Joe Horgan Column
By Joe Horgan
Maybe it tells us a lot about Ireland maybe it doesn’t. Everyone
has been remarking upon the apparent strangeness of Bertie Ahern’s
outing as the ultimate creative accountant coinciding with a surge of
support for him in the polls.
He took money from strangers as a gift, from friends as a loan, brought
his publicity-hungry family into the limelight with his own words and
then said how upsetting it was that this had happened.
In response he got a bit more voter approval. He claimed that as Minister
for Finance he actually had no bank account but somehow saved ¤50,000
that he kept on his own person.
Ah good old Bertie, they said, he’s just an ordinary fella like
the rest of us.
In most other countries a lot of people pointed out he would have had
to resign. Here he moved seamlessly on and the voters lapped it up.
We have low standards the voices said. We have no faith in politics anymore.
We are more selfish than ever because no matter what he’s done we’ve
all got a few more bob and go on shopping trips to New York now and drive
SUVs and relax on our decking and that will do for us.
But maybe it doesn’t tell us that much about Ireland at all for
the truth is that — even amongst the percentage who vote —
Bertie’s approval rating is nowhere near half and far more people
disapprove of him than approve.
Perhaps what is far more telling than newspapers generating their own
headlines are such things as the show of rage displayed by our Minister
for Foreign Affairs recently.
His anger was provoked by a European committee calling on Ireland to account
for 147 CIA flights that had stopped over at Shannon Airport.
The inference was that the Americans might have been using these flights
for the transporting of prisoners.
What made the Minister so angry in all the interviews he gave was not
this alleged abuse of Irish territory but the fact that the European committee
did not seem happy to accept his reassurances that the American administration
had given him its word that there was nothing sinister about these flights.
Why, he angrily asked, was this not acceptable? The word. Of Condoleeza
Rice. George Bush. This American administration.
Everybody else’s reluctance to join him in cloud cuckoo land had
him beside himself. It also marked our own government’s connivance
in the use of the word rendition to mask the reality of torture. Torture
apparently is what others do.
Perhaps what is just as telling is the recent traffic jam south of Dublin
that saw some people stuck for up to seven hours.
And that is just people trying to get home from work.
It may in fact have marked the high-point of our modernity.
At long last we have entered the realm of urban legends. This is the Ireland
they have built. Vast suburban housing estates without shops, schools
or any kind of transport services.
This is real life for many, many people in Ireland today. Seven hours
to get home from work in a country the size of Ireland. We’ve come
a long way have we not?
Interestingly enough and perhaps again just as telling is that this comes
on the back of a recent report by the European Environment Agency.
Now just a few short years ago we were in a unique position in that we
were suddenly wealthy and yet our natural and man-made surroundings remained
much as they had for generations.
This meant that a lot of things were ridiculously decrepit but also that
much of our environment was pristine. We were certainly unique in this
corner of Europe in that regard.
We also had the great opportunity of being able to learn from the mistakes
others had made in terms of development and thus avoid the social disaster
of bad transport and planning.
What did we get? The planned destruction of the Tara Valley, seven-hour
traffic jams and a clogged M50 awaiting, amongst other things, the opening
of an Ikea store for which we changed our planning laws.
So far have we come in fact that this report now uses our capital city
as a worst-case scenario of urban planning.
We are now being held up as an example to others states of how not to
manage development. And that’s what they did with the unique opportunity
we had.
So from a country that now has more mobile phones than people, perhaps
we need to forget about our dodgy Taoiseach and what his popularity tells
us about ourselves.
Perhaps if we just stop and look around us we might see exactly the kind
of country they want to make us all live in.
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