Putting the FF hopefuls under the microscope

Any new leader of Fianna Fáil risks being a captive of the neoliberal consensus the party has bought into, writes Vincent Browne.

Brian Lenihan is the most formidable candidate for the Fianna Fáil leadership, by many criteria. He is very clever, very articulate, has lots of personal courage and is likeable. He is based in Dublin, where the party is in danger of obliteration, and his election as leader might minimise the drubbing.

Except he was the joint author of the blanket bank bailout, which has proved so calamitous. Almost everything he said about the cost of that has proved wrong, as have his prognostications on the economy. Instead of acknowledging those errors, he spins with an alacrity not known since the best days of his father. And then the denial that he had fomented any unease over Brian Cowen. Several backbenchers testify otherwise and most believe the backbenchers rather than him, which is a problem, especially as these backbenchers had wanted him as leader – until the porky.

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Mary Hanafin was good, I think, as Minister for Education but she was awful as minister for social welfare and, it appears, made no effort to acquaint herself with the idea of equality, which would seem an indispensable aspect of her job.

She engaged in the familiar populist rhetoric about social welfare fraud, exaggerating the scale of it, thereby preparing the ground for social welfare cuts, just at a time when frauds in the corporate sector were costing the State tens and tens of billions of euro.

One of her targets was single mothers, some of whom, it was alleged, had overclaimed. Single mothers are a target for a minister of a Government that had and has stood by when fraud of billions was perpetrated without a single thing being done about it.

The speed with which she got rid of an agency, Combat Poverty, which had done much to highlight the depths and effects of poverty here, and the relish she took in doing so, in my view, disqualify her for any position in government, let alone that of would-be Taoiseach.

Éamon Ó Cuív is the most interesting of the candidates. This fellow has the unusual propensity to think for himself. He has been a Eurosceptic in a cabinet of Euro-fans.

He recently expressed unease about inequality here and the scale of the Government's depredations on the poorer sector of society. Yes, it's odd he remained in Government while all this was going on, but it's interesting nonetheless.

Micheál Martin is a fine fellow, if you ignore the Fianna Fáil affiliation. He is serious about politics and thinks things through. He has never been part of the gargle wing of the party. He was good in education, less good in health, not good at all, in my view, in enterprise, trade and employment (he celebrated light-touch regulation and free markets) but good again in foreign affairs. It was he who held his nerve after the first Lisbon Treaty defeat and it was he who led the way on the second campaign. I didn't celebrate that for I was opposed to the Lisbon Treaty. But one must acknowledge Martin's success in persuading the electorate otherwise.

Oh, and he is not given to porkies, as far as I am aware.

While in personal terms the Fianna Fáil contest is mildly interesting, does it matter a damn otherwise?

The fact is that Fianna Fáil has bought into the neoliberal consensus: that the state has no place in the economy, that economic growth is paramount and free markets are the engine of growth, that monetary incentives are indispensable to economic success, and too bad about inequality but we will do our best to deal with consistent poverty! So too, incidentally, has Fine Gael and the Labour Party bought into that consensus, however much the latter may now protest this is not so.

None of the parties and, obviously, none of the contenders for the Fianna Fáil leadership has as its base line the idea of a society that respects people equally.

None of them appears to appreciate that large inequalities in income inevitably erode equality of respect and undermine equality in most other spheres, including in the spheres of education and health. And that inequalities in income, health and education generate further inequalities across society. Allied to that is an indifference to democracy, the supposed guarantor of equality.

The vacuity of our form of representative democracy is evident by the exclusion of the sovereign people from all the major decisions that now affect this society, aside from participation in the crude mechanism of a general election. But it is evident otherwise also.

Take the Finance Bill currently going through the Dáil. It is 223 pages long, full of dense, incomprehensible legal verbiage, intelligible only to tax experts, who have a great deal of time and are fortified by a great deal of guaranteed remuneration. This is a would-be piece of legislation of the sovereign people that is consciously framed in a manner designed to exclude the sovereign people.

It is a piece of contempt for the sovereign people; not one of the establishment parties thinks there is anything odd about that.