So you think you have it bad? But for the grace of God, you could be a Fianna Fáil TD, writes Ann Marie Hourihane
IT IS indeed a grim day for Ireland when an incompetent and uncaring government targets one of the most vulnerable and needy groups in our society. Surely even our government could have found someone else to pick on.
We are talking about a body of people who are now in the winter of their lives. Their faculties are in terminal decline. Their short-term memory is dangerously compromised. They don't look good in photographs anymore. They are without a voice or a friend among the powerful, and so are cruelly ignored by their more active and able neighbours. They are largely unloved and frequently isolated. Their courage and curiosity are gone. Let's face it, the next stop for them, if they're lucky, is residential care. But that's enough about Fianna Fáil backbenchers.
Or maybe not. It is dreadful to think that taking the medical card off a few posh over-70s has caused the Fianna Fáil backbenchers so much stress, but their nerves are completely shot.
Bureaucracy is terrifying to them. For the young and vigorous, the simple filling-out of a form holds no fears, but to your Fianna Fáil backbencher it can mean sleepless nights and even hallucinations.
These people have given Ireland, so they tell us, the best years of their lives. Whether we wanted the best years of their lives is neither here nor there. The Fianna Fáil backbenchers have given us the best years of their lives, such as they were and whenever they were, and by rights they should now be enjoying a quiet retirement in that sleepy and well-appointed backwater, Dáil Éireann.
Everybody knows that. Everybody knows that how a society treats its government backbenchers is the true test of that society's compassion, and also of its priorities. It has to be said that on this issue, the record of many Irish governments, from all sides of the political divide, is not good. This record is becoming embarrassing for us in Europe: in America they treat backbenchers surprisingly well, considering that all Americans are, as we know, savages.
It is easy for a Cabinet to forget, but Government backbenchers have actually to live among that most terrifying of social groupings, ordinary people. Every community has its Fianna Fáil backbencher living, for the most part quietly, on its housing estates, avenues or up the suspiciously well-tarmacked boreen.
What now for these once-proud patriots? Will the neighbours continue to drop by and check on them? Will the kindly shopkeeper still leave the bag of groceries at the door? Will the minibus still come once a week to take them to the pub for a bit of an oul' singsong, or perhaps to one of the few surviving games of bingo?
When they take a tumble at home, alone, will anyone answer their panic alarm? Fianna Fáil backbenchers are for the most part an uncomplaining lot. Complaining is not in their nature and years go by without us hearing from them at all.
In our busy and all-too-frantic lives, the Fianna Fáil backbenchers have given new meaning to the term "silent majority" or, as they would have it, Silent Majority because they weren't brought up that way, you see. They were brought up in the hard school, or, as they would prefer it, Hard School. (Being a Fianna Fáil backbencher leaves you with an indelible love of capital letters, as any consistent reader of their Election Literature can testify. Or Testify.)
But now, you see, this group of modest, one might even say invisible, men and women is filled with fear. The Cabinet would do well to remember that many of its backbenchers are forced, due to economic circumstances, to live without the basic services that their Cabinet colleagues are fortunate enough to take for granted.
I know of Fianna Fáil backbenchers who have nobody to answer their telephones for them - no one at all, except their wives. They have no one to drive their cars for them, only themselves. They even - and this is truly shaming - have to process their own expenses.
All of this leaves them horribly vulnerable to attack. There are some Fianna Fáil backbenchers who go home after morning Mass, lock the front door and do not see another human being until the next morning. Although Marian Finucane very kindly started phoning them over the weekend, to see if they were all right. But you never know, when you pick up the phone, whether it will be Marian at the other end and whether she will get your name right, or some abusive gurrier, I mean constituent.
And yet this is the Fianna Fáil backbencher who has been placed firmly in the firing line by their own Government, which was elected on the unspoken but nevertheless firm promise that it would protect them above all other underprivileged social groups.
These are the people who have been thrown to the wolves. God knows the Fianna Fáil backbencher does not ask for much: simply to be left alone to enjoy his or her twilight years, with a nice pension to look forward to at the end of it.
Yet now these gentle souls are taking the hit for our years of profligacy and greed. It just doesn't seem right.