You know for sure that the government is in election mode when it no longer bothers to maintain a balance between decisions made for electoral gain and those made for the public’s benefit. Our legislators have all but abandoned any pretence of looking after the public, and are openly mollifying backbenchers and lobby groups with questionable policies. Just as the decisions to extend the monopoly at Dublin airport and to abandon plans to expose publicans to competition were taken to serve Fianna Fail’s election interests, our ministers didn’t bother to dress up their comments about privacy laws as anything other than what they were — an attempt to curtail the media’s ability to scrutinise politicians.
This government has such contempt for both voters and political opponents that it doesn’t even trouble to pay lip service to them any more. At Dublin airport, it would undoubtedly have been of enormous benefit to the travelling public to have introduced a little competition through the construction of an independent second terminal. But, because Fianna Fail did not want to antagonise union workers in the taoiseach’s constituency, we can look forward instead to many more years of bedlam.
An example of the absolute disdain with which the airport monopoly views its customers was evident in the response to the security lapses uncovered some months ago. The fact that undercover inspectors were able to smuggle weapons through security checks somehow became the fault of the travelling public, for which they paid dearly in the weeks that followed. Enormous queues for security checks meant many people missed their flights yet they were not compensated for this manifestation of managerial incompetence.
Similarly, Michael McDowell’s proposals to introduce cafe bars aimed at encouraging the Irish to eat while they drink were ditched to pacify the publicans’ lobby. The pious bleating from both the taoiseach and backbenchers, some of whom are publicans themselves, about how this restraint of competition was done to protect the public’s health was particularly hard to swallow. The cafe bar proposal was genuinely innovative and just might have weakened the link between alcohol and leisure in Irish life, yet it wasn’t given a chance.
At the moment, it is next to impossible to enjoy the kind of evening available in most continental towns — restaurants won’t seat you unless you undertake to have a meal, and bars provide little to eat in the evenings besides toasted sandwiches, if you’re lucky. A cafe bar, where you could have a coffee or a drink, a plate of cheese or a full meal, offers a civilised and reasonable alternative. The very fact that the publicans opposed the plan with such vigour shows that they reckoned it would prove popular.
The smoking ban is hurting publicans’ business, and the government is no doubt bracing itself for the wrath of that lobby come election time. But the response of pub owners to the downturn in trade has been typically dull-witted. They could have headed off the smoking ban years ago by introducing the sort of ventilation systems for which they developed such righteous enthusiasm as the ban loomed, but that would have meant digging into their profits.
Now that they’re feeling the effects of that false economy, they react with an even more short-term solution: jack up prices across the board and load on the increases during busy times such as for sporting events and rely on the lemmings to keep on turning up. Then they whinge, complain and flex their political muscles when the lemmings start to do the maths. When a proposal that would have introduced valuable competition is put forward — cafe bars would have been an attractive novelty for those people who, post-smoking ban, have chosen to do their socialising at home — the publicans’ knee-jerk reaction is to block it. And then try to convince us it is for our own good.
The fact that our politicians no longer care about any interest but their own was in evidence again last week in the response of a number of cabinet members to the proposed new libel legislation. McDowell deserves credit for attempting a legislative reform that looks, strangely, like an effort at genuine progress. He is addressing our outdated and restrictive libel laws but, as a quid pro quo, it emerged last week that several cabinet ministers are demanding privacy legislation to curtai l media freedom.
All members of the public, no more or less than journalists, stand only to gain from increased media freedom tempered by the increased sense of responsibility that a press council — another McDowell proposal — would impose. Yet more than half the cabinet, including Brian Cowen, Martin Cullen, Willie O’Dea and Seamus Brennan, favour privacy laws and, it was reported, they cited their own hurtful experiences
at the hands of the media as justification for the restraint. They would, wouldn’t they? Foolish peasants that we are, we sometimes forget that the process of enacting legislation and running the country is there to advance the interests and careers of ministers, their friends and advisers, to help their families travel speedily to sporting events in state cars without hacks making a fuss, and to reward valuable fundraisers without troublesome questions being raised about the nature of political contributions.
Vague though the definition of “privacy” would necessarily be in any such legislation — there might, for example, have been a legitimate claim to privacy by the owners of the Leas Cross nursing home — the one certainty in the matter would be the prospect of shameless abuse.
If you needed any reminder of the need to resist “privacy” legislation, just tune in to the second instalment of the Haughey documentary on RTE1 tomorrow night. He kept his financial and personal affairs firmly under wraps through implicit and, as I discovered myself on one memorable occasion, explicit threats to journalists who asked inconvenient questions. And, as the programme indicated through his children’s words, he justified this with the conviction that he was our saviour and knew what was good for us better than we did ourselves.
The days when politicians feel free to manipulate the media and the law to protect themselves and their interests — both professional and personal — ought to be consigned to the past. But they are not. When politicians start trying to convince us it is actually for our own good, that’s when we really need to worry.
