INSIDE POLITICS - THE OTHER SPEECH

Enda Kenny's speech to the Fine Gael Ard Fheis last night was in marked contrast to the gameshow extravaganza Bertie Ahern gave us last week. It was, most of my political colleagues agreed, the best speech of the conference cycle and probably the best of the past couple of years. There was a studied effort to make it as different as possible to that of Ahern the previous weekend - and it played to all of Kenny's strengths - the perception that he is honest; his personable nature; his ordinary man perception. Much more on this tomorrow...

Meanwhile, the controversy over Ahern's speech rumbles on this morning. Stephen O'Brien in the Sunday Times has a very interesting main lead implying that Brian Cowen, the FF deputy leader, was kept in the dark about it until very late, and the Sunday Independent also lead on it. Stephen Collins column in The Irish Times (subscription) was also excellent. My colleague Paul O'Brien and I both led on the same story last Monday (click here for Irish Examiner story).

The upshot is somebody is either that somebody is telling porkey pies or that some of the most senior ministers are excluded from the deliberations of the cabal of advisers that surrounds Ahern (suggesting that he now has the equivalent of Tony Blair's sofa Government). So who should we believe? Those who tell us that it was planned all along (and I had two separate briefings on Friday to this effect) or those who say that there was a panicky about-turn by Ahern in the run up to the Ard Fheis?

Fianna Fail has made a habit of this. We should call it the hyperventilating stunt. They did it with decentralisation, with electronic voting, with the rash promises of no-cuts made before the 2002 election.

Given the adverse media coverage this weekend, is this another of the stunts that's going to backfire?

INSIDE POLITICS - PROMISES, PROMISES

This árd fheis will not be about making promises that we cannot deliver, Fine Gael deputy leader Richard Bruton said on Thursday.

Where did we hear that line before?

Oh, yes, here in fact. In this column last week we quoted Seamus Brennan saying that Fianna Fáil’s árd fheis will not be about making promises that we cannot deliver.

We all know what happened after that. We found ourselves caught in a monsoon. It might have lasted only half an hour, but it left the political establishment wholly swamped.

This column, for one, was suckered last week. It gives me no pleasure whatsoever to admit that it included this ultra confident prediction: “Unlike other party conferences held so far this season, I don’t anticipate any major announcement on tax cuts, on stamp duty, on tax bands, or on anything that’s going to cost a ball of cash down the line.”

How wrong can you be? Very wrong in my case, though, in fairness, I wasn’t alone in being duped.

So when Fine Gael start telling us that they’re not going to make any promises they can’t deliver, forgive us as we laugh hysterically while quickly finding a spare patch of sand to bury our heads in.

In fairness, you can be sure that Fine Gael won’t be making any major tax announcements for the simple reason that they have already made all their major tax announcements already.

The first part of it was the 2% cut in the standard rate, the Labour part of the deal. Fine Gael’s own portion is the proposed cuts in stamp duty Enda Kenny announced on a slow Thursday during a visit to Rathkeale.

That begged a number of questions. Why then? Why not wait until the árd fheis where you can get maximum impact for expensive — yet definitely populist — concessions on stamp duty?

Part of the answer to this became evident last night during Kenny’s opening speech to the conference and his key line that “the General Election this year will be a referendum on this Government’s handling of the health services”.

That is what you’d call a “raise on the blind” in poker parlance. It is by any measure a massive gamble, saying that the election will turn on health rather than on the economy without fully knowing if those cards will be revealed.

Sure, health is always a core issue. But will a party’s policies on health be more swayable for a majority of voters than its economic and financial policies? It’s a big call. But it has been made: you can see this calculation playing through in the themes that the party has chosen for this morning’s live TV coverage of debates — crime and health.

And yes, like Seamus Brennan a week earlier, Richard Bruton insisted this week that this árd fheis will not be a manifesto launch.

But given that the party will have an almost unfettered chance to push its agendas and candidates this weekend, I’ll be very surprised if there aren’t a couple of major announcement.

But the difference will be that big surprises will be in the areas of health and crime rather in tax, stamp duty or other wallet-fatteners.

Seamus Brennan worried about promises the opposition made and their potential to bankrupt the country. I don’t think (here I go again; a fool never learns) anything Fine Gael will promise this weekend will bankrupt the country financially.

But there are other ways of bankrupting a country. At present, the Oireachtas is debating a draconian piece of legislation proposing tough mandatory sentences, erosions to the right of silence, seven-day detention, restrictive bail laws including electronic monitoring. In the dying days of this government, it has been rushed through quicker than a Bertie Ahern árd fheis promise.

The problem is that there’s no opposition to it from the big parties. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael (and to a lesser extent Labour) do their Big Bad Wolf impressions huffing and puffing at each other to see who’s toughest. And the perverse creation and ratcheting-up of a crime crisis that simply doesn’t exist has led to the most cynical auction of all.

