in. Give it a bit of time.

It was — and I didn’t quibble — a reasonable explanation. But it was also wrong.

Just as a week can be a long time in politics, a five-year term can be a short time in politics. And we have seen a couple of examples in the past week of Fine Gael spokespeopleopposing just for the sake of opposing and offering no cohesive or original proposals of its own (and before you correct me, the otherwise smart Charlie Flanagan’s suggestion to call in the army was not original).

And so in the new Dáil term, we have seen FG take up where it left off before the election. We don’t know if it’s still relying on the three pillars on which it fought the election campaign — health, crime and value for money — but it seems to be. And that’s a mistake.

There’s a school of thought within FG that if it ain’t broke don’t fix it — continue with the strategy that won it 20 seats and sure, won’t it yield even more?

A couple of weeks ago, FG’s young blade Leo Varadkar wrote in a posh newspaper arguing that far from trumpeting its success, FG should be flagellating itself for failing to win the election.

The campaign (ie the superficial razzmatazz) was professional, but wasn’t enough. “We did not win the policy debates. We showed an unwillingness to take clear positions. We did not demonstrate competence to run the economy.”

As an example, he said, the party, by concentrating on the narrow issue of stamp duty (pandering to a skewed and perverse Sunday Independent campaign), abandoned imaginative plans for a 30% income tax for middle earners. To that end, they could learn from the flair that Tory shadow chancellor George Osborne has shown in terms of policy and presentation.

Mr Varadkar’s argument that Fine Gael “will have to look like modern Ireland” sounds like it comes straight out of David Cameron’s rulebook.

FG needs to do all of those things. But already, it’s beginning to look like it might not need to bother. The PDs already look like goners. There’s no dynamic for change within FF, which means that Brian Cowen and others will bide their time even if Bertie Ahern stays on until 2011.

If that happens, whoever succeeds him will be leading Fianna Fáil into opposition.

And the Green Party? The incinerator debate this week underlined the innate weakness of its position in Government. The media and opposition honed in not on John Gormley’s argument that Ireland will need two rather than eight incinerators, but on his tacit acceptance that incinerators will be needed in the first place. That’s a big concession.

Its biggest enemy will be time. In the Programme for Government, the Greens got a commitment to an international review of national waste policy. And it’s been agreed. That’s fine. But it won’t be completed until 2009. And by the time they’ve gone through the hoops of approval, procurement and delivery, it will be — well, way beyond 2012.

And with an economy beginning to feel the squeeze, its own big flagship issues — the annual 3% reduction in carbon emissions; the big push towards renewable and alternative forms of energy — will encounter resistance from FF ministers.

The Greens know that FF has red lines and is not prepared to cross them. So many of what the Greens want is predicated on reviews, reports, promises and vague aspirations (stuff that can be kicked into the blue yonder). Green ministers and their advisers are still talking naively about how nice FF ministers have been to them. But in technical terms that’s called a honeymoon period.

If they don’t start picking a couple of fights with the Big Beasts of FF soon, they’ll find themselves with nothing tangible to show. There are four years, eight months and five days left. But if they don’t start moving, it will be too late.

INSIDE POLITICS - OPPOSITION STRATEGY

At the end of every term, I do a simple exercise, totting up the topics that have been chosen by opposition leaders for the twice-weekly set piece Leaders' Questions.

Over the last couple of years, the predictable issues have dominated - health, crime, and the Government's secret weapon of dealing with Limerick's gang culture: unleashing Willie O'Dea in the city's drinking establishment on weekend nights.

The dynamic has changed this time. There are now only two leaders entitled to speak during Leaders Questions and one of them, Eamon Gilmore, is new. With the smaller parties and indepedendents having been hoovered up by Government or gobbled up by the electorate, there is no longer a technical group. There is no Joe Higgins. The Greens have forsaken tofu abstinence for meat indulgence. And Sinn Fein - this was meant to be another breakthrough election; it instead became a breakdown election. Down from five to four. No Mary Lou. Pearse Doherty in the Senate rather than in the Dáil.

So where once there were five, now there are two. It's very early days and I don't think that any of the opposition parties have got their heads around what strategies they will adopt to down the Government over the next five years.

With Labour's Gilmore, there has been a difference of style and nuance rather than substance so far - he is less confrontational; appealing more to reason and to common sense than Rabbitte was. For Enda Kenny and Fine Gael, it's been more of the same, leaving off where they left off before the election.

