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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
3 2 April 2016
I
t’s a couple of years since I observed somewhere
or other that, if Enda Kenny chose to have an elec-
tion in the springtime of 2016, he would fight it not
against Micheál Martin and Gerry Adams but
against Pádraig Pearse and Joseph Mary Plunkett.
So it has come to pass, although this meaning of the
outcome, like most of the others, has been overlooked
or fudged in the moronic cacophony of the pol corrs,
who have managed to achieve a quite astonishing feat
of anti-journalism by reducing an unprecedented
moment in Irish politics to a succession of quasi-routine
news days.
I had been hoping to stay out of it. Having deliber-
ately abstained from voting for the first time, and for
the most part reading and listening to nothing but the
dogs’ and street-criers’ accounts of the fallout through
my open window, I imagined the whole thing would be
over by now and we restored to our normal state of non-
government by showroom dummies. When I heard the
outline of the outcome – some five weeks’ since, at the
time of writing – I immediately perceived that the
arithmetic presented an insoluble conundrum for virtu-
ally every one of the 158 freshly-elected deputies, not
to mention those we laughably call leaders.
What has astonished me (somewhat) is that almost
nobody mentions the impossibility of the arithmetic.
Most of the commentary since February 27th appears
to have consisted in speculations, hints and musings
about likely alliances, ‘exclusive’ information about
possible seductions, lists of demands and breathless
whispers of phone calls and texts, all delivered well into
April as if it were still February.
But there is no possibility – other than a theoretical
one – of a workable government being formed out of
the present Dáil arithmetic. This is so obvious that we
should be deeply concerned by the fact that it has not
become conventional wisdom and given rise to the
rather urgent question: what now?
When the pol corrs have not been talking up the talks
about talks aimed at a minority administration of Fianna
Fáil or Fine Gael supported by the other, or a National
Government of the two, they have been murmuring
There is no possibility of
a workable government
being formed out of
the Dáil arithmetic. It is
extraordinary that this has
not become conventional
wisdom and given rise to
the rather urgent question:
what now?
The Chassis
underneath the Stasis
Irish democracy is dying because the old
who care no longer matter and the young
mostly couldn’t care less
POLITICS
No horses to trade: new election
by John Waters
April 2016 3 3
about the feasibility of various permutations of
independents and others in conjunction with
either FF or FG. But it must surely be obvious
that this latter category of administration is
conceivable only at the most theoretical and
abstracted level of conjecture, since it would
require the harmonic incorporation of between
half-a-dozen and a dozen discrete and differ-
ently-minded entities (imagine a menagerie of
wildcats, badgers, rats, ferrets, foxes and, sit-
ting in the middle calling for order, Willie O’Dea).
Since most of the swollen ranks of the raggle-
taggle technicolour brigade have been elected
on the basis of either local grievances or
broader anti-austerity platforms, no govern
-
ment dependent on their continued concurrence
could hope to last anything more than a few
weeks. The first time a contentious issue
cropped up, the mavericks would be tripping
over one another to be first out of the door. In
the old days, mavericks were simply bought off,
but those days are gone. There are far too many,
and what would the IMF say?
And in case you have not already guessed
this from the track records of those predicting
it, there never was the slightest prospect of a
National Government. Fine Gael, having ped-
dled a localised relapse of the Celtic Tiger as a
national ‘recovery’, is hoist on its own rhetorical
petard: it cannot now claim that conditions exist
for the declaration of a national emergency. A
minority government of either of the theoretical
options is almost equally improbable. Two
words: Tallaght Strategy.
The dismal political fate this phrase invited
upon the head of its architect, Alan Dukes,
speaks to us of the perils of statesmanship in a
context where Darwinian principles obtain.
Nearly three decades ago, Dukes thought to
gain himself a place in history by doing the
decent thing and placing the national interest
before party-political advantage, supporting
the then minority Fianna Fáil government in a
programme of austerity that would have made
Claire Daly choke on her own fulminations. Per-
haps Dukes foresaw the electorate rewarding
his selflessness, or perhaps he had a more
Machiavellian intention, but in any event history
records the electorate as computing something
to the effect that martyrs should seek their
rewards in the next life. Fine Gael failed to cash
in and Dukes became political toast.
