The ongoing hoo-ha over Aer Lingus allocating its Heathrow slots to Belfast at the expense of Shannon offers insight into how Fianna Fail manages to stay in power. It’s a twist on the old “divide and rule” policy–except in this case it’s the party in government that is divided. FF TDs with seats in constituencies clustered around “the Pale” (Minister for Transport Noel Dempsey, for example, with a seat in Meath West) either keep schtum or dismiss the plaints from the West as exaggeration (thus playing on the suspicions among some on the East Coast that they enjoy wallowing in their oppression in that part of the county).
Meanwhile, TDs from the same party in Shannon’s catchment area, spearheaded by Minister of Defence, “Corporal” Wille O’Dea, position themselves as the plucky opposition to a Dublin-based “establishment” remote from the needs of people beyond the M50 commuter belt.
Such a stance is particularly ludicrous in the case of O’Dea, a member of the cabinet that made the decisions leading to the very action he is now protesting. But this is not the first time that O’Dea has sidestepped the concept of collective responsibility for cabinet decisions in a flailing effort to buttress his local power base. When the PDs pushed to deregulate the taxi industry back in 2000, O’Dea told a meeting of Limerick taxi drivers to keep up resistance to the changes. When confronted with his duplicity, O’Dea offered the pitiful excuse that he didn’t realize his comments to the taxi drivers were being recorded!
O’Dea’s ad hominem attacks on the Aer Lingus’s chief executive, Dermot Mannion, comparing him with Oliver Cromwell, are both disgraceful and hollow. Hollow because the only secure way to keep the Shannon-Heathrow routes in place would be to re-nationalise Aer Lingus–and O’Dea isn’t going to forfeit his seat at the big table by making that demand. But his histrionics, and those of other protesting FF TDs, are probably sufficient to convince voters that they have a man “in their corner.” Likewise, the silence of FF TDs elsewhere convinces commuter-belt voters that the government is not getting worked up over howling from vested interests.
The government is in disarray–but Fianna Fail is thriving as both government and its own opposition (especially as there has been little more than a whimper from either Fine Gael or Labour). I suppose it’s one way to stay in power, but it’s no way to run a country.