Fine Gael's big strategy last time was that the election would be won or lost on three big issues - health, crime and value for money. The party was wrong on all three issues. The election was won and lost on the economy.

So can we expect more PPARS, more attacks on health, more 'we are tougher than Terminator' on getting the criminal gang scum off the streets.

Well on the crime front, yes. Listening to Enda Kenny and Charlie Flanagan yesterday, it was deja vu all over again. Kenny repeated a phrase three times: "Who's in charge Taoiseach, the Government or the gangs?"

That had tabloid written all over it. But when Charlie Flanagan started talking about bringing the army onto the street as back-up, that really took the pip. Brian Lenihan should have dismissed it out of hand. Instead, foolishly, the Justice Minister actually said he would refer it to the Garda Commissioner. I mean, if you follow that line of argument, the next thing is that we will impose martial law on the street and people will begin to consider the sense of Eoghan Harris's baublings about armed gardai shooting it out with criminals and the return of capital punishment.

INSIDE POLITICS - THE MEAN OF GREEN

One of the cardinal rules of journalism relates to statistics. Don’t drizzle them all over your articles, wizened news editors will tell you. Use no more than a pinch and
even then sparingly.

But then they are the selfsame news editors who will tell you that there’s a story lurking out there at every corner. Sadly there is not. Not that they would know. Because they don’t’ have to go out and brave the elements like the poor gom of a junior reporter.

But let’s stick with the rule. No statistics unless it’s an emergency. Except in sports reporting where anything goes. The more statistics the merrier. And it must be pointed out that some of my friends who argue that they are bored to tears with all the detail of the Anorak-in-Chief’s 18 hours at the Mahon Tribunal are the same friends who bore me to tears with hole-by-hole and stroke-by-stroke accounts of their last epic round of golf.

But you’ve got the message by this stage. Stats are for Prats. I’m very sorry to have to disappoint you but they are central to the following discussion. The figure in question is 3%. Keep it in mind. It gets worse. The debate will also include a number of phrases that will make readers desert this column quicker than the sight of a sergeant’s uniform will clear a country pub long after closing time. They are (brace yourselves): Global warming; climate change; and (ouch) carbon emissions.

It may feel complicated. But it’s important. Because that one statistic (3%) is going to determine the fate of this government on the political score (Bertie Ahern’s continuing encounters with the Mahon Tribunal will create its own dynamic on the personality front). Or to be more specific, the Green part of the Government. The 3% in question is the annual reduction in greenhouse gas emissions the Government has set as a target ovr the next five years. Cumulatively that’s a 15% reduction between now and 2012. No matter which way you look at it, it’s a huge ask.

That little 3% statistic is going to become one of the litmus tests for this new government – similarly to the O.7% of GDP going to overseas aid; the 14,000 cops; or the 3,000 extra hospital beds. If it’s not achieved it won’t be the end of the line for Fianna Fail but it could be for the Greens.

The argument about global warming is undeniable at this stage. Yesterday’s New York Times carried an article that revealed that the ice floating on the surface of the Arctic fell to 1.6 million square miles on Sept. 16, a massive drop from the previous low of 2.05 million square miles, reached in 2005. Sure it will increase again in the winter but not by so much – the polar ice cap is definitely receding.

The challenge facing this Government in achieving this target is enormous. Even if it does, it will mean that other European countries with much more tardy records on the environment may steal a competitive edge on us in the short term because they are unwilling to endure the necessary pain.

And there are a couple of other tangled questions. The 3% reduction, it’s a reduction of what? The figures for this year will not be be available until 2009. The latest year for which figures are available is 2005, when just under 70 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents were emitted.

Let’s give a little meaning to that figure. When we signed up to the Kyoto Agreement, Ireland pledged that by 2012 its carbon emissions would be 13% higher its emissions in 1990. For a couple of years at the start of the century it looked like we were bringing them under control and we actually reduced carbon emissions. But the figures for 2005 made for grim reading – it represented a substantial rise of 2% from 2004 and meant that our emissions were running at over 25% more than our 1990 emissions (or 12% above the Kyoto target).

I know: we’re overladen with stats here. But the picture could be worse last year and worse again this year. The reason: there has been a huge increase of emissions from road transport because of higher car ownership and more freight being carried on the road. There is nothing to suggest (especially with the Government’s ambitious road-building programme) that there has been any reduction in that.

