Which images will linger in the mind when it’s all over?
Donald Trump whipping up the MAGA crowds, dismissing the virus as a hoax perpetrated by the Democrats to unseat him, juxtaposed with refrigerated white lorries loaded with New Yorkers’ bodies? The UK prime minister’s enthusiastic endorsement of hand-shaking “continuously” amid No 10 discussions about “herd immunity”? Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro spreading such egregious misinformation that Twitter had to remove two of his tweets? Viktor Orban leading Hungary into dictatorship under cover of pandemic emergency measures? The video of a desperate Chinese doctor pleading to be heard alongside news of his death from the virus he tried to warn us about and the Chinese Communist Party’s “solemn apology” to his family?
How much will we remember of this queasy sense of a deeply fragmented world, of market-obsessed, climate-denying, libertarian culture warriors taking the hilarious “stick it to the libtards/sheeple” line well beyond a joke? Will we remember EU leaders continuing to bicker uselessly over eurobonds – reviving the tiring old crash-era battle about pooling liability versus “negative incentives”? Argentina slipping into another technical default? Vultures circling over corpses on the streets of Guayaquil, the Ecuadorean gateway to the Galapagos? The despair of African health officials over the almost total absence of ventilators?
How will Ireland's odd obsession with government-formation at the height of a pandemic come across in the history books?
As for us? We may remember the outpouring of love for the workers who carried on doing essential jobs and the rising regard for the less celebrated ones; the multitasking civil servants, the newly appreciated teachers, the gardaí who brought solace and flowers to the housebound. The company directors frantically figuring out ways to survive. The workers who kept the shops open. The invisible ones who carved tiny workspaces out of kitchen niches, boxrooms and domestic chaos and kept on keeping on.
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Bitter-sweet day
We may acknowledge all those – the great majority – who never took to Facebook or Twitter to vent some ill-informed malice, or to amplify the fear or to politicise a terrifying pandemic.
But on that bitter-sweet day when we can take a pause from the fear at last and look back, how will our leaders and politicians fit into this picture of diligence, chaos, worry, care and sacrifice? How many of them will be able to look back at this time of our greatest need and say with truth that they stepped up as true patriots?
In the sweep of global and local agony still to come, how will Ireland’s odd obsession with government-formation at the height of a pandemic come across in the history books? In the UK on Saturday, the first act by the new Labour leader Keir Starmer was to call the prime minister and promise to work in the “national interest” to help guide Britain through the crisis.
Why would any small party volunteer as the patriotic cannon fodder in the fiscal carnage that lies ahead?
What are we at here? Our current government has full constitutional authority. It has already mobilised one of the largest fiscal and emergency responses in the State’s history, including a multibillion-euro, debt-funded income support and unemployment scheme. It has clearly listened to the medical experts and in the main, has handled an unprecedented crisis with deeply impressive calm, indefatigability, responsibility and authority. According to an RTÉ/Behaviour & Attitudes survey, more than four out of five of us believe it is doing a good job.
So why waste time right now breaching that continuity with an unseemly rush into an inevitably unsatisfactory new arrangement? Legal minds differ about whether the current government can pass legislation without a fully constituted Seanad. This in turn is being used as a cudgel to hound a small party or two into making up the numbers as a patriotic duty, while brushing a gloss of “change” over the new government benches. We can chide them all we like but why in the name of God would any small party volunteer as the patriotic cannon fodder in the fiscal carnage that lies ahead? Why would they draw out battalions of new enemies on every flank? Why perform political suicide when there are options?
Truly patriotic
No one with more than a single brain cell denies that we are now in exceptional times. So why not offer all parties and Independents the opportunity to be truly patriotic at this time and at little cost? This would entail supporting the current Government for six months to guide Ireland through the crisis, in a kind of confidence-and-supply arrangement that would empower it to take all emergency measures.
Small parties would simply enable continuity and allow for emergency measures for a strictly limited period while also holding the Government to account
The Government would have the required support to appoint senators (with due, generous consultation obviously) and pass legislation without paralysing the Cabinet in a babel of dissenting voices. No small party would be required to enter coalition or form part of a unity government. They would simply enable continuity and allow for emergency measures for a strictly limited period while also holding the Government to account.
Come September or October, every one of them would have the space to negotiate a fully considered programme for government. Failing that, they could hold another election. Now who wants a piece of that brave, new government? Anyone? Anyone at all?