Sometimes politics can be a rough and ugly business; brutal, too, when the stakes are high, as they often are. So we should all take our amusement when we can get it. The announcement by Justin Barrett, leader of the National Party, that his party’s “gold reserves” had been removed from “the party’s safe vault” really was a highlight of the crowded last week of the political term before the August holidays.
Barrett has hovered beyond the political sidelines since his only significant moment, the campaigns against the Nice Treaty in 2001 and again in 2002. In the second referendum, his campaign imploded when reports emerged that he had attended meetings in Germany and Italy of political organisations widely regarded as neo-fascist.
Barrett’s pretensions to leadership of a great national movement — “the last vanguard of the Irish Nation in an hour of deep distress,” as he puts it — brings to mind nobody so much as Sir Roderick Spode, the fictional leader of the “black shorts”, who appears in a few of PG Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster books. Bertie Wooster’s dismissal of Spode is worth quoting as a lesson in how best to deal with rabble-rousing, right-wing demagogues: just point out how ridiculous they frequently are:
“The trouble with you, Spode,” Bertie tells him, “is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you’re someone. You hear them shouting ‘Heil Spode!’ and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: ‘Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?’”
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Don’t get me wrong, Barrett is not a dictator in waiting. But with his far-fetched pretensions, blood and soil rhetoric and stash of gold bullion, he is more than a little ridiculous.
Anyway, Barrett and the rest of the perishers who make up Ireland’s small but vocal far right have been kept a long way away from elected office by the disinclination of the Irish public to indulge ultra-nationalist rhetoric and divisive tropes. Next year’s local elections, when anti-immigrant candidates will surely stand against a background of clear angst about the arrival of asylum seekers in a few areas, will be a test of whether that good sense endures. The elections should mark out a deadline for Roderic O’Gorman’s Department of Integration to have all local issues settled and a workable and sustainable way of accommodating asylum seekers established.
The big end of term wrap
On the other side of the political spectrum, the radical/revolutionary left, represented by People Before Profit (PBP) and some Independent deputies, has had better electoral fortunes and is much more integrated into parliamentary politics. It maintains some decidedly odd views — a party policy document earlier this year predicted that the election of a left-wing government in Ireland would be followed by its overthrow via a right-wing military coup, cheered on by the media, no less. And its insistence that the actions of an elected government can and should be subject to reversal by the alternative democracy of street protest is clearly undemocratic.
But the political success of the radical left owes more, I suspect, to its efficient constituency work and frequent access to the airwaves than enthusiasm for revolution. It’s an open question whether its deputies will withstand the challenge to their seats in the next election, emanating principally not from the lackeys of the right-wing press nor the ranks of reaction and counterrevolution, but from its allies and potential left-wing coalition partners in Sinn Féin. I fear solidarity on the left and the brotherhood of man will not save some of the PBP seats.
Meanwhile, for the very centrist Coalition, the summer break brings an uneasy calm. The few weeks off will be welcomed by all and sundry; not least because they know there are simmering divisions likely to come into the open when decisions on various matters are required in the autumn.
On Tuesday, political correspondents ran from Taoiseach Leo Varadkar’s end-of-term press conference to the Government Buildings courtyard where Minister for the Environment Eamon Ryan was delivering his end-of-term thoughts, and there was no mistaking the differences between them. Ryan was talking up his plans for rail investment; Varadkar was saying, yeah that’s all very well but we still need to build some roads. The divisions are real and they are as acute as they have been at any time in the Coalition’s life. Expect plenty more where that came from.
The plan for land use — and the broader intersection of climate action and agriculture will be hard — because they involve conflict between vital interests on each side of the Fianna Fáil/Fine Gael-Green division. Some of the conflicts will be expressed through budget choices, but not all. Some of its most senior figures believe that the Coalition is heading for a bumpy patch. There is, says one protagonist, very considerable tension about.
And yet the centrist government is, three years after it was formed, in reasonable nick: under pressure, to be sure, yet hardly crumbling under the strain. This Government, one senior figure tells me, can be re-elected if it wants to be. He adds he is not sure if it wants to be, though.
And for all the noise (and occasional amusements) at the extremes of politics, the challenge to this Government, when it comes, will come not from those extremes — but from a Sinn Féin party fast-tacking towards the centre. That may not be where the noise and the colour and even the gold are to be found. But it’s where the votes are.