At last year’s árd fheis, Enda Kenny promised drunk tanks, among other hardchaw policies. That was scary. I’m worried he’ll go too far this year, establish Fine Gael’s law and order credentials by suggesting something even crazier than the Government’s crazy policies; and end up overbidding at an auction that can leave us
all bankrupt when it comes to justice, proportionality and morality.

This is my column from today's Irish Examiner.
Read Enda Kenny's opening address to the FG Ard Fheis here

INSIDE POLITICS - FIANNA FAIL ARD FHEIS

In the knowledge it’s a little vulgar for first thing Monday morning, we still couldn’t resist distorting the famous Mae West line to describe the amazing conversion that happened Fianna Fail this weekend:“Is that a gavel in your pocket and are you just happy to see me?”


For having spent many weeks slating the opposition for getting involved in irresponsible ‘auction politics’ and out-vying each other on tax cuts, Fianna Fail this week decided that the best way of beating them was to get in on the act.

Drawing to the close of a humdrum Ard Fheis in City West this weekend– with the exception of Brian Cowen’s majestic demolition of Fine Gael’s tax proposals – Bertie
Ahern stood up on the podium on Saturday night and electrified the weekend with an unusual – nay, extraordinary – leader’s speech.

It was a baffling kind of affair, going against the grain of everything we had been expecting all week. On Tuesday, Social Affairs Minister Seamus Brennan had launched the ‘clár’ for the Ard Fheis and also took the opportunity to flay the opposition with some hard ‘timber’ for their irresponsible spending policies.

“Fine Gael and Labour have been making commitments now for over two years in the Dail and in policy documents. They add up to a frightening amount of money. It’s not a competition we are interested in entering,” he proclaimed.

Well within four days the Fianna Fail star players had entered the fray. And in 30 minutes, Bertie Ahern had managed the amazing feat of making more new promises and commitment than the combined opposition had made in two years.

There were some pundits (including this one) who were made to look foolish by Ahern’s speech, having confidently predicted that there would be nothing new or substantial in his speech in terms of promises. Ministers would consistently tell you that they would continue in Government mode (ie running the country) for as long as possible and that the party’s policies and manifesto would appear only after Easter. Until yesterday morning, when ministers started dropping big hints into their own speeches, there was no general inkling that it was going to take place.

So what happened? Had we been given a bum steer? Had those clever backroom wonks in Fianna Fail managed to keep it all strictly confidential to be gloriously revealed by Ahern on Saturday night?

Erm, no. The first hint was on Saturday evening. Usually, the script of the leader’s speech is released under embargo in late afternoon to allow TV, radio and Sunday newspapers to absorb it. But for once, the script was late, not arriving until after 6pm. This suggested that late amendments had been added.

And later that night a member of the Cabinet told me that none of the proposals to cut rates of tax and PRSI were in the original speech. Yes, the Minister said, there were a couple of sweeteners in the speech. But the decision to include the kitchen sink and all was taken at a very very late stage.

And the reason for that? Nerves verging on panic. Ahern himself had always spoken about Easter as being the natural starting point for the campaign. But what he read on Saturday night was, to all intents and purposes, the party’s manifesto masquerading as a leader’s speech.

The decision to shunt everything forward, according to the senior minister, was made on the back of two opinion polls that spelt bad news for Fianna Fail this week.

The first in the Star on Thursday showed the party at 32% in Dublin, support levels that would invariably lead to the party losing seats. And then yesterday, the Sunday Business Post’s latest monthly tracking poll showed marginal slippage for FF for the second successive month. Given that the party’s support levels were consistently in the 40s in the run-up to the 2002 election, this gave Ahern some cause for concern.

Hence, the front-loading of all its best goodies and the decision to start now, not at Easter. And in his interview with RTE Radio’s ‘This Week’ yesterday Ahern gave credence to this when accepting that his party were lagging behind the others.

“When you are in government for a decade, it’s just that bit harder. The polls are very interesting if you look back over the past 15 months.

“There has been a swing of about four times of us being up five and being back down five. I accept that we are down in the opinion polls even though there are on a small basis.”

Well, there are two reactions to panic – fight or flight.

And certainly Ahern’s instincts on Saturday were all fight. His leader’s address was the best he has made in a couple of years, helped by the fact that he was talking in simple language about tangible things and not about concepts.

Promises came faster than bids at a charity auction. No sooner had Ahern hit the gavel on a new promise, than another one had materialised. The policies seemed to poach bits out of other party policies with a couple of novel ideas of FF’s own making. The elimination of the ceiling on PRSI will be popular as will the halving of rates, and the dropping of tax rates

It was getting harder to keep up with the pace of Bertie’s speech, as the promises stacked up. Increasing tax bands; rises tax credits in line with wage inflation; the State pension to be increased from E200 to E300 over five years; outflanking Fine Gael on tough cop stuff with promises of mandatory jail terms for unprovoked assaults, CCTV cameras everywhere and compulsory drugs tests in prisons. More cops. Step-down beds. More teachers. Cafes for teenagers. It went on and on.

