Ireland After the Reign

"The People should not be afraid of their Government; the Government should be afraid of the People."
- from the film version of "V for Vendetta".

I must confess that I enjoyed feelings of schadenfreude last Friday - the 13th, how appropriate - as the count on the voting on the Treaty of Lisbon went ahead.

Nor did I feel in the slightest bit bad at having such ignoble emotions. The politicians of Fianna Fáil, our party in power, are so smug, vain and untouchable that it was only human to enjoy their discomfiture.

As I listened to their trembling voices on the radio and watched their faces of bone- white shock on the television screen I realised with amazement what was wrong with them. Like bloodless vampires they were, desperate for a fix to put some colour back in their cheeks.

Good heavens, they were actually SURPRISED at the result. I could barely believe it. These men and women, to whom we have entrusted the running of the country, these towering intellects were blind-sided by the overwhelming victory of the NO vote.

In the run- up to Lisbon the electorate were at first ignored and told nothing except that this would be good for the country.

No information, just an entirely unreadable document running into hundreds of incomprehensible pages and an assumtion that we would do as were told.

Then, when our doubts began to filter through to them in their splendid Fortresses of Solitude and as the NO campaign took off with gusto - then the bullying started. We had better do what was good for us: tip the forelock just as we used to, listen to our betters and don't upset the apple-cart.

That didn't work for me on so many levels. First and foremost the bulk of the angry noises were coming from Fianna Fáil. Now I don't want to be harsh, perish the thought, but I would vote for Hannibal Lecter before I would vote for this party.

Sure, Dr. Lecter had his faults but he was a man of wit, taste and refinement. He might dine on your liver but I can't for a moment imagine him getting his perfectly- manicured nails sticky by dipping into Clarice Starling's liver transplant fund to help him to continue his hedonistic lifestyle, as the phoney FF country squire Charles Haughey did with the fund for his 'best friend' Brian Lenihan. No, Dr. Lecter would have too much class for that.

As I wrote here a fortnight ago I was also more than a little put out that a supposed republican party would throw themselves in with European Union Commissioner Jose Manuel Barroso of Portugal, he who stood up in Brussels and warned us that if we weren't complicit in handing over what was left of our sovereignty that we would 'pay the price.' Now I don't like orders, but on the sliding scale I particularly don't like orders from guys like Barroso.

This chameleon will do anything for power. In the seventies he was running with and a member of the Maoist Reorganising Movement of the Proletarian Party.

When they split he went with another group whose long-winded name I can't be bothered writing out. I only have so many words, but suffice to say that 'Communist', 'Revolutionary' and 'Proletariat' were all in there.

No wonder this fellow liked the Lisbon Treaty. That goes on forever as well. Oh, and none of this made it into his official biography. Now there's a surprise.

The Times of London was watching though: 'A former Marxist militant who once denounced capitalism and preached the dictatorship of the proletariat."

Even better was the sarcasm evident in Italy's La Republica: "He has the makings of a good president of the EU. He is such a flexible politician that he started his career as a sympathiser of Communist China and ended up leader of an openly conservative party."

Like our own bunch he doesn't seem to care too much for the will of the people either.

When 84% of Portuguese declared themselves to be against going into Iraq he decided not to pay any attention to the little folks.

Hell, didn't he have some major sucking-up to do to President Bush, British Prime Minister Blair and, to a lesser extent, to Spanish Prime Minister Aznar?

To that end he hosted a pre-war summit on the islands of the Portuguese Azores. The Opposition dismissed him pretty accurately as a 'butler'.

Well, he must have a particular fondness for waiting at George Dubya's table because even though he is a stout enthusiast for a European Rapid Response Task Force it is only with permission from the Bush administration.

When it became obvious to our leaders that our concerns weren't going to go away, they tried the Barroso method: bully the suckers into submission.

They made a couple of mistakes here though, quite leaving aside the fact that the Irish don't take well to bullying. I suppose they've seen enough of it through the centuries.

No, where they really lost the plot was when Brian Cowen (who is minding the country while his ex-boss answers in a sort of 'Alice in Wonderland' manner, questions regarding his finances) up and piped that he hadn't actually read the document himself but that we could TRUST HIM.

Then Our Man in Brussels, Charlie McCreevy warms to and even augments the theme. He tells us that not only has he not read it but that anyone who HAS read it would have to be 'insane', but that we should TRUST THEM and go ahead and vote for it anyway.

So I trust that you'll forgive me my schadenfreude at their discomfiture on Friday. It really tells you how far they have become removed from what their constituents think.

The fact is that they trusted them once too often when they voted Fianna Fáil in for yet another term, only to see them once again break any promises they had made.

You can really only make eejits of people for a finite period of time. Nor did the other parties distinguish themselves.

How is it possible that out of 166 TDs only eight questioned this? Again, how far removed from the people they govern have they gone? (It kills me to say that Sínn Fein were the only party of any clout to ask for a NO vote and that was the only cloud for me on Friday's horizon: I was on the side of the Shinners.)

Last week two Englishmen declared that they hoped that Ireland would give a No vote because they felt that their personal freedoms depended on it. What a strange turn- around that was.

One was the great man and socialist Tony Benn; the other was the author Frederick Forsyth, who wrote: "...if the governors treat the governed with thinly disguised contempt, ruling by covert decree, then the governed will respond with dislike and mistrust." And: "To our east we have the Brussels way, based on a deep contempt of you and me and a belief that government is best achieved by tossing the plebs a document that no man can read with a flat order to endorse it if we know what is good for us."

On Friday the public spoke, and what they told our ashen-faced politicians was: We don't trust you. And in case that's not clear enough, let ME make it like crystal; like a deep blue summer sky: WE DON'T TRUST YOU.

To paraphrase Alan Moore's writing in 'V for Vendetta': "Noise is relative to the silence preceding it. The more absolute the hush, the more shocking the thunderclap. And our masters hadn't heard the people's voice for a long time."