It’s true that agriculture – methane produced by cattle and sheep – remains the single biggest contributor at 27% (Michael O’Leary and others have made the argument that the Government will need to target farting cows before they target the transport and aviation sector). That is a fair point. But our dependency on cars, our addiction to cheap flights, all our road-building (with all those emissions from the cement factories); and our lack of insulation in our homes (even modern ones) will come at a cost.

Those cosy middle class solutions - Switching off lights, recycling, stand-by buttons, changing light bulbs – are not enough.

It could mean higher taxes on cars; fuel levies, huge costs to improve insulation in homes; big capital costs for converting to solar or to other alternative energy technologies in homes; congestion charges for our bigger cities; carbon taxes; and punitive levies for those who collect a lot of air miles.

Doesn’t sound that impressive on first hearing of it, that teensy weensy 3% target. But it’s going to inflict a lot of pain.

INSIDE POLITICS - COWEN NEEDS TO CALL BERTIE'S BOAT IN... RIGHT ABOUT NOW

Late on Wednesday night right as the confidence debate on Bertie Ahern drew to a close we learned a lot about the leader of Fianna Fail.

He rose to his feet and spoke for a little over five minutes. But that's all we needed, nothing more. For in the course of a magnificent, spontaneous, and from-the-heart contribution we witnessed an immense force, an outburst of deeply impressive moral authority that is rare in an age like this.

The leader of Fianna Fail we are talking about is of course the next one, the anointed one, and not the current one.

Brian Cowen was magnificent on Wednesday and once again - as he has done all year - he recovered the situation when Bertie Ahern found himself in crisis. With Cowen, to quote Beethoven, what comes from the heart goes to the heart.

The recipe for Ahern's own speech earlier was a little less ambitious. It contained a couple of tablespoons of lemon zest. For its clear bitterness lingered in his mouth for that hours that he sat silently fuming as as the opposition branded him as a liar.

Cowen sat beside Ahern for the duration of the broadside against him, giving an air of a man who was weary of listening to all the platitude and cliché. For FFers, that was a big thing, a demonstration of Cowen's loyalty to the organisation, and, by extension, to its leader.

But when his turn came, he quickly departed from the script to give a sermon on political values and on morality. Cowen quickly branded the opposition as hypocrites and opportunists. In doing so, he made the credible argument that they had only discovered high standards and morality after the election. Before polling day, he argued, they back-pedalled from BertieGate more quickly than a professional cyclist on dope, because they knew that by taking him on on this issue was like walking straigt into a haymaker in the first round.

The general point of Cowen's was the default position of all the Government parties that day. To wit: "The Tribunal will be the arbiter. If we are to avoid arbitrary justice let the Tribunal proceed with its deliberations," he said.

Green leader John Gormley also used this argument. But you have to understand that he had no choice. When the Greens agreed to Government, they understood that it entailed a Mephistophelean deal. They knew, they just knew, that their condemnation of Fianna Fail's dubious moral compass in the run-up to the election would be rendered hollow. Gormley may have quibbled with the nuances of the Fianna Fail countermotion to Enda Kenny's motion of no confidence. But that was sophistry. The Green Party - for not the first time and not the last time - had to swallow hard and back the Government, even though they knew it meant a demeaning compromise.

The most potent moment of Cowen's speech came when he lectured his adversaries the following thought: "I know right from wrong".

It was utterly believable, utterly compelling. And it made his case as a natural leader for his party. What we witnessed was a person who was the personification of the heart and soul of his party and what it represents and stands for. The problem, from a Fianna Fail perspective, is that the jury is out on whether or not his boss stands for that, and if he can distinguish between those relative values of right and wrong.

Later on Wednesday night, I spoke to a couple of TDs who would consider themselves Cowen's most ardent supporters. And they spoke about his speech that night in much the same way as Kerry supporters spoke about Colm Cooper's magic in the All Ireland final. The other pretenders - Dermot Ahern, Mary Hanafin and Brian Lenihan (Micheal Martin was playing an away fixture in the US this week) - all made perfunctory and pedestrian speeches during the debate. But Cowen in an unscripted and spontaneous way rose to the occasion, found the perfect pitch and tone, as he had done during Fianna Fail's darkest moments of the election campaign.

There's been a lot of old guff about the disconnect between us anoraks and Joe Public on this issue. I'm sorry but it's my belief that Bertie Ahern, the most successful Irish politician since the utterly unique Eamon de Valera, is now damaged goods, with serious questions surrounding his credibility.

