Government needs to duck and cover

Leinster House has gone quackers and it has nothing to do with the 12-week summer break the Government has imposed on the house or Michael McDowell's penchant for chewing gum in the Dáil.

Last weekend, eight little ducklings hatched their way into life in the Rock Pool Garden that sits in the middle of the Leinster House 2000 extension building.

Waddling behind their mother, the antics of the baby ducklings are thrilling visitors, especially groups of school children. The gauche attempts of the chicks to swim, dive, and walk in a neat line, one behind the other, can be viewed through the glass wall that forms one side of the café on the building's ground floor.

On Tuesday tragedy struck. Three of the chicks were dead; two by drowning and the cause of the third death is unknown. A concerned member of staff sent an email around the house later in the day warning members not to feed bread to the ducklings because (on the advice of a wildlife vet) bread has the potential to cause them injury and death. 

It's a drama that's been played out only a few yards away from that other rock pool of Irish politics, the Dáil Chamber, where a different (sitting) type of duck is also experiencing slippage.

Not quite lame but certainly limping, this is a most peculiar duck who will be greatly relieved to waddle across the line of the Dáil summer recess. It's spent the last few months fending off missiles from various quarters and its clutch of ducklings (ie Cabinet ministers) are looking forward to a breather from the adversarial politics of pond life.

Between the exposé on nursing homes, the furore over the publication of the second Morris Report, the drip-drip revelations about the waste of tax-payers money and the chronic crises in the health service, the Government is on the back-foot.

The foxes on the opposition benches have caught their scent and are yelping for blood. Not so long ago Bertie and his Government looked as if they had all their ducks lined up in a row to secure a third term but now some Fianna Fáil backbenchers are talking as if their party was a "dead duck".

On Monday when the story about the huge cracks in the National Aquatic Centre broke in the newspapers (alongside a file photograph of the Taoiseach standing in the middle of the €62 million centre), alarm bells must have gone off in the corridors of power.

While at one level the story represented one more example of incompetence and bungling, at another it presented a serious threat to the Government's image. That's because the accumulation of such damaging examples, according to one popular social theory, can create a critical mass or "Tipping Point" after which it only takes one more example to trigger a radical change in how something or someone is perceived.

In the case of the Government, the allegations about the National Aquatic Centre, coming after a litany of other such debacles, have the "Tipping Point" potential to indelibly stamp Bertie and his cabinet with the image of incompetence.

The Fine Gael leader certainly did his best to help that effort on Tuesday when he compared the debacle of the aquatic centre to that of the Government. "Truly (it) is an apt metaphor for the Fianna Fáil/PD Government: huge cost to the public, so-called state of the art attraction; all splash; fake waves; the roof blown off and leaking like a sieve."

When Enda Kenny demanded to know who was responsible for the roof of the centre being blown away, the Taoiseach cheekily replied, "the wind". The response drew guffaws from all sides of the House but it did nothing to ameliorate the Government's position. Two years after the Taoiseach described the project as a unique concept that had been brought to "magnificent fruition", the chickens are coming home to roost.

Ursula Halligan is TV3's Political Editor and Presenter of the Political Party show on TV3