When good men do nothing

I have a younger friend who is, like me, a passionate believer in the EUropean Dream. As a youngster he was happy to articulate his side of any argument about the politics, economics & social benefits of hugging Magyars and Spaniards. In college he widened (or narrowed?) his political horizons to consider the inequities and inefficiencies of Ireland and asked which of the available political parties had the organizational infra-structure to get things done. His analysis decided that Fianna Fail was far-and-away the most Effective machine and so he joined the party. In May 2002, two weeks before the 2002 General Election, our entire lab was on a train to Cork for a scientific meeting. Our Kevin bailed out in Portlaoise and returned to Dublin because the Fianna Fáil website had collapsed and he was the only person in the country who knew how to fix it. We used to tease him about being the next Taoiseach but three.

I've just finished earbooking Running From Office by former TD and Minister Eoghan Murphy. Murphy was a middle class kid who could have leveraged his network and straight white privilege into a comfortable life with two cars in the drive and enough money for beer and skittles. In his 20s he working abroad as an effective UN apparatchik when the 2008 financial crash, the bailout, the Troika set fire to Celtic Tiger. He could not look on from the sidelines and watch his country get flushed down the t'ilet. His family had no party political affiliation, so he was free to choose what colour shirt to wear. Unlike Our Kevin, he cast his lot in with Fine Gael FG, the other right-of-centre party who have carved up the political turkey with Fianna Fáil FF since the foundation of the State 100 years ago.

The subtitle of Murphy's book is Confessions Of Ambition And Failure In Politics. And confessional it is. The quality of political discourse in these Post-Twitter days is so debased, that people all over the Internet are damning the book as a self-serving, self-pitying, pathetic excuse for the fact that there are still homeless people [Murphy was Minister of Housing (. . . Planning, Flood defense, Pandemics, Local Government and Elections) for several years]. We don't have a TV, and indeed I've recently stopped listening to the wireless especially The News. But I remember at the time clocking Minister Murphy as someone who was not merely marking time and blaming others but was having new ideas about how to house the nation . . . and all her dusky dispossessed dependents. 

Politics is the Art of the Possible [Politik ist die Kunst des Möglichen, Otto von B.] and there is so much inertia built into any parliamentary democracy that it is difficult for any one person, as Minister of Whatever, to achieve anything at all let alone deal with a major systemic embedded long-standing political issue like Health or Homelessness. It is otoh very easy for shouty hurlers on the ditch to prevent progress towards a more just and equable society. Lord NIMBY stalks the land holding up the Children's Hospital, Water Infrastructure, Refugee processing. Meanwhile Lord NIMBY's lieutenants are being spiteful and ad hominem on-line about politicians. That's poisonous enough, but now NIMBY's minions think it's brave to spit on the children of politicians or go by night and shit on their family doorstep.

Eoghan Murphy fought his corner on behalf of us all for 10 years but then cried Enough! before he had a total breakdown. He went on to other things which will benefit from his drive and realpolitikal chops. My opinion is that, as with Othello and Charlie Haughey, he did the state some service.  It is no harm to the health of the nation that Murphy chose to create photo-ops of him surfin', wild-water swimming and trekking [he covered 2 weeks of The Camino back in the day]. Better than being performatively seen bulging out of a funeral-and-events suit at Teh Ploughing. So Murphy is gone for now: who among Ireland's young-and-fit will next take up thankless cudgels on behalf of us old-and-not-so-fit and the dispossessed? Also on the reading list But What Can I Do? Why Politics Has Gone So Wrong, and How You Can Help Fix It by Alastair Campbell.

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing" Not an Edmund Burke quote. And while we're on the pol quotes page “Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made”  Not Bismarck but John Godfrey Saxe (1869) so I don't need to rustle up the original German statement.