A very senior Green politician to whom I spoke on Wednesday night offered the opinion that Ahern will step down during the Christmas recess. I don't believe it will happen that early, just as I don't belive that Ahern will stay on until he is 60.

Cowen loyalists at a senior level want Ahern to step down prior to the European elections in less than two years time. Like Gordon Brown, they believe the Tánaiste will need time to impose his imprint upon FF before the next General Election in 2012. Unlike Gordon Brown though, Cowen's loyalists do not necessarily speak on his behalf. For them, there is an element of proxy wish fulfilment. Sometimes you feel he is prepared to play the bridesmaid role forever!

Whatever, when he imposed himself on the debate this week, we witnessed a force, a force that's potentially strong enough to win a fourth General Election for Fianna Fail. It's time for him to get off the fence, to identify a date for a painless and seamless succession.

This is my column from Saturday's Irish Examiner

Nobody actually openly accused Bertie Ahern of lying yesterday. But if you were to look up a thesaurus, you’d find that just about every possible alternative word for ‘lie’ was used by Enda Kenny and Eamon Gilmore when describing the Taoiseach’s evidence to the Mahon Tribunal.

There is a basic rule in the Dáil. The ‘L’ word may never be uttered. In the past, we have seen some creative words and phrases being employed: dissembling; misleading the Dail; untruth; ‘being economical with the truth’.

But yesterday was of a different order. The L word was never uttered. But during the motion of confidence – and let’s make no mistake about – it was clearly meant. There was to be no softening of the blows. To all intents and purposes – but without every actually saying so – Kenny and Gilmore accused the Taoiseach of lying and lying and lying again.

During a heated, angry and self-evidently bitter debate on the motion of confidence in the Taoiseach – the first motion brought since one against Albert Reynolds in November 1994 – Ahern found himself being accused of giving incredible accounts, of fabricating, of not being credible, of creating smoke screens, of gelling bizarre and shifting tales. And all of this was said under oath, during his 18 hours of evidence to the Tribunal.

The charges that Kenny and Gilmore laid were far more serious, far graver than most of us had anticipated. Not alone did they accuse him of the L word. They claimed that most of the events that he has based his entire defence on never took place. They contended that events recalled by Ahern in interviews and under oath to the Tribunal – the famous Manchester dinner, the dig-out from friends, the Michael Wall payment, the purchase of £30,000 sterling – never took place.

This was the core of Kenny’s argument in one of the best speeches he has made since he becoming leder: “Most of the events we were discussing never happened. In my view, in my opinion, they’re fictitious. Complicated stories, part of a web of complicated stories designed to mask hard facts. Constructed stories to fit known facts.”
Phew! That was strong stuff and potentially as corrosive as sulphuric acid. And though he didn’t say it either, what Kenny also suggested that Ahern was on the take when he lodged amounts between 1993 and 1995 that equated to €300,000 in today’s terms.

“We have heard no credible explanation from the Taoiseach for these lodgements. In the absence of such an explanation the deep suspicion must remain that these lodgements were a result of personal contributions made to the Taoiseach.”
And in a speech designed to – and which probably did – get under Ahern’s craw, Kenny quoted lines from Des O’Malley (“I stand by the Republic”) and Jack Lynch (“we cannot stand idly by”) to make unfavourable comparisons to Ahern. He also quoted from Charlie Haughey to make even more unfavourable comparisons.

Gilmore, making his maiden speech as the new Labour leader, went over the same ground. He recalled the Taoiseach recalling next to nothing about the dinner in Manchester and then pointed out that Ahern claimed on the Late Late Show in 1998 that one of his best attributes was a good memory.”

His recurring theme – in a speech that was serious and under-stated - was that he did not believe Ahern, that the Taoiseach was making up cock and bull stories.

“I don’t believe him. Most of his own deputies don’t believe him and the public clearly doesn’t’ believe him either,” was a phrase that was uttered more than once.
And this is Taoiseach’s big quandary. There’s a serious credibility problem there that can’t be explained by unusual circumstances or his marriage break-down or by what he described as his ‘unorthodox affairs’ during his marital separation in the 1990s.

Yesterday he again urged people to read the 18 hours of transcript. But anyone who reads it will be no clearer about all those information and credibility gaps. If anything they will be bewildered and more confused.

