Sharing in the outrage over expenses gradually gave way to disquiet at an element of mob rule, writes JOHN WATERS
HARD TO believe, but a decade ago Irish newsstands were briefly graced by a home-produced magazine called Spend, subtitled "how to and where". In the first issue, a local pop star, asked about the most indulgent thing he had ever bought, recalled purchasing "a really expensive Gucci dog-bed" for his wife's dog. He also shared details of his "last impulse buy": a WG HSE Range Rover. "It was very impulsive," he said, "because I already had a 4x4, so I guess I didn't even need it. But I just had to have one."
Does anyone now remember a time when such interventions were thought normal, when daily we were told that the country was “awash with cheap money”, a situation that would continue for as long as everyone agreed not to “talk things down”? Today we live in times changed unutterably, as if that dizzying 1990s nonchalance was but a dream.
In bed this week with flu, I found myself sucked into the changed mindset. Of course, even if John O’Donoghue’s profligacy did not fill me, too, with outrage, it would be necessary to pretend otherwise, lest the baying mob fetched up outside my window. But, as it happens, I am indeed, in my capacity as a taxpayer, quite outraged – and enjoying this outrage enormously.
In the course of these meditations, I no longer think of O’Donoghue by his name, still less as “An Ceann Comhairle”, but as “Johnny Cash”, a moniker I picked up in one of the redtops. I particularly relish contemplation of those chauffeured trips around Heathrow, and even more the idea of an embassy official being transported by limousine from the centre of London to entertain the Cash family for an hour at the airport. I delight in scrutinising every amount – €533 for the VIP lounge, €326 for the limousine – and estimating the proportion of my own tax contribution to it. At last I have found a substitute for calculating how much my house earned while I was away from it – a reverie that, sadly, I have had to abandon.
There is, then, a harmony between the general outrage and my own. Still, I would like to be sure we have not succumbed to mob rule. Eavesdropping on the discussion, however, I have difficulty discerning the precise offence for which O’Donoghue is being lynched.
There is no suggestion that O’Donoghue or his wife broke any laws or regulations to do with foreign travel by office-holders or public representatives. The Ceann Comhairle is not prohibited from accepting invitations from abroad, and it has not hitherto been considered inappropriate for a spouse to travel also. Some of the tabs seem a bit mad, but all expenditures were sanctioned by the cross-party Houses of the Oireachtas Commission. It is troubling that many expenses were unvouched, but this was how the system operated.
The issue of O’Donoghue employing extra staff and a political adviser certainly raises some prima facie questions. But all this, too, was sanctioned. Putting a throbbing ear closer to the radio, I gather that the reason O’Donoghue must go has to do not with any technical breach but something more elusive: “confidence” and “authority”. These, it is alleged, relate to O’Donoghue’s failure to adjust his lifestyle in accordance with the sudden shift in national fortunes.
But . . .
We had already been through O’Donoghue’s receipts for the period while he was minister for arts, sport and tourism, accepted his apology, given him a kick in the backside and moved on. The sting of recent revelations was that similar patterns of excess persisted, despite public disquiet, into the period of recession, while O’Donoghue held a position for which the requirement for foreign travel was less pressing.
Is this true? The present crisis in the public finances emerged gradually in the second half of 2008. O'Donoghue's foreign trips, which presumably had to be arranged some months in advance, ceased in March of this year, several months before the Sunday Tribune, which has made the running on this, published its first article about his expenses while a minister.
When you zoom in, the charge sheet seems to say something about a failure to understand the changed circumstances arising from the economic crisis. But only if he had anticipated this crisis before the end of 2007, and reined in his travel patterns accordingly, could O’Donoghue have ensured that he and his wife remained grounded from the start of the downturn.
It is difficult here to avoid the conclusion that, as a result of a moralistic auction among politicians on the run from public opinion, a man is being driven from office without being allowed to defend himself. Worse, some of the hanging party may themselves be implicated in attempts to resist changes that would have made O’Donoghue’s extravagances impossible.
O’Donoghue has become the latest scapegoat of our resolve to disown the recent period of excess. He is being lynched as an expression of collective shame and self-loathing, part of our efforts to expunge from the collective consciousness any residual awareness that we might in the recent past have lost the run of ourselves.