IT IS over a quarter of a century since UK prime minister James Callaghan famously sought to play down the chaos of the 'Winter of Discontent'. The comments backfired, resulting in the legendary 'Crisis? What Crisis?'
headline that would come to define Callaghan's troubled premiership, which ended two months later.
Clearly, Tanaiste Mary Harney decided over the past few weeks that she was not going to make the same mistake in relation to the Winter of Discontent in the country's A&E units. 'Crisis? What a Crisis!'
would be a better tabloid summation of Harney's blunt statement last week that the overcrowding in A&E should be treated as a national emergency.
Pat Rabbitte couldn't resist pointing out that the Tanaiste was now beginning to take on the bewildered bystander persona so effected by the Taoiseach. It was hard to blame him poking fun. Her comments did bring to mind that hilarious scene from the Mel Brooks classic Blazing Saddles . . . where a black sheriff posted to a racist, all-white town escapes being lynched by its citizens by holding a gun to his own neck and shouting "the next man makes a move, the sheriff gets it." Afterwards, he marvels at his accomplishment in keeping the mob at bay: "oh baby, you are so talented, and they are so dumb."
But to be fair to the health minister, having volunteered for the job that nobody else wanted, she deserves a bit of latitude. Besides, she was simply obeying two of the key rules of political survival: 'If you're in a hole, stop digging' and 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em'.
Harney's political antennae are generally well-tuned. In the wake of theLate, Late Show pasting for the government on the health services, she would have immediately known that the time for quibbling with the Irish Nurses' Organisation over exactly how many people were lying on trolleys on any given day was long gone.
The embattled minister managed to come out with her hands in the air (or a gun to her neck), yet buy herself a little breathing space with her straight talking.
And, as one of the most experienced politicians in Dail Eireann, she will know that it is generally only a state of emergency that results in the Irish political system stirring itself to make difficult and potentially unpopular decisions. In the 1980s, it took four general elections, unemployment lines of hundreds of thousands, mass emigration and a crippling national debt before any party had the stomach to do the right thing.
Only when we were in the realm of 'will the last person to leave the country, please turn off the lights', did politicians finally stir themselves. Charlie Haughey and Ray MacSharry delivered the unpalatable medicine, ably assisted by Alan Dukes and the PDs. The result has been 15 years of unprecedented prosperity. The economy isn't the only example.
It took the near-collapse of Aer Lingus in the early 1990s before common sense took hold and the airline . . . previously run almost exclusively for the benefit of its employees and for politicians . . . was allowed to operate in any sense as a commercial entity. It was that emergency at Aer Lingus that also finally gave the government of the day the courage to dilute the Shannon Stopover. Coercing passengers to fly through Shannon was financially crippling for the national airline and more expensive and time-consuming for passengers, but it needed Aer Lingus almost going to the wall before politicians had the bottle to act. It's the same with the Kyoto protocol, the impact of which the government has ostrich-like ignored for years.
Now the potential for enormous fines on the state has forced it to take action. A decade ago, it was the tragic murder of Veronica Guerin, and the resultant public outcry, that created the political will to tackle serious crime. In the early 1990s, the government that wouldn't have dreamed of scrapping the first-time buyers' grant was willing to accept hugely punishing increases in mortgage interest rates as part of misguided and ultimately futile emergency efforts to stop the punt being devalued. Much more recently, it has taken the horrendous, almost-daily carnage to focus minds on the consistent failures to reduce road deaths.
The hugely frustrating reality is that for a whole variety of reasons (mainly electoral) our political system is bad at being proactive and making hard decisions to head off problems in advance, but often (though not always) better at reacting and in emergencies. The handling of the foot-and-mouth crisis showed that, while politicians of all parties have generally done well dealing with life and death issues in Northern Ireland. Don't forget, either, that we didn't have a second world war, we had 'the Emergency'.
So perhaps Mary Harney is on to something. Maybe her state of emergency declaration will "imbue" the A&E taskforce, and all the vested interests involved, with the necessary urgency to bring about improvements. It would certainly be long overdue.
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