But when you start looking at how much all this is going to cost, Fianna Fail’s earlier claims of auction politics begins to look very hollow indeed. After the speech, senior ministers argued that these promises weren’t part of the auction because they were all costed and affordable.

But then all of the other parties have done the same exercise. And I think, strategically, that Fianna Fail has realised very late in the day that it blundered by ignoring massive the E8 billion surplus warchest in the Government Exchequer.
All the other parties saw that dropping ball and caught it before it bounced. Thus, they were able to offer wallet-fattening incentives without being accused of spending beyond their means.

The upshot of it all is that the gloves are now off. Fianna Fail also unveiled its first poster yesterday, a sure sign that the bidding war is on. It might not have been called yet but the election campaign is now in full flight.

This is my analysis from today's Irish Examiner

INSIDE POLITICS - The Hurricane of Hype

WHO is the star of this week’s column? Take a wild guess. If you happened to die and are now pushing up daisies, you might not have noticed him this week.


Of if you happen to be an anchorite monk living on a remote island sometime in the 6th century, there’s a slim chance that he may not have crossed your path.

For everybody else, there was no escape. From the moment he choked on his Corn Flakes last Sunday morning, Michael McDowell has reacted to Labour’s tax coup by invading our every waking moment, policing our thoughts, and trying to wash, like rain, the trashy Labour promises off the pavement.




On Monday, he introduced the techniques of Sumo wrestling to Irish political discourse. In a matter of mere seconds, his ferocious and fierce onslaught removed Pat Rabbitte from the ring. The winning technique? Haiku. “I want to say this about the speech that Pat Rabbitte made the other night. That speech proves that he is now admitting that he has been talking rubbish for 20 years. He has attacked every aspect of our tax policies. He’s voted against them in every Finance Bill.

“He has denied our argument that tax rates matter. And here he is now saying, after 20 years of empty, unsuccessful, hypocritical rhetoric, that he accepts he is wrong. What a sadmoment for him.”

This outburst came during a so-called doorstep interview, where the politician takes questions (usually on the street) from reporters. There were no questions here. McDowell walked up the reporters, delivered his broadside, said “I’m finished” and walked away again. A few reporters sniggered. But for McDowell there was nothing funny about this.

For this was a Labour leader having the cheek to encroach on his territory. Though what came across washumorous, what bubbled inside was toil and trouble. This column has said it before: McDowell is a one-man walking Atlantic weather system. This week, it was storm force 10 stuff coming in furiously with no respite.

The really scary bit is that all this is just the lead-up to the Progressive Democrats national conference this weekend. You might have noticed the sly reference above to Travis Bickle, the anti-hero of Martin Scorsese’s classic film, Taxi Driver. On Tuesday, McDowell did his own bit of scary “you looking at me” stuff when he announced a package of anti-crime measures. The Tánaiste has a tendency to announce his measures in the manner that Twink introduced John Bruton at a Fine Gael Árd Fheis a long time. You initially think, great stuff, and then you think, this is over-the-top, and then you think, oh, God, this is going to finish up badly.

His crime package sounded very impressive on first hearing. Suspects could be detained for seven days. There were tighter measures for bail; further curtailments of the right to silence, as well as provisions to introduce the long-awaited DNA database.

But then we found out it was all based on an interim (and rushed)report of the expert group charged with re-balancing the law.

Not only that, but the package of measures didn’t include legislation — only an intention to legislate.

So what was that all about then? Optics? In reality, by the time that package becomes law, the general election will be but a dim memory.

McDowell wanted to give the impression he was being tough on crime (as usual the “crisis” has been hyped up by politicians and the media). Now he has come up with illusory measures to remedy an illusory crisis.

For one thing hit me between the eyes in the recent Frank Luntz focus group exercise for RTÉ. Crime was identified as a huge issue. Yet, not one of the group had been a victim of crime in the past five years, save for one guy who got his chainsaw nicked. And why were they all scared to walk the streets, leave the key in the door etc? They said it was because the media told them so. That’s a self-fulfilling prophecy if there ever was one.

Of course, the Tánaiste didn’t leave it there. He was just warming himself up. On Wednesday, he took on the Mahon Tribunal, claiming its legal bill could top €1 billion. By Thursday, that row deepened into a full-blown crisis. Characteristically, he robustly stood by his word that night, setting up the second grave stand-off with the judiciary in as many months. And that was the same day, he promised he would big it up at the PDs’ conference in Wexford, with his own proposals on tax cuts and stamp duty.

Batten down the hatches folks. A hurricane of hype and histrionics is fast approaching from the South East.

(This is my column from today's Irish Examiner)