Kenny and Martin may not be Pearse and
Plunkett, but they didn’t get where they are
today without functioning memories and finely
tuned instincts for the meaning of past events
in the present. Neither of them wants to end up
like Dukes, wandering the post-political land-
scape, the lost soul of a former contender. This
is why all the continuing talk of ‘horse-trading’
is simply smokescreen: they must SEEM to be
trying to form a government, but both of them
know that, whichever of them ended up sup-
porting a minority government led by the other
would have signed his own political death war-
rant. There is, in other words, no horse.
The abortive Fine Gael proposal for a "part-
nership government", rejected as Village was
going to press, was no more than an attempt to
deny the result of the election. Any such
arrangement would amount, in effect, to the
nullification of electoral contests, since it would
mean that in future any number of parties and
candidates could engage in all kinds of debates
and disagreements during an election cam-
paign in the knowledge that, once the election
was over, they were free to carve up the cake
between them as though nothing had been said
and nothing had occurred. The idea of a 'rotat-
ing Taoiseach' amounts to a satire on the office:
why not - as an alternative to two periods of 30
months - simply have a night shift and a day
shift on an alternating weekly basis?
I have never been one for attributing a mind
to the electorate. We have had a little too much
of that, in 40 years of every kind of political shy-
ster seeking to invoke retrospectively some
alleged deep-seated will of the voters to
summon up all kinds of possibilities for unholy
alliances which had been either dismissed out
of hand in the proximate election or were so
remote from thinkability as to be in the realm of
comedy. And yet, this time around, it is as
though the electorate has indeed acted with
one mind.
From the beginning of this, there was but one
functional answer: a second election. But poli-
ticians hate and fear elections and will do
almost literally anything to avoid one. Thus,
with the collusion of the media, they pretended
the possibility of another solution. In fact, any
contrived solution will amount merely to a stall-
ing device, and will not last piddling time. Since
February 27th, we have been moving inexorably
and ineluctably towards a fairly immediate
The beauty of the
election is that it seems
to means something,
and yet this meaning
cannot be translated
politically
3 4 April 2016
second election, in which the same conditions
will apply – which does not rule out an alto-
gether different result. Fine Gael, had it the
brains and bottle, might by changing its leader
steal another few years of relative normality
before the crisis announces itself as
irreversible.
I have been morosely fascinated bythe abso-
lute inability of anyone in politics or the media
to say that we are in an entirely unprecedented
and bizarre situation, for which we have as yet
no words or names. It is as if the electorate-
with-no-mind had withal delivered an insoluble
mathematical puzzle to the political system, a
profound human-generated algorithm in the
cause of denying the politicians the recourse of
interpreting the outcome according to their own
requirements and at the same time saying:
‘Yes, there really is a ghost in the machine!
Boo!!’.
Once we look past the superficiality of the
relative strengths of the parties, the mathemat-
ics of the comparative permutations and the
unworkability of each and every conceivable
option, we see the sheer ingenuity of the mes-
sage delivered by the deep and common
unconscious of an electorate which, duped too
many times, ultimately trusts nobody trading
under the name of politician to do anything but
what the paymasters demand. The beauty of
the election outcome resides in the fact that it
seems to means something, and yet this puta-
tive, implied meaning cannot be translated
politically. This is neither, as the politicians and
pol corrs insist, an accident of the electoral
system nor a random feature of the result. It is
a deliberate element of the voters’ judgement,
which is not a positive endorsement of any-
thing, but quite the opposite.
The pundits pore over the figures and permu-
tations but, afflicted by the logic of their calling,
see things inside out; the politicians, being
attuned to every nuance of the meaning of
votes, must know more or less what they have
been told. Hence this unprecedented moment
of stasis. Those who have been elected feel
unconsciously that they have been chosen as
negative statements – against something or
someone, rather than FOR anything, least of all
for themselves. Thus they have been put on
notice that a rupture of some kind has occurred
in the imagination of the voting populace.
The meaning of the present stasis, by virtue
of the negativity of the election outcome that
preceded it, is much more far-reaching than
suggested by the mooted immediate conse
-
quences, e.g. the fabled ‘political instability’,
occasionally mentioned as though the bubonic
plague. The stalemate is not simply the acci
-
dental outcome of conflicts between rival
desires of a confused electorate. Being the con-
sequence of an outright negativity, its
implications could scarcely be more ominous.
It signals a form of resignation by some sec-
tions of the voting populace – resignation in the
sense of withdrawing its services from the cha-
rade that politics has become.
This negativity, however, is not gratuitous; it
does not exist for its own sake. It is not purely
petulant. There are reasons for it, in fact differ-
ent kinds of reasons emanating from different
kinds of negativity, albeit all adding up to a
single minus-statement out of which has arisen
the present inertia.
A journalist from a foreign newspaper asked
me recently if there was not a connection
between the election result and last year’s ref-
erendum. It seemed obvious, he said, that the
annihilation of the Labour Party contained
some such meaning, as perhaps did the elimi-
nations of such as Mr Shatter and others. On
the surface of things, I responded, you would
have to say that there is minimal evidence of a
direct connection, the two events being of quite
different character. And yet the circumstantial
evidence was interesting.
Just as it is risky to impute a single mind to
the electorate, it is a mistake to see a voting
public as the same ‘beast’ from one poll to the
next. In fact, the cohort that voted in the gen-
eral election would have been a substantively
different ‘animal’ to that which voted on the
marriage and family question put in the refer-
endum last year. TheReferendum Commission
noted that young people were “particularly
engaged” by that referendum. By contrast, in
the general election, based on figures con-
tained in RTÉ’s exit poll, it would seem that,
whereas the oldest section of the population –
65 and upwards – voted just short of its weight
within the general population (15.9% of the
overall vote, as against 17.3% of the popula
-
tion), the youngest sector – 18-24 – managed a
ratio of just over half its weighted value (6.5%
of the vote compared to its population share of
11.6%). The oldest cohort therefore voted at a
level 1.65 times that of the youngest, a ratio of
5:3. It is likely that many older voters who voted
in the general election voted No or did not vote
at all last May, and that many of the first-time
voters who turned out inthat referendum
abstained, like me, from voting in February.
I wouldn't go so far as tosuggest that dis-
gruntled people bided their time to use the
general election to make a statement on the
amendment alone. Nonetheless, it is possible
to see in the result a more complex, possibly
unconscious response of people who had been
lied to under many headings – especially eco-
nomics and related issues – who trusted the
outgoing coalition government to represent
them, believed what the politicians said about
defending their interests in Europe etc, but then
observed something close to the opposite play-
ing itself out. It is therefore not implausible to
read into the election outcome a message along
the lines of: 'You promised us backbone and
fairness and all you gave us was ‘marriage
equality’, which we never asked for!' This mes-
sage was not overt, but a subtle, slightly hidden
one, as befits a response to the bullying and
scapegoating which were the principal
recourses of those pushing last year’s consti-
tutional ransacking. I see the election result as
a sublimated roar of metaphysical rage emanat-
ing from the belly of the ‘permanent’ electorate,
some members of which may well have been
additionally motivated by virtue of finding
themselves invited simultaneously to reflect on
the visions of Pearse and Plunkett while being
offered a Hobson’s choice between Enda and
Micheál.
Yet, the referendum result, whatever you
thought of it, represented a positive outcome,
at least in the minds of those voting for it. It was
a vote for something, albeit not what most of
those voting imagined they were voting for. (In
POLITICS
Being the consequence of an outright
negativity, it signals resignation in the sense
of voters withdrawing their services from
the charade that politics has become
April 2016 3 5
fact, they were voting for the radical reinvention
of both marriage and family, for the rest of con-
stitutional time.) The election result is the
opposite: a vote against things and political
life-forms.
We contemplate, then, an electorate divided
generationally as though by a cleaver. The
younger sector is mainly detached from every-
day political reality, having nothing but
contempt for politics except in as far as it pro-
vides opportunities for identity-related
statements ('gay marriage is cool, therefore
good'); the older elements continue to see poli-
tics as it used to be, making connections
between how they vote and the complex well-
being of their country and their own
circumstance.
Here’s the rub: the totality of the energies of
the political system is now directed at the
younger sector – engaging, seducing, appeas-
ing. And yet this younger sector flatters itself
that it is too smart, cyber-savvy and educated
to be spoken for by the
gobdaws who people
the political bubble.
Meanwhile, the old,
who used to care about
stuff, are rapidly grow
-
ing tired of being
ignored in favour of the
young, who couldn’t
care less. The media
continue to write and
talk about politics as
though this rupture had
not occurred, as though the underfoot condi-
tions were exactly as they were in our fathers'
time. In reality we stumble through a post-polit-
ical landscape. Those who know and care about
how democracy actually works are dying off one
by one, and as a consequence Irish democracy
is in its death throes also. It will die as the Irish
Press once died, and for the same reasons. Its
death will perhaps coincide with the final
breaths of the Irish Catholic Church, and again
for the same reasons.
The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard,
writing in 2001, spoke of a “silent insurrection”,
in modern society, among the symptoms of
which is a refusal to be represented. He had in
mind the technologisation of modern life and
the consequent alienation of the human person
from a sociological reality that amounts to a
simulacrum of the real. Fifteen years on, his
analysis reveals itself as prophecy. Caught
between the real and the virtual, the modern
inhabitant of cyberspace is no longer represent-
able in the old way. Politics and the freedom
offered by democracy have revealed them-
selves, in this diagnosis, as ‘bit-part playing
and a shabby hoax’, for many cyber-savvy
young people a doltish activity in which they
have no interest.
Baudrillard talked about a strain of humanity
that had moved beyond freedom, meaning and
even identity, becoming subjects of a new order
who may use the language of politics but no
long recognise its purpose or usefulness in
their lives. Ideas like ‘running the country’ or
‘envisioning the future’ are alien to them,
because they believe that, like their iPhones
and laptops, the coun-
try is somehow looked
after, or looks after
itself, and the future
will be there waiting
for them when they get
there. They seem to
envisage a democracy
run along the same
lines as a Google
search: a random
series of benefits tai
-
lormade to your needs
and delivered like baguettes hanging on your
door knocker when you awake from your
dreams. “What interest”, asks Baudrillard,
“does the modern individual have in being rep-
resented – the individual of the networks and
the virtual, the multifocal individual of the oper-
ational sphere? He does his business, and that
is that”. As we are going, a future electorate, if
it even recognises itself as such, won’t care
about the content of anything so long as the
meaning is ‘cool’.
We take it for granted that politicians want
power, but nowadays, with power belonging
mainly to the extra-political domain – the
multinational corpo-colonisers, the bond-trad-
ers, the bureaucrats who slide invisibly on the
greased rails of totalitarian ambition – a new
kind of politician has emerged who fits this new
era precisely: one who wants position rather
than power, prestige rather than influence, a
state car rather than a principled platform, a
career rather than a legacy. Power has slipped
away through political fingers, not just to the
multinationals, stock-jobbers and bureaucrats,
but into a process little short of miraculous in
its stochastic, algorithmic nature, and this too
dovetails beautifully with the mentality of the
unrepresentable as described by Baudrillard.
In truth, the present much-discussed politi-
cal impasse is making no difference to the
stability or wellbeing of the country, nor would
it begin to do so were it to continue for another
20 years. It is even probable that things will
improve exponentially for as long as we con-
tinue to have no proper government.
What the election result ultimately conveyed,
therefore, was a multi-faceted disclaiming of
representation: different people, different cat-
egories of people, stating in their different
ways: none of you may presume to speak for me
anymore – some said this by abstaining, others
by voting against: i.e. deliberately elevating
Paul, not for his own sake but to deny Peter.
Hence the impossibility of the result. It is not
surprising that politicians no longer know what
to do with themselves or what they ought to
seem to stand for to best advantage.
Politics, as a result of these trends, has
arrived at an unscheduled midlife crisis.
Sheathed in skintight jeans and driving a red
hairdresser’s Ferrari, the politician has turned
his back on his natural constituency: those who
know about the past and its meanings and the
role of proclamations and constitutions, and
how these phenomena matter in the present.
Their heads turned by the scorn of the young,
our alleged leaders play the part of medallion-
chested lounge lizards who court the
mini-skirted, stilettoed bimbos who huddle in
groups at the disco giggling into their cocktails
at the ludicrousness of their suitors, the pursuit
of the unrepresentable by the reprehensible.
“What interest”, asks
Baudrillard, “does the
modern individual have
in being represented
Like their iPhones, the country is somehow looked after, or looks after itself
