MORE than anything it was disheartening and dispiriting.
All of the things that a country in the middle of a recession does not need.
Our Government has pushed through any number of hard-to stomach measures over the last few years in order to plaster over the mess they have made during the last 15.
It hasn’t been in any way admirable and those who created the situation have got away with it. It has been deeply unfair.
Fianna Fáil openly cavorted with and worshipped the wealthy. Ireland in the ’90s and noughties was like Britain in the ’80s.
Greed was good, there was no such thing as society, there was no political morality. Bertie Ahern’s negotiating skills were essentially politically vacuous and into the vacuum came the amoral values of the market. We were in thrall to money.
But the mess was the mess and if the Government was simply saying that whatever the history the facts were now that it had no money, then backbench TDs must have felt they could do nothing but face into that. Pay cuts, pension cuts, health cuts, unemployment queues — it was painful, they argued, but there was no alternative.
They supported their Government. They had to.
The Fianna Fáilers rolled in behind their party.
Until what?
What do you think was the one line, these noble Fianna Fáil TDs, these soldiers of the Republican Party, felt they couldn’t cross?
If I say that at the same time as they finally said, enough is enough, parents of severely disabled children were marching in Dublin at protest to cuts in respite care, telling genuinely heartbreaking stories of hardship, sacrifice and love, where an occasional respite bed for a child was the one thing that kept them going, mentally and physically, you will probably think that was it.
They are after all, these TDs, as human as the rest of us.
Or perhaps if I say that at the same time the poster boy of Celtic Tiger financing, former Anglo Irish Bank chief executive Sean Fitzpatrick, the one who claimed he and his cronies were the only ones who’d had the ‘balls’ to build this country, was being declared bankrupt you might think they couldn’t stomach it anymore.
That those TDs felt that a whole nation having to pay for the crimes of a few, who would forever be legally covered, was just too much.
So was it the disabled kids or the stomach-churning travails of the Celtic Tiger nobility?
Which do you think was too much for the Fianna Fáilers, the republicans, the selfstyled representatives of the plain people of Ireland?
Well, that is where the disheartening and the dispiriting comes in because, of course, it was neither. What was too much for them was a ban on stag hunting.
And not just that but a specific ban which affected one particular hunt in Co. Meath which just so happens to be often attended by some of the new grandees of Celtic Tiger Ireland who, though the tiger is dead, are still grand and who, after NAMA, are likely to remain so.
They could take everything else those Fianna Fáilers but they couldn’t take this. They couldn’t take the gentry on the back of a horse being denied the right to chase a deer around the lanes of Co. Meath.
I have used this quotation before but it keeps coming back to me and seeing as the late John McGahern was one of our finest ever writers and a great chronicler of rural Irish life I will use it again.
In his wonderful Amongst Women, McGahern has the old republican Moran say bitterly of his years fighting for Irish independence, ‘what did we get for it?
A country, if you’d believe them. Some of our own johnnies in the top jobs instead of a few Englishmen. More than half of my own family work in England. What was it all for? The whole thing was a cod.’
I have met one of those TDs who rebelled against the stag hunting bill.
He came to see us when we weren’t too long here to help us out with a housing problem at a time when he cannot have believed there was much in it for him.
He was genuinely helpful, went out of his way. Like many TDs I expect he is truly driven by a desire to serve the public, is willing to work long, unacknowledged hours. But what goes wrong?
Where do they get lost? Why is it that, after all, it does all seem like a cod?