Left won't challenge establishment

Commentators complain about public disengagement from politics, but the holiday antics of the main opposition parties and the equally risible response of the government show all too clearly why people have a point when they say they can't be bothered.

Recent exchequer figures showed that state income is in a very healthy position, with even more money to spend than previously thought. Surely this should be the opportunity to demand that this money be spent on worthwhile social projects that would improve the lives of the citizens?

Not a bit of it. The opposition is wetting itself that the government will "buy" the election, as if voters are really so stupid and fickle to reward a government merely for doing what should be done anyway.

Their strategists believe they have the government in a cleft stick here: if they don't spend the money to improve the health service, or solve the M50 toll booth crisis, or reduce the negative impact of stamp duties and house prices, then the opposition can attack them for missing the opportunity. And if they actually do the right thing, the opposition will attack them for "buying" the election!

Living in a cocoon of their own making, far from the realities of everyday life, the party strategists must be pleased with themselves, but everybody else is just turned off. There is no honesty in this type of politics and underlying it, I believe, is an understanding that none of the political parties now jostling for office has the courage to present real ideas and back good policies no matter where they come from.

So, Labour is now putting the boot into Fianna Fáil, complaining that the party is reneging on its 20 per cent social housing plans – even though Labour remained shamefully silent when Noel Dempsey first announced the idea. If Labour really supported the 20 per cent social housing plan, they would have backed it from the beginning. But it's safe to back it now, when it's on its way out.

Fianna Fáil are no better of course. In opposition they behave in the same opportunistic way. And so, as we await the general election campaign in the autumn, we have to contemplate the awfulness of shallow pretence and play-acting that passes for politics amongst our leading contenders.

Forget the old guff about "this government" that and "this government" the other, the reality is that there are three key questions facing the Irish people on which we need political leadership: where do we stand internationally on the sovereignty of nations and the fight against colonialism and imperialism? What is the way forward to complete the struggle for democracy in the North in the face of unionist intransigence and British two-facedness? And how should we use and distribute the wealth we now have in our own little country?

This last one is a political, not an economic, question. But if we look at our civic administration, it's clear where the power lies. It lies with the economists of the Department of Finance.

In a proper society, the job of finance would be to organise how to raise the funds needed to pay for our social projects, drawing attention to economic problems that overspending might cause but respecting the primacy of political decisions.

That would mean the chief civil servant would not be the secretary general of the Department of Finance, but of the Department of the Taoiseach. And spending departments like health, social welfare, etc, would have to justify themselves to the Taoiseach's office rather than to that of the Minister for Finance.

And all the high falutin' plans of Labour (and the rest of the left) are worthless unless they are willing to confront that fact. But subordinating finance to politics is too 'revolutionary' a step for our social democrats, so they prefer to spend their time in idle point-scoring. That doesn't bother finance, and so finance doesn't bother them.

Look, for example, at the question of tax. All 'left' parties run scared on this, even Sinn Féin. All promise that they will deliver their social projects without extra taxation, in conformity with Establishment and Department of Finance rules. But even if it were possible to do that – and there are big question marks about that – taxation is also a method of (don't let the DoF hear this!) redistributing wealth, of shifting some of the money we have from the rich who have it to the less rich who haven't.

But the best the 'Left' can do apparently is to tell us that we're rich enough now to leave the really rich alone.

Unfortunately, even that is too much for the omnipotent Department of Finance, which is scouring the budget estimates as we speak, hunting for profligacy and asserting the primacy of the dismal scientists.

So, since they can't, or won't, do anything about the things that matter, especially since so much power has been ceded to Brussels, our politicians are reduced to petty point-scoring and playing a game that no one else has any interest in.

And then they complain that people aren't interested in voting?

Eoin Ó Murchú is the Eagraí Polaitíochta of RTÉ Raidió na Gaeltachta. He is writing here in a personal capacity