Does it matter that the Dáil is on holiday?

COMMENT

The Dáil adjourns this week as TDs take off on their annual summer holidays. Does it make any difference to you? Will you be any better off? Or will you be worse off? Does it bother you that the gates of Leinster House will be closed from now until late September?

Perhaps it doesn’t. After all, the major decisions about our economy are all now taken in Brussels and Frankfurt rather than in Dublin. Those decisions that are taken here appear to be doing more harm than good.
This week, Social Justice Ireland slammed the Government for taking decisions that have widened the gap between rich and poor.
Dr Sean Healy, who is head of that organisation, said there is “something profoundly wrong with government decisions that produce this lop-sided distribution of income favouring the richest when Ireland’s poor and middle-income people struggle to make ends meet”.
He quoted figures from the Central Statistics Office that show that in one year income for the poorest among us had declined by 18.6%, while income for the richest had increased by over 4%.
Is that just? I know we are in a recession but why is it that those who have least to give are forced by government decisions to give the most. This is Robin Hood in reverse – robbing the poor to give to the rich. It is nearly 50 years ago that prominent members of the Fine Gael party, such as Garret FitzGerald and Declan Costello, pledged to try and bring about a just society in our country. Their successors are doing the opposite.
I am blue in the face from saying this but it was not the poor who caused the recession. It was the richest among us, such as the bankers and the developers. Everybody knows this. Why do governments persist in putting most of the burden on the poor and on the middle-income earners?
My own belief is that the people who take decisions do not really understand the sufferings of the less well-off.
Did Dr James Reilly ever have to go without a crust? Did Simon Coveney ever have to walk in the rain with leaking shoes? Did Richard Bruton ever have to worry about how he was going to meet the next repayment on his mortgage? Did Enda Kenny, Michael Noonan, Leo Varadker or any of the others? Did Eamon Gilmore, Rúairí Quinn or Pat Rabbitte?
They all probably mean well but they cannot really understand the problems without having experienced them themselves. They think that if they take a cut of €10,000 or €20,000 in their annual salaries they are suffering with the rest of us. But if you are earning say, €150,000 a year, a cut of €20,000 will still give you a salary of €130,000 a year. You’ll still be earning far more than the average yearly pay in Ireland.
Then take all the former ministers from the last government. They are all on big fat pensions. They need never do a day’s work for the rest of their lives. Those who want to can walk into new jobs paying big salaries.
Take the former Fianna Fáil minister Dick Roche. This week in the Irish Independent we read that he is on course to earn up to €200,000 this year alone in his new role as a lobbyist for the banks. His job is to ensure the banks continue to get an easy ride. This salary will be on top of his €50,000 a year public pension.
Does Dick Roche know there is a recession? Has he any feeling for the man with his arse out through his trousers, the man that Fianna Fáil was founded to protect?
These are the people we elect in the hope they are going to look after us all in an equal fashion in a just society. But as another former Fianna Fáil minister put it all those years ago, “Some are more equal than others”.
I am not preaching revolution. I am merely talking fair play.
The aforementioned Dr Reilly is well able to defend himself, but I don’t think he received fair play from the opposition or from the media in relation to his financial affairs when he had a €1.9m judgement registered against him after agreeing but then failing to buy out a Tipperary nursing home.
This is a very complex issue but, in fairness to Dr Reilly, I don’t think it was his fault that his name appeared as a debt defaulter in Stubb’s Gazette.
The question about a possible conflict of interest is, however, a different matter. The minister has an interest in a private nursing home at a time when public nursing home beds are being closed. However, Dr Reilly’s explanation seems to be a reasonable one. He has been attempting to divest himself of his private nursing home interest but cannot for a number of good reasons.
I will give him the benefit of the doubt and move on to other matters. Perhaps it was all just a storm in a teacup.
What could be described as a calm in a teacup was the announcement by Micheál Martin of the new Fianna Fáil front bench. Who cares? Does it matter a tupenny damn that Charlie McConalogue is the party’s new spokesman on education? Charlie who? you may ask. Are you delighted or are you sad that Robert Troy is now the Fianna Fáil spokesman on children?
They usually give this portfolio to a woman because they still think that only women can look after children. The problem is that Fianna Fáil no longer has a woman TD. Please don’t let me hear you say, “bring back Mammy O’Rourke”.
But shows we are really into the silly season when the papers gave so much coverage to this non-event. It wasn’t always the same, but Fianna Fáil now has as much relevance as when TDs get their summer break.
May they enjoy their holidays, but stop talking about working for their constituencies through July and August.