He – and all his Ministers who spoke – also argued that there was not a scintilla of proof to back up the central allegation made by Tom Gilmartin that he took payments from Owen O’Callaghan.

Joe Higgins was spot-on last week when describing the use of this particular blatant diversionary tactic. Higgins gloriously employed a famous Bertie-ism to describe Bertie dragging Owen O'Callaghan and Tom Gilmartin in:

“It’s throwing red herrings at white elephants.”

But it’s not about Tom Gilmartin any more. It’s about all these odd transactions, all these unremembered and half-remembered sterling and Irish sums passing through accounts controlled by him. And why his explanation of them is of the ‘the dog has eaten my homework’ type.

He was effective in pointing out the belated courage of both Fine Gael and Labour in going for his political jugular. “One day they blow hot and the next day they blow cold. Last May to them due process was an excuse not to comment but today, political accountability is the pretext for their questioning.”

He repeated his defence against allegations made in the Tribunal, rebutting allegations that he had delayed or not cooperated or dissembled. But it’s all a bit conditional. He said he waived confidentiality on bank documents and consented to the Tribunal obtaining discovery against AIB. But he forgot to mention yesterday that he only did so when forced to by the opposition.

And as for changing his evidence he asserted: “The fundamental of my evidence have remained the same. I have added some detail and elaborated in some areas for reasons which I shall explain…. It is a matter of reality that one’s recollection can be helped as new information comes to light.”

And in a day where little love was lost, where both sides strongly signalled that the 30th Dail will be a tenser, colder House, he accused his political foes of “stretching the available evidence with malign invention.”

The thrust of the Government defence, put most passionately by Tánaiste Brian Cowen in the closing speech (and boy does he sound like leader-designate) the opposition were hypocrites in that they had only discovered high standards and morality after the election, where before polling day they back-pedalled from BertieGate more quickly than a professional cyclist on dope.

“I know right from wrong. And the Tribunal will be the arbitrer. If we are to avoid arbitrary justice let the Tribunal proceed with its deliberations.”
Ahern sat through it all, uncomfortably. It’s clear he finds it all, as he said in his speech, unseemly and intrusive. For him once no evidence is adduced of payments from Owen O’Callaghan, the rest is nobody’s business. The payments were, as he put it, being “assisted by friends”. In his moral compass, he did nothing wrong. He made a big deal of paying back €100,000 but he only did that when he had to (in 2006), when the outing of the payments last year forced him to do that.

And if he was uncomfortable, the Greens seemed to be squirming in their seats. Trevor Sargent, Eamon Ryan, Ciaran Cuffe and Mareey White didn’t clap at the end of Ahern’s speech as the loyal FFers did, but we were later told that nothing turned on that. The opposition reminded the party of how quickly it had rolled down from the high moral ground into the swamp. Trevor Sargents excoriations of FF in the run-up to the election campaign were recalled. And when John Gormley finally made an appearance in the chamber shortly after 8pm, he said little more than he would wait until the Tribunal reported. He then resorted to the magician’s trick of misdirection by reciting Green policy objectives in Government. There are times to talk about climate change but last nights was not one of them.

The L word was never used. They didn’t have to. This was the most serious attack Ahern faced in 30 years of politics. Strategically, the Government banked completely on the Tribunal report. When it does report (will it be next year or 2009?) if it criticises him to any serious extent, he will be a goner. One senior Green Party person thought privately that it might be as soon as the Christmas break.

We have all gone through the disconnect between the media and Joe Schmo out there. But no matter how you look at this one, Bertie Ahern has been damaged.

INSIDE POLITICS - FF THINK-IN AT DRUID'S GLEN

Question: What’s got a trunk, floppy ears, massive legs and grey crinkly skin?

Answer: A Fianna Fail press conference.

We had 50 minutes of it yesterday at the Fianna Fail parliamentary party meeting at Druid’s Glen including a 15 minute marathon answer from Tánaiste Brian Cowen on the economy, construction, the fundamentals, soft landings, liquidity, Northern Rock, Kerry’s victory in the All Ireland, and the spillover the sub-prime market in the US has globally.

And all the time stampeding from the corner was the elephant but the ignoring of said vast grey mammal by the top table at Fianna Fail was admirable.
When the inevitable question arose about the Mahon Tribunal, Taoiseach Bertie Ahern went into schtum mode, as he had done when being harassed by reporters during the election campaign. The question, when it arrived, was adroitly posed by TV3’s Ursula Halligan, who asked him how people had reacted to his appearance last week.

