Dear Esteemed Voices of Opposition in Government. (Yes, you lot).
We, the People of Tipperary (yes, that rag-tag, unwashed mob, who struggle to pay the rent, mind the children, endure freezing radiators and fruitless housing-hunts), write to you today with admiration.
Oh yes, you have mastered something truly impressive: the art of being perpetually angry and outraged, heroically indignant and spectacularly unhelpful. (Bravo, Three Cheers, Hip, Hip, Hooray).
You stand there in the Dáil, gesturing grandly, as though you are the last defenders of Irish morality and justice, and the nation watches on, in overwhelming fear and general anxiety, before wondering what the hell exactly were you offering yet again?
Awe-inspiring words (volume high, content light).
Your speeches soar with righteous anger. You denounce, you condemn, you rail against government failures. You paint bleak pictures of homelessness, cost-of-living, neglect, inequality. You raise the volume, you draw the cameras, you craft the headlines and welcome criminals into our Ardeaglais na nDlíthe (Cathedral / High Church of Laws), our Civic Palace of Stone and Voice, our People’s Drawing-Room, better known as Leinster House.
Yet, when the press lights dim and the papers close, the problems remain. Those health waiting lists grow – the rents continue to climb – the vacant units and houses stay vacant and deteriorate – and the young people we highly educate for free simply emigrate to the benefit of other states.
Is this your grand plan? A master-class in rhetorical fury, without a blueprint, without a map, without wheels that actually roll.
No plan, no policy, just performance
You accuse the Government of failure, and indeed with some justice. But then: what is your remedy?
You hand us soundbites, slogans, finger-pointing. You hand us anger and outrage. You do not hand us homes. You do not hand many people peace of mind.
If politics is a fire, you seem to delight in fanning flames of indignation, but offer no water, no ladder, no shovel to dig foundations to rebuild what has burned.
Procedure over purpose.
You treat parliamentary procedure like a stage for drama. Adjournments, speaking-rights rows, stand-off’s, delicious theatre. Critics dare to call it “chaos.” Some might even call it an embarrassment. But to you, it’s perfect. Because nothing says “principled opposition” like disruption for disruption’s sake.
You trumpet this as integrity. We hear the loud banging and the unconstructive silence that follows those bangs.
Then amongst the so called Independents; those great parliamentary wallflowers who would sooner walk barefoot across hot coals than appear in a live television debate. They know full well that the moment they open their mouths without a script, the entire country would witness the intellectual equivalent of a slow-motion car crash. So instead, they clutch their pre-written sheets, like a toddler clings to a comfort blanket, lift them up with trembling hands; while attempting to read aloud words they clearly had only encountered for the first time, just moments earlier.
What follows is a linguistic bloodbath: mispronounced names, mangled terminology, long pauses where they glare at the page as if the letters are rearranging themselves out of spite. They stutter, they stumble, they sweat, like someone trying to defuse a bomb using only phonics. It becomes obvious that the speech wasn’t written for them, so much as in spite of them. By the time they reach the end, the chamber is left wondering not what point they were trying to make, but how such a person was ever trusted with a microphone, a mandate, or indeed the ability to read aloud in public.
These today are, allegedly, our lawmakers. God help us.
And then, of course, we have the Opposition’s “Elder States People” Sinn Féin, those political veterans who behave as though their entire past was spent rescuing kittens from trees and mentoring youth choirs, rather than, whatever it was they were actually doing. Their official biographies glide gracefully from birth to present day, skipping over entire decades the way a dodgy landlord skips over mentioning mould in a rental advert.
These are the same people who now lecture the public about peace, ethics and moral leadership, while hoping no one ever dusts off the old photo albums from their glory days, which saw them remembered for blowing things up with great enthusiasm and who involved themselves in robbing banks and home grown genocide.
Listening to them now; polished, pious, freshly laundered, you’d swear they spent the 1980s running charity bake sales rather than attending strategy meetings in windowless rooms, lit by a single flickering candle. Their reinventions are so dramatic they make witness protection programmes look lazy.
And yet, with straight faces and quivering angry indignation, they condemn everyone else for moral failings. It would be funny if it weren’t so magnificently ridiculous, a whole troupe of reformed revolutionaries pretending their pasts were nothing more than a misunderstanding, involving fireworks and enthusiastic landscaping.
The people, now weary, watch from the sidelines.
We are tired; not of the problems, no we cannot afford that luxury. We are tired of the show. We are tired of the endless promises of change, if only the Government is shamed enough. Shame. Shame again, and then, nothing.
We, the salary payers, used to believe that opposition was a safeguard: a watchdog, a conscience, a balance. Now, increasingly, we suspect it’s become a puppet-show, put on for the people, yes, your employers, who are now a jaded audience.
What we the people would like you to remember:
- If you believe there is a crisis, propose a fix, not just an angry rant.
- If you object to the way things are run, say how you would run them, not just why they are wrong.
- If you seek to hold power accountable, do so without turning every debate into a circus. Clarity beats chaos.
- And finally; remember those of us who don’t work a 3 day week outside of Leinster House. The ones who count the days until payday, who worry where the next rent cheque will come from, who wonder if home will ever mean more than a roof and attempt to give us hope.
Without hope, loud speeches become hollow noise, and parliament becomes a theatre of shadows.
Yours sincerely,
We, the People of Tipperary, (tired of the Drama, longing for Delivery).
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