I See Where ...

Rural-reared readers will be familiar with the distant rumbling of tractor-drawn rollers being pulled along the roads on their way to roll silage fields at this time of year. As a child this sound filled me with a sense of foreboding until the implement came into view and the mystery of the origin of the sound was resolved.

I can hear that low rumbling again, only this time it is the impending arrival of the next General Election. Although some eighteen months hence the machinery has been greased and the first tentative test-drives have already taken place.

Minister McDowell seems to proffer that it is not the size of the dog that is important but the colour of the tail that wags it. While An Taoiseach seeks to keep the door open for a coalition with the Labour Party. Labour Party leader Pat Rabbitte apparently refuses to rule this out although anyone with an interest in Politics knows that Bertie (the man he labelled as “Ireland’s first non-English speaking Taoiseach”) is not high on his Christmas list.

There is an opinion abroad that many Labour back-benchers and those previously in coalition with Fianna Fáil would favour a return to power with their one-time bedfellows. Mr. Ahern, astute as he is, knows this and knows that if it were to happen it would be at the expense of Mr. Rabbitte as leader of the Party, and so he leaves the door ever so slightly ajar. Revenge, as they say, is a dish best served cold.

Whatever the make-up of the next government radical changes are necessary in public policy. Successive past governments have placed business and enterprise as central to the future success of the nation, apparently convinced that as long as we’re making money we’re doing well. They have foisted upon us the low tax system selling us the notion that to have more money in our pockets to spend as we wish is a noble ideal. They failed to point out that our new-found joy at our enlarged pay packets would be short lived and would come to an abrupt end once we stepped outside our doors and attempted to find some value for our money. Or, God forbid, when we attempted to access public services like health and education.

Why, when the country is supposedly awash with money, do these essential services continue to rely on pre-fabs for housing?

In this land of near full employment foreign investors continue to relocate their operations to other locations citing Ireland’s high labour costs as their principal reason for so doing. Labour costs may indeed be high, but when one takes into account that the average worker has to provide everything for his or herself, it is hardly surprising that wage demands continue to escalate.

An increase in the tax income of Ireland Inc. fairly garnered according to income and wealth, and a consequent increase in spending on essential services for all, might bring our Constitutional ideal of cherishing all citizens equally a little closer.

The wealth of a nation is not in its end of year accounts but in its people.

Business and enterprise are important for the provision of employment, products and services, but it is people who create the demand for such things. People feed the commercial life of an economy not the other way around.

Do I feel the need for change? Most definitely. Do I sense its impending rolling into view? I hope so, but I fear the distant rumbling is just the sound of the gravy train negotiating a twist in the tracks and slowing sufficiently (but not stopping) to allow would-be passengers to board. I hope I’m wrong, time will tell.

On another subject entirely, the events surrounding the recent “Love Ulster” march in Dublin have me incensed.

I’m not sure the riots had anything to do with Unionists marching down O’Connell Street. It may have been as a result of the deep feelings of isolation and disenfranchisement felt by residents of the north inner-city that have been exacerbated by the death of young Terence Wheelock in Garda custody and the local perception that a cover-up has been executed.

I honestly don’t know what caused the violence but mindless thuggery is just that.

If the march itself was the cause then it only adds to my sense of outrage. While my own views may be, and indeed are at variance with many of those held by the Unionist community, the last time I looked I was living in a free democracy – one that likes to think of itself as being all grown up now – where people are free to express their views and practice their beliefs.

There is no such thing as a la carte democracy. Either one espouses the ideals of freedom and equality or one doesn’t. There is no middle ground.

Furthermore, to re-hash history every time a view contrary to one’s own is expressed is at best childish.

While I must believe that most right thinking people uphold the equal rights guaranteed under the ideals of democracy, I cannot help but see that there is a section of our citizenry that needs to grow up and direct their destructive energies in a positive and constructive direction.

Perhaps in time they may see that it is no failure to agree to disagree and that maybe they’re not right all of the time.

Then we could all behave like grown-ups. Wouldn’t that be nice.

Roy Thompson.