He wasn’t going to go there, he said. When she persisted, he just clammed up, pursing his lips into a rictus smile. There was a brief embarrassed silence, nothing like the extraordinary eight seconds of silence that occurred during the election campaign. But the message was clear; the subject is off limits.

The Taoiseach’s uncomfortable journey through his own marathon examination at Mahon has been the undertow of the two day annual think-in of the parliamentary party. To be sure, it was never going to be any other way, given the fact that the think-in is now sandwiched between his two appearances. But it was clear that everybody in the party was following the Boss’s lead – by saying nothing. The only thing of significance that Ahern said was that Willie O’Dea was a “great minister”. That was in response to the remarkable free run O’Dea got in the Sunday Independent to take a swipe at its Tribunal.

Ahern’s problems with his personal finances have overshadowed everything in Fianna Fail since the story first broke exactly a year ago. It panicked Ahern into calling the election early, gouged into his party’s election campaign for an agonising two weeks and is still dominating the party’s agenda in the autumn, just as the Dail returns to business proper. And if he thinks the reporters’ questions are offside, wait till the opposition parties begin to take a cut off him next week in the Dáil.

This is the extent to which it dominated. The other Fianna Fail-related story of the story was the controversial axing by Aer Lingus of its service from Shannon to Heathrow. This think-in was the first opportunity that backbench TDs from the mid-west had an opportunity to vent their frustration publicly over the issue and the Government’s cack-handed handling of it.

Yesterday, nobody brought it up at the plenary session. Nobody that is except the unexpected figure of Senator Mary White (not really associated until now with the save the stopover campaign) who took a huge cut at the leadership for abdicating its responsibility and also reportedly dressed down the Taoiseach’s special adviser Gerry Hickey for shaking his head in disagreement. We have written before about FF rebellions but it was clear that there was no appetite for mutiny yesterday. In previous years, White may have got a round of applause. But yesterday, there was silence.

In recent years, party strategists have realised that the think-in is a good way of capturing the news agenda in the slowish weeks before the Dáil returns. And so every year, there is at least one new initiative and one core message, each drip-fed in a coordinated way to the media. They took on an extra importance for the party this year, in that they would help distract the public’s attention – if only temporarily – from Mahon.

This year’s initiative was FF’s proposal to attempt to do in the North what Sinn Fein is doing in the South. It all sounds very grand except we have heard it all before, at Ard Fheiseanna over the past four or five years. And it’s all very vague. It might or might not involve a tie-up with the SDLP. It might or might not involve Fianna Fail establishing an electoral presence in the North. That only thing that’s solid is that yoke that is beloved of all political parties, a high-powered committee, has been formed to look into it. This one will be chaired by Dermot Ahern.

One other major announcement – the probability that we will have two referenda (one on Europe; the other on children) within the next 12 months. Will the age of consent be broached? Again Ahern was very circumspect, saying that it would be very hard for all parties to reach consensus on this.

The core message was simple – the economy stupid. On a day when Irish customers of Northern Rock began queuing for their money at its only Irish branch on Harcourt Street, it was important for the Taoiseach and the Tánaiste to come out with a positive line.
There was no need to panic, was the key message.

Or be to verbatim about it, this is what Ahern actually said:

“There is no place for negativity. No need for any pessimism. Above all, there is no place for politically motivated attempts to talk down the economy and the achievements of our people across all sectors.”

Ahern was particularly dismissive of one headline that said the economy was crashing.

“They are not economists who say things like that. Anyone who says that knows nothing about nothing. You wouldn’t give them a dime going down to the shop.”

He and Cowen accepted that construction had ‘moderated’ or was facing a soft landing. The figures behind those euphemisms are that new starts on houses will fall from 90,000 last year to 75,000 this year to as low as 60,000 next year. And double digit growth in departmental budgets ain’t going to happen next year. The message from Cowen was that it all must be manageable and sustainable.

This was the first PP meeting after the election and it was low-key, subdued. Especially compared to the high octane ones beginning in 2004 at Inchdoney when FF revved itself up into election footing.

This was as flat as the plains of Kildare. Not because it's the beginning of a long slog (the 2012 election), but because it's right in the middle of one (Ahern's money problems).

INSIDE POLITICS - BERTIE AHERN'S SECOND DAY AT MAHON

Those who work in the survival business – writers; sportspeople, actors and politicians - know that ultimately they are only as good as their last book, game, film or election.

Bertie Ahern is around enough to understand more than most what a precarious, dangerous and unpredictable business politics is. He will be well aware of Enoch Powell’s dictum that all political careers end in failures, will have seen too many of his colleagues – Charlie Haughey, Ray Burke, Liam Lawlor, Padraig Flynn, and Denis Foley – see their careers and reputations upended unceremoniously for them.

What is clear is that Bertie Ahern has himself taken a bit of a hiding this week.
What is more difficult to assess is the extent of the damage to his reputation and to his standing as Taoiseach. What is sure more he walks into booby traps at the Mahon Tribunal, the shorter his period as leader will be. But it is infuriatingly difficult to make any firm conclusions. We have seen him encounter crises like this before where he looked like a sure goner only for his popularity to go shooting up in opinion polls, or for FF to win elections.

What you can say with certainty is that he will be browned off that it did not finish last night as scheduled. Fianna Fail’s annual parliamentary party think-in begins in Monday. He would have wanted the Tribunal to have been behind him by then but instead for about the fifth time in a year, his personal finances will dominate the agenda at his party.

Amongst the scribes, the consensus on yesterday went as follow: He was damaged, that he an awful day, that some of the evidence was ruinous to him, that it was death by a thousand cuts etc. But I just couldn’t bring myself to agree with it? Sure it’s serious stuff. But given his Teflon knack in the past, it will have to be very serious to down him and until then, all FF ministers will stay loyal to him.

Having said that the stakes are very high indeed. Ahern’s explanation and clarifications of all the lodgements, the dig-out loans, the whip-arounds and the house purchase have been ropey. And that innate ropiness of his accounts has been exposed on a good few occasions by the persistent if sometimes monotonous questioning of Tribunal lawyer Des O’Neill.

As well, Ahern’s narrative has always been that he has fully complied and cooperated with the Tribunal. Yesterday, we had further reminders that the Tribunal’s own experience is at variance with this. As well as the lateness in disclosing foreign exchange reactions, it emerged yesterday failed in his obligation to include the fact of Celia Larkin’s involvement in an account operating to his benefit in an affidavit of discovery (that’s pretty serious)

Yesterday, after a day and a half of thoroughly exhaustive and exhausting preliminaries, the Tribunal finally turned its attention to the four specific lodgements, and the substantive issues surrounding Mr Ahern.

And the first that has come under scrutiny has been a lodgement of £24,838 in punts in October 1994. Ahern’s version of events is that this is primarily made up of two separate components – the second dig-out loan he got from friends totalling £16,500 in addition to the £8,000 sterling that he was handed after a whip-around by Manchester-based zillionaires sometime in 1994.

All very well until Tribunal lawyers began to do the maths and then discovered that the figures just didn’t tally. The exchange rates of the day just didn’t support the two sources that Ahern claimed for the money. In other words the sterling sum would have to be in pounds and pence.

When it did its own assessment, it found that the sum lodged of 24,838 exactly matched the money you would get if you exchanged £25,000 sterling. That was explosive stuff. If that was the case, it meant that the version of event that Bertie Ahern has put on the public record just wasn’t true, that there was no £8,000 sterling, no £16,500 and that his narrative was a fabrication and – well – a brazen bare-faced lie. And if that were true, or established, or proven, there would be no question but the Taoiseach would fall on his sword. He just couldn’t survive that, politically.

But there was one problem with this theory (and that’s what it is because there are no documents to back up this version of events; or indeed Ahern’s). It assumed that the bank teller had applied a rate that day that was for sums of £2,500 and below, rather than a more favourable rate for larger sums.

“You are saying a person going in with £25,000 gets a rate for £2,500 and is entirely screwed by the bank,” riposted Ahern to O’Neill.

The lawyer pointed out that the same rate for £2,500 was mistakenly applied for a sum of £20,000 Ahern deposited in December 1995, before it was corrected to the appropriate rate.

Hugely coincidental and all as it is, the theory still makes a huge assumption that the teller applied the wrong rate, either deliberately or mistakenly. And the December example isn’t compelling because the mistake was rectified by the bank at the time.

What was lacking yesterday were other comparitors. Surely, an exercise could have been conducted to see if the £2,500 rate was mistakenly applied to sums exchanged by other customers with large amounts around that time.

Overall, the Taoiseach has done himself no favours throughout the process. Everytime he explains, the sands shift a little bit more. A new detail is included. The story is tweaked to address a potential weakness in his version of events. There are new recollections.

