Kevin Myers: The fool and knave that was FitzHaughey
It is two months this week since Garret FitzGerald's death, a decent enough period for us now to revisit his political career, especially since it is precisely thirty years since he first became taoiseach.
Garret FitzGerald's political life was in many ways defined by his primary adversary, Charles Haughey, who was easily the most unspeakable reptile to inhabit the zoo of Irish politics since Independence. It was FitzGerald's inability to damage Haughey which was his greatest and most astonishing failure. Haughey lived in sinful extravagance for decades. He had pilfered government money to set up the Provisional IRA.
He was conspicuously and unapologetically depraved. He bought an island with money that wasn't his, and was ferried to and fro in helicopters that he couldn't and didn't pay for. As Taoiseach, he created within his constituency an autonomous economy, wholly dependent on capital transfers from elsewhere. When the local Talbot car-assembly plant folded, he put the entire workforce on the public payroll. This wretched man was a sitting duck for a skilful politician; but FitzGerald barely landed a single meaningful blow.
Indeed, the poverty, timidity and inanity of our political system have now been exposed by our many Tribunals, if only at quite hideous cost. But most of their revelations could have been made by the inspectors of the Revenue Commissioners. It was FitzGerald's failure as Taoiseach to mobilise the resources of the government against wrong-doing which stands as one of the greatest indictments of his tenure in office.
This was particularly true for the inability or unwillingness of his coalition government to close down the Provisional IRA, especially after the Anglo-Irish Agreement, so brilliantly negotiated by Michael Lillis, had given the Republic a permanent say in the governance of Northern Ireland. This was now the time for the Republic to drive the IRA into extinction, and close down the South Armagh stronghold. Instead, we got more of the dickering and havering that had enabled terrorism to flourish down the decades. Three hours before the signing of the Agreement in November 1985, David Hanson, an RUC officer, was killed in South Armagh. Twelve years and some 800 lives later, the last soldier to be murdered by the Provisional IRA, Stephen Restorick, was shot dead not far from where young Hanson had been slain. That is a shocking indictment of the security failures of successive governments of this Republic.
During the 1980s, the abysmal FitzHaughey decade, the governance of Ireland was divided between a fool and a knave. In an infamously unprincipled alliance, Haughey and the Catholic Church successfully opposed the few putative "liberalising" measures of FitzGerald's government. Thus Ireland acquired a constitutional ban on abortion, a restatement of the constitutional ban on divorce, plus the longest new runway in Europe, paid for by the government, for the Marian shrine at Knock. FitzGerald's failure to skewer Haughey was, as we now know, quite disastrous.
Moreover, FitzGerald authorised a move that foreshadowed the lunacy that was to drown the Celtic Tiger in a financial bloodbath. In 1985, when government debt stood at 116pc of GDP, and unemployment was soaring, he bailed Allied Irish Banks out of its catastrophic involvement in the Insurance Corporation of Ireland, at a cost to the Irish taxpayer of £400 million. How much better for us all if AIB had folded then.
Yet all, all of a piece throughout, for AIB had forgiven Haughey his million pound overdraft back in 1979. Fourteen years later, AIB was similarly to write off further debts of £200,000, but this time incurred by Garret FitzGerald, after he'd tried (and failed, naturally) to make a killing on the stock market with the flotation of Guinness Peat Aviation. The Moriarty Tribunal was later to contrast FitzGerald's attempts to settle his debts (he sold his family home) with Haughey's refusal to pay any of his. But to be compared favourably with a sociopathic alligator like Charles Haughey is surely not much of a compliment. And what a miserable reflection it is on the two men running Ireland in the 1980s: both were bailed out by the very bank that in 1985 FitzGerald had himself rescued, and which was later to bring utter ruin to this Republic.
But FitzGerald's many failures as Taoiseach do not seem to have made much impression upon the general perception of him within the media. He is now generally regarded as the "good" Taoiseach, even though he left office with the economy in ruins, his liberal agenda largely unachieved and the IRA war-machine essentially intact. Moreover, the subsequent emergence of the PDs came largely at the expense of Fine Gael TDs. At bottom, FitