Humpty Dumpty sat in the Dáil
Humpty Dumpty watched it fall
As all the whips’ resources and all the whips’ ken
Tried putting it back together again.
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Amid the pandemonium sat Michael Lowry, the cause of it all, having his cake and wanting to eat it too. His chosen candidate was ensconced in the Ceann Comhairle’s chair, four of his associates were about to be named junior ministers and his seal of approval graced the programme for government. Yet he was digging his heels in and insisting on sitting with the Opposition. As Humpty Dumpty told Alice: “When I choose a word, it means just what I choose it to mean.”
Chaos in Leinster House: how the day unfolded and what happens next
Instead of the expected election of a taoiseach and appointment of ministers, today Leinster House was the scene of chaos and an unprecedented disruption of Dáil tradition, with the Opposition saying it will not back down from its demands in a standoff over speaking time.Jennifer Bray and Pat Leahy were there. They tell Hugh Linehan what happened and why.
Nothing Lowry does has the power to shock any more; not after the McCracken and Moriarty tribunals or his tax settlement and court conviction, or telling the Dáil that, if he had money to hide, sure wouldn’t he have an offshore bank account – as if he had none, when he actually had not one but five. What is mystifying is the Government’s captivation by him.
It is eight weeks since concerns began surfacing in the media about the Independent deputy’s role as the Regional Independents Group’s chief negotiator in government-formation talks. Since the subsequent news that the Criminal Assets Bureau’s file triggered by Moriarty’s findings had gone to the DPP, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have batted away these concerns as derisively as Lowry was batting away Opposition parties’ objections to him sitting on their side of the Dáil this week.
The perplexing thing is that Micheál Martin and Simon Harris need never have made themselves beholden to him in the first place. They could simply have told his nine-member group on day one of the negotiations that, though they were willing to deal with the rest of them, they would not negotiate with the former Fine Gael minister whom they had erstwhile called on in a Dáil motion to resign his seat in shame.
The war of words about speaking times in the chamber may seem like a ball of smoke but it is fundamental to a functioning parliamentary democracy. Politicians of all sides and hues are notorious for not answering the questions they are asked.
When junior minister-in-waiting Michael Healy-Rae could not give a straight answer to Sarah McInerney’s invitation on Wednesday’s Drivetime to cite a precedent for a group of Independent TDs sitting simultaneously in government and on the opposition benches, he hung up on her. That night on Prime Time, Fran McNulty had to repeat his opening question to Fianna Fáil’s Thomas Byrne four times before eliciting some sort of response. If professional media interviewers are hard-pressed to extract answers for their vast broadcast audiences, the challenge is even greater within the Dáil’s strictly timed speaking slots.
Government backbenchers get the fewest opportunities to speak in the chamber, which can be a blessing as, too often, they read their “questions” from eulogising scripts that sound as if they were written by a cabinet publicist. The drawback for Lowry having to share government speaking times is that he gets fewer opportunities to impress his Tipperary North constituents with his national profile. Using the Dáil as a personal platform risks diminishing its already eroded power.
[ What Michael Lowry’s constituents really think of himOpens in new window ]
In Washington, DC, last Monday night, Donald Trump steered his wife around a dance floor with all the gainliness of a cattle drover. It was the US president’s third inauguration ball that day, and he was still dancing past midnight, having signed stacks of orders earlier in the day that generated tremors of fear across the planet. The rest of the world will have to be up very early in the morning to take on this fellow. The New York Times reported that European leaders were bracing themselves as Trump’s return to the White House had plunged the continent into “a precarious era” with “almost no aspect of European policy that [he] does not seem poised to upend”.
Evidently, the memo failed to reach Dáil Éireann, which will have done no substantive work whatsoever for three whole months by the time it finally gets down to business in February. While Trump has been pulling America out of the Paris climate accord, the World Health Organisation and the OECD tax agreement, our TDs have been fighting about who gets to sit on which chair. Ireland fiddles while Rome burns, along with Paris, Bonn, Madrid, Lisbon, Amsterdam, Warsaw, Tallinn, Athens and Brussels.
The farce that unfolded in the national parliament this week would have been more fitting on the Gaiety Theatre’s pantomime stage. Was it for this that Pearse and Connolly died? To have the country’s legislators roaring at each other about their rights, while tens of thousands of citizens are struggling to find homes, get hospital appointments, obtain disability assistance and mental health support, and avail of inadequate public services? The Dáil’s lack of urgency in knuckling down, in contrast to Trump’s up-and-at-it attitude, would suggest that our body politic has nothing better to be doing.
Since Harris called the general election on November 8th, and we voters had our say on November 29th, Dáil Éireann has been in mothballs. The least contentious government-formation talks in the history of Irish coalitions – if it is true, as we are told, that no deals were done – took a leisurely eight weeks to conclude. Now the TDs are having a fortnight’s rest after the taxing business of electing a Taoiseach. No sooner will they be back than they’ll be off again for St Patrick’s week, followed by Easter, followed by the May bank holiday, followed by their annual week off in June, followed by a two-month summer recess from July.
If any other workforce was as unproductive it would be facing redundancy. But maybe that’s the intention. For a neutered Dáil has as much bite as a toothless guard dog. Gary Gannon’s assertion that the Government planned the fortnight’s break “to avoid Dáil scrutiny, to not answer questions and not be called to account” should not be lightly dismissed. When government leaders accuse the opposition of subverting the Constitution, they ought to examine their own attitude to Dáil Éireann.
