Michael Collins Revisionism

Frances Fitzgerald, Minister for Justice,
Equality and Law Reform.

Justice Minister Frances Fitzgerald today addressed the annual Beal na mBláth commemoration in West Cork, a celebration of the life of Michael Collins, at the place where he was killed during the Civil War. Instead of honouring the man, or making a statement of vision, or progress, Minister Fitzgerald chose instead a thinly veiled attack on Sinn Féin and the parties of protest, in anticipation of the coming general election. It was grubby, disrespectful and low, reminiscent of the excesses of her predecessors Shatter and McDowell. What is it about the portfolio that makes its ministers so dislikeable?

Seanad Result: An Irish Identity Crisis

There are those who would argue that the Seanad result is a vote against the government, a protest vote. Others say that it is a vote in favour of reform. I think it runs deeper than that, however. What we are seeing in this country is a pattern of negativity and absence in our politics that has become progressively worse over the last ten years.

The problem is that there is no vision, no direction being articulated by our elites.  Elites have never been a problem in this country, we are a people seemingly happy to subjugate ourselves before our betters, whether that's the British, the Catholic Church, or Fianna Fáil, though each of them found that there was a limit to our patience.  Each represented a kind of vision, an identity, a belief that we could attach ourselves to.  With the British, we were a part of Empire; with the Church, we were a Catholic Leader country, with education, healthcare and the entirety of our social fabric tied up in the Church; and with Fianna Fáil it was the political extension of the late nineteenth century Gaelic Revival, a kind of Irish exceptionalism, we saints and scholars, a cult of the extraordinary that was almost fascist in its design.

Fine Gael and The Will To Power

Abolishing the Seanad is an intellectually lazy and
populist move that will compound our system's failure

I shared a plane journey to New York yesterday with a man working with NGOs, in the area of global co-ordination.  We talked about how difficult it was to control egos where righteousness levels seem to know no limit.  "People get into this," he said, "with the best of intentions - then they forget about why they're there, they forget about the children, and the starving, and the organisation becomes an end in itself.  You can get a lot done when you remind them about why they're there."

Shatter's Folly

The Minister has some work to do in making himself popular

The Minister for Justice and Defence Alan Shatter is being accused of an abuse of office for digging up some Garda dirt on a political opponent in order to undermine him during a television debate.  Government Ministers Joan Burton, Richard Bruton and Brian Hayes have been out defending the Justice Minister, but whatever the outcome, they are going to be privately acknowledging that this incident has begun to damage an already poor public view of the administration. But more on the politics later. This is not the first time Minister Shatter has brought the dignity of the office into question.