It all began this day last week with revelations about a game of golf between Sean FitzPatrick and Cowen, which were greeted as somehow being sensational. I am still trying to work out exactly why.
I suspect that there are few places in the world where a game of golf between a senior politician and a leading banker would be seen as anything other than simply the way the mighty and powerful pass their leisure time with each other. But then this country at the moment is a very disturbed place.
Of course politicians, bankers, captains of industry, judges, celebrities and the very rich have always belonged to exclusive clubs and they gravitate towards each other like moths to the light.
They enjoy each other’s company - the sense of power and achievement it gives them - with, of course, the opportunity to talk informally and off the record.
So pervasive is their need for the company of equals and the reassurance that it brings that, for many years, the powerful have joined exclusive clubs and secret societies - some of them featuring rolled-up trouser legs and secret handshakes. This is actually how establishments work the world over.
In Britain, invitations to socialise at 10 Downing Street are hugely prized. Even better is to be invited down to Chequers, the prime minister’s official country residence, for Saturday night dinner. Chief executives relish the boardroom Reaction when they let it drop that they and the missus are off to Chequers for the weekend.
In the US, Reagan and the Bushes, father and son, always entertained the rich and the powerful to golf and shooting weekends. (Perhaps it’s just as well in the circumstances that Biffo isn’t interested in double barrels.)
Of course, in our current understandable state of paranoia and public anger, the media wants Cowen’s sacrificial head; Bertie’s reputation is dead and buried and Biffo has to be next.
The subtext of the famous golf course outing in the summer of 2008 was the then-declining fortunes of Anglo Irish Bank, and the suspicion that somehow Cowen and FitzPatrick were conspiring on the fairways.
Could this, the media wanted to know, be where the idea of what later became the catastrophic bank guarantee came into being?
There wasn’t any real evidence for this, but the fact of Cowen and FitzPatrick playing golf together was apparently a good start for a round of media pub talk that ran for almost five days. Here was a scenario of which the media and the opposition - each for their own purposes - were not prepared to let go.
In the end, such was their desperation to get a result that, by last Friday, it seemed that golf clubs and golf balls had become subversive weapons. What for the media had begun the week as All the President’s Men had ended up looking much more like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
It goes without saying that the media storm last week did not change anything in the country, politically or economically, nor did it reveal anything about the origins of our crisis that we don’t already know.
As every bar-room bore in the country joined the phone-ins, the unavoidable sense that the pursuit of Cowen has become a sort of bizarre entertainment was unavoidable.
Down on the Leinster House plinth, the same cast with the same plot and the same soundbites were circling the microphones, hour after hour and day after day.
The concentration on the golf story undermined the excellence of The FitzPatrick Tapes, the book in which it emerged, and which in its own way is a fascinating document.
But, in some ways, what was most compelling about the past week was the display of our pointless obsession with the past and how much easier we find it to bury ourselves there collectively as a nation, instead of attempting to navigate to our future.
What happened is history and cannot be changed.
We can do nothing with it, but we can do something with what is to come.
In the context of where we are, the passions of the last week - the anger and the recrimination - however understandable, were wasted.
The supreme question facing this society as we head into an election is not where the bank guarantee came from or whether it had its origins on a golf course, but rather what we as a society are going to do with the mountain of debt we have been left with.
The bank guarantee and the EU/IMF bailout has indentured this country and its future generations to economic slavery.
Even now, almost two years on, nobody really knows where the debt ceiling is, and the notion that a workforce of about one and half million people is going to be able to clear it, is simply fantastical. Even the unborn are in debt.
In all the hours of radio and television and the acres of newsprint last week, have you heard anything about this, the real crisis?
When did you last hear any member of the opposition parties - currently lining up to form the next government - with any idea of how to deal with this crisis?
The only question we need to ask now Is whether the opposition parties seeking to form the next government will seek a democratic mandate to renegotiate our entire debt package, or meekly follow on where this government has placed us?.
This is the real elephant in the room, and it grows bigger and bigger with every passing day.
Tom McGurk - Sunday Business Post
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