| The Joe Horgan Column By Joe
Horgan
However much the NHS in Britain may be a perpetually failing service
and however much free health care for those desperate for life-saving intervention
is a myth (private health is willing after all to save you at the flash
of a credit card), the NHS remains a shining beacon.
It is something British society can always take pride in because however
much it crumbles it is underscored by a principle and it is that principle,
of free health care throughout the country, which makes it so special. It
is the principle that gives it worth and the principle that makes British
society a better place for having it. No such thing, unfortunately, exists
in Irish society. Ironic that for once the habitual, slavish copying of
Britain would have brought many, many benefits.
It does though go to show how important the role of principle can be
and what an affect it can have on a society. With Bertie Ahern now the longest-serving
Taoiseach in Ireland after Éamon de Valera, it is clear that his beliefs
and principles must be having some kind of profound effect upon Ireland.
Strangely enough though, in being the archetypal modern, western politician,
Bertie Ahern is very good at steering clear of the very idea of principle
and is instead the eternal fixer and manipulator. He is a manager of events
and circumstances rather than a man with a vision of his country’s future.
He is happy for his country to reside in the principle-free realm of the
market place where profit is the one and only belief system. Bertie has
had moments of trying to reposition himself by making some strange remarks
about being a socialist but none of it has rung true and that little sideline
was quietly dropped.
But to suggest that this Irish government is a principle-free zone is
to do them an injustice. In many ways the principles driving them are having
a very profound effect upon Irish society and are at the core of what they
do. Indeed the very assertion by politicians like Ahern that they are free
of ideology is not true, for the beliefs they have in the free market and
the global movements of capital are clearly not value-free.
They may be free of ethics but there is principle there all the same,
the principle of the primacy of trade and capital and of the rights of money.
That aside though, this Irish government is deeply ideological. Its driving
force is not the glad-handing clientelism of Fianna Fáil, but the beliefs
of the junior partners in the coalition, the PDs.
The Progressive Democrats are in fact an all-round oddity. They garner
little more than 3-4 per cent of the national vote but wield enormous influence
in government, supplying both the Tánaiste and the Justice Minister. They
are the true, deep ideologues of Irish politics. If we are looking for a
belief system, a principle that is driving Irish society towards its destination
then it is to the PDs that we must look. It ain’t pretty but we have to
look all the same.
Strangely enough when we do look we find that the aggressive ultra-modernisers
of the PDs are a strangely old fashioned group. They are pushing Irish society
down the road of Starbucks and McDonalds, the land of suburban high street
everywhere, with a scary wild-eyed zeal, but do so out of dated, retro politics.
They are quite simply, 20 years later, Ireland’s Thatcherites. They have
stated that they believe in an unequal society and that society is in fact
like a football league. Some make the Premiership but others aren’t so good,
unfortunately. All fairly ludicrous stuff. As anyone who follows football
knows it’s no longer about how good you are but how rich you are. Which
is probably what the PDs actually mean.
They hold up as their model the deeply unequal society of the USA, where
large corporations hold enormous sway and where the poorest millions in
society get little or no health care. Some people may think that is obscene
but to those driving Ireland forward that is the price you pay for the enterprising,
value-free society. The point about these Thatcherite meritocracies is not
that the best get to the top but that the worst go to the bottom. To this
way of thinking the poor are poor because they are no good. So when Mary
Harney announces that private hospitals constructed under special tax breaks
and operating on the principle of profit would be appearing in the grounds
of public hospitals soon, we all knew what she was dreaming of. And it bought
a whole new fear to the thought of getting sick.
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