Leader column: What’s so tough about shafting ordinary people?

Green Party leader and minister for the environment John Gormley has been taking unusually large amounts of flak for his comment that there is a “civil war” between Ireland’s public and private sector workforces (though few seem to have noticed it’s a phoney war with the government and Ibec on one side and a stage army on the other). forth has no wish to add to Gormley’s troubles – not today, anyway – so we shall skip over what he said that is unique (for now) and hang him for what he also said that is far from new.

While making his comments the minister also said that there were some people in the leadership of Ireland’s trade unions that “recognised tough decisions had to be made”.

Tough decisions, as we all know, translates as skinning the public alive: pay cuts, heightened job insecurity, raised interest rates, special taxes and levies, cuts to public service, hikes in consumption taxes and so on. But what is so tough about screwing-over the public? After all, it’s what Ireland’s political classes have been doing since the foundation of the state.

Never mind the history lesson, let’s just look at the present. No mainstream political party in Ireland is offering anything even resembling a positive vision for the future. The best they can muster is the belief, nay hope, that the country will eventually come out of recession.

Of course, our problems won’t end with that. After all, we are regularly instructed that when the sun does once again shine on our shores things will be different. This translates as: “We’ll be keeping an eye on you this time, you bastards, so don’t even think about trying to improve your life. You owe us.” Wartime rhetoric, whether over imaginary civil wars or the environmental ‘crisis’ being as serious as the Second World War is a plain attempt to drum-up support for an austerity drive the likes of which we haven’t seen in three decades. This is your future, say our politicians: no money and no fun.

Welcome to Ireland where we have four parties with one policy – Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, Labour and the Green Party: Fuck you buddy! The only difficult decision in Irish politics is the process of finding a party worth voting for.