There are parts of Bertie Ahern’s account that were not convincing when he first told it and are still not convincing a year later, notwithstanding all the tweaks, elaborations and clarifications.

And besides that, it was morally and ethically iffy for a Minister for Finance to take non-repayable repayable loans from friends and whip-arounds from Manchester businessmen. The sums of money involved were huge, especially if you are one of the little guys on the terraces. But having said all that, there are few who are as expert in the survival business as he is.

INSIDE POLITICS - LOOK UP IT'S AER LINGUS AND A FLYING PIG

On Politics
Harry McGee
Politics, during the summer, is as dead as vaudeville. Of course at the same time we need to ink our pages, even during the most taciturn and underwhelming days of silly season.
Since the dawn of civilisation, government ministers tend to disappear during August leaving one or two ministers on duty during the month.
On very slow weeks, somebody will mention at a news conference that the Taoiseach is out of the country.
That will lead to the inevitable question from a senior editorial person: “Well if he’s abroad, who else had skived off? And who has been left behind to run the country?”
Occasionally, fate will deliver a golden hand and intelligence will come back confirming that the only minister who’s still around is the most junior, gaffe-prone, incompetent, ill-regarded and generally hated minister.
The next step in the process will be to find a crisis of some kind– no matter how unimportant or infinitesimally small – and then take the silk purse (a marginal rise in unemployment figures; some hospital cock-up) and make a proper pig’s ear of it.
CRISIS AND LOOK WHO’S LEFT RUNNING THE COUNTRY? will scream the (totally unjustified and totally over-the-top) headline, the following morning.
Yes, it’s cynical and it can be a cheap shot. But it can also be highly effective. John Prescott was Tony Blair’s deputy prime minister and the man in charge of the country when the PM was abroad. But the man who was nominally running the country was photographer playing croquet with his staff in his summer residence. That did untold damage to the country.
Last Sunday we saw this at the worst when the Sunday Independent launched Scuds of outrage and bombast in the direction of Tánaiste Brian Cowen. His crime? He had gone off on holidays to the Algarve. The crisis? The housing market had collapsed and the economy was in freefall. I don’t know about you but somehow I didn’t notice Armageddon last weekend. It just seemed to pass me right by.
The fact is that crises during the summer are more manufactured than real. The last really deep crisis to beset a government here happened in the summer of 1982 with the sensational news that a double murder suspect Malcolm Macarthur had been staying in the flat of the then Attorney General, Patrick Connolly. The A-G was due to fly out on his holidays to the US the next day and refused to alter his plans. The Taoiseach, Charles Haughey, was on his holiday island of Inisvickilaun and either at the end of either a very bad line or a very good wine. When first contacted he didn’t grasp the depth of the crisis. The following day – when all hell broke loose – he cottoned on very quickly.
But then,
Then just when we though silly season had reached its nadir, along comes a real crisis. Not only did it catch the Government completely off guard, it also found both main opposition parties with their eye off the ball – their transport spokespeople were nowhere to be seen (or heard) earlier this week.
What was extraordinary about the Aer Lingus story was that, for once, the ‘who’s left running the country?’ attack was valid. Since the its announcement on Tuesday, the Government has given us the benefit of one full sentence. The Taoiseach won’t speak. The Minister for Transport won’t speak. The Minister for Enterprise won’t speak. The Minister for Finance won’t speak. And only belatedly did the Minister for Defence speak. Willie O’Dea said he was aghast at the disgraceful decision. Sure, wasn’t everybody in the mid-west similarly aghast.
The question for O’Dea is: what is the Government going to do about it? It’s all very well for Willie O’Dea to criticise Aer Lingus but if the Taoiseach and the relevant government ministers are not going to do anything, or not even going to say anything, all he’s involved in is a exercise to give him political cover.
The Government made a huge play about safeguarding Heathrow slots and ensuring balanced regional connectivity when it allowed Aer Lingus to cut the apron strings. Was this part of an under-the-table deal? Did senior Government ministers really only learn last Friday? Why didn’t the Government use its 25.4% shareholding as leverage?
The capitulation of deed and word has been a disgrace. And the Government’s continuing silence is an insult to the people of the mid-west and also to its back-bench TDs. The problem with third-term governments isn’t that the citizens begin to grow indifferent to them; it’s that they begin to grow indifferent to the citizens.