Biffing Biffo

Because economics tends to be a tedious business I rarely watch programmes about it or read copy on it when it appears in the newspapers. But like most others I suppose, I have been drawn to the topic because of the dark cloud that hangs over our shared societal future. The only certainty is that there no longer is any certainty. Grim times ahead. We can not even console ourselves that the burden we are forced to bear will allow our children to escape it. They too will be forced to suffer; a bit like original sin in that sense, punished for something not of their making.

I watched Prime Time on Wednesday evening because Brian Cowen was due a grilling from Miriam O’Callaghan. Also because what sometimes passes for the Left in Ireland would have a chance to seriously critique the type of thinking that has produced our economic woe and which seems wholly incapable of successfully navigating a way through it.

What struck me about Prime Time was how well the Taoiseach actually performed in his interview with O’Callaghan. After the intense mocking he took on the Jay Leno show and elsewhere as a result of his ‘morning after’ debacle, it was widely thought he was chronically incapable of anything other than slurring his way through a serious interview. And if there was room for improvement it promised to lie in a slight shift from slurring to slugging his way through.

That was one image certainly put to bed. Cowen came over as assertive but not aggressive. His performance was all the more masterful because Miriam O’Callaghan is no slouch as an interviewer. There were times when Cowen had her on the back foot when the expectation was that she would leave him without a leg to stand on.

Cowen was not for taking his misfortune lying down. He came into the gladiatorial arena determined not to be eaten by lions and he wasn’t. His position distilled amounts to a simple proposition: bollix or worse that we have made of things don’t let the opposition sit there and pretend that they are going to do things any different.

The sad thing is that he is right. What Cowen probably understands is the logic of capital. As a former government Finance Minister he should. From the point of view of capital what needs preserved is not a few, or even many, bankers but the system of capitalism upon which the Irish economy is based. He knows that the other parties, even those nominally of the Left, will manage that system rather than subvert it and that they will be faced with the same type of challenges and decisions to be made that confronted him. He has put it up to them.

I had hoped that Joan Burton and Pearse Doherty between them might have proved him wrong but they didn’t. Doherty, who by many accounts made a brilliant maiden speech in the Dail where he hammered Fianna Fail economic strategy, was tested on national television. He is much better on the economic question than his party Master whose concept of economics is one plus one equals three and if you disagree you pose a threat to the peace process. Doherty outlined a number of alternative options his party would pursue but his figures did little to plug the fiscal black hole and tended to sound populist, another extravagant luxury the country can ill afford at this juncture. When he raised the issue of default but restricted it to the bondholders with AIB it seemed clear Sinn Fein were preparing to play it safe.

Burton proved no more persuasive. Her main concern seemed to be ensuring Doherty did not come up on her left cheered on by an emotional electorate. In that context she reminded the freshly minted Sinn Fein TD that his party was busy slashing and cutting the public purse in the North. It did not make Sinn Fein’s Left credentials look too strong. Few will buy into the fiction that the party is privatising its way to socialism under the tutelage of Che Cameron.

But Labour are no better, just more articulate with a greater degree of economic nous and less enamoured to power for its own sake.

That the leader of Fianna Fail should emerge as the most coherent, despite being the most wrong, witness for the economy on Prime Time, permits us a vision of the abyss we have fallen into with no way out.

Posted in: Brian Cowen