Opinion

Patrick Murphy: Our political situation is turning into Catch-22

Patrick Murphy

Patrick Murphy

Patrick Murphy is an Irish News columnist and former director of Belfast Institute for Further and Higher Education.

The Stormont Executive collapsed in January last year
The Stormont Executive collapsed in January last year The Stormont Executive collapsed in January last year

Our political situation has brought us to the point where we appear to be living in a novel. It reads like Catch 22, a literary work which suggests that the more we fight against the rules which govern us, the more we are bound by them.

Set in World War II, it relates, for example, how some airmen tried to show they were not sane enough to fly, so they could avoid dangerous missions. But since anyone wishing to avoid a dangerous mission was obviously sane, their argument failed and they had to continue flying.

"So," you say, "how does this relate to us?" Well, it appears that dissatisfaction with poor governance here has led to a realisation that alternative forms of administration are probably worse, thereby strengthening the case for a return to poor governance.

Welcome to Catch 22, Irish Style, a novel about an assembly which did not work. (Any resemblance to any other assembly, living or dead, is purely coincidental.)

The assembly in our story failed, because it had a wonderful record of maladministration, including political and financial patronage, petitions of concern, a reluctance to put much in writing to avoid freedom of information requests and a massive financial scandal over the sale of property taken into public ownership (and that's only the first chapter).

When the assembly collapsed, many said it was a good riddance, especially one party which took the credit for collapsing it, even though it had said up to that point how well it was working and how those who criticised it were negative.

When they then criticised it after its collapse, their negativity was somehow positive. This shows a remarkably creative attitude to the laws of physics, in that the positive or negative nature of an electrical current depends on where it is coming from. (Even the original Catch 22 was not that inventive.)

Instead, we were told, senior civil servants could run the place. However, if you have ever worked with senior civil servants you will know that while some of them are highly able, many of them could not go down to the shop to buy a pint of milk, without first forming a committee to ensure that responsibility for failing to find the milk could not be traced to them.

The failure to get milk would then be investigated by a high-powered team of consultants, who would conclude that lessons had been learned, the main lesson being that they were over-paid for writing what they had been told to write.

But then one day (we are in the second chapter now) a judge said that even able civil servants had no authority to buy milk, or approve planning permission for an incinerator, or anything much.

Many citizens became worried that no one was running society, although in fairness, no one had been running it up to then, because most of the running had been done in the political interests of the two main parties.

So, some people in La-La Land (where our story is set) said it should be governed from across the water and others said it should be governed from across the border. But since either option would annoy half of the population, the more both sides argued for governance from outside, the more they strengthened the case for a return to poor governance from the assembly.

So everyone said that it would be better to pay assembly members not to govern and in 18 months they received £9 million for staying at home to watch soccer on television, which is known as constituency work. Everyone agreed that it was probably cheaper than letting them loose on society and that it was probably the best model of governance we could expect - a government which did not make decisions.

In the absence of decisions, lots of people rioted and fired shots and threw petrol bombs and the politicians who were being paid to do nothing criticised the rioters but not themselves. No one blamed the model of government and wise heads nodded and agreed that the rioting showed we needed the return of the assembly and its poor governance.

The original Catch 22 ends with the emptiness of war, which is where Catch 22, Irish Style begins. Our novel ends with the emptiness of institutionalised sectarianism, which has not just placed us in a novel, it has imprisoned us there. Unless those who write most in our society write a different novel soon, we are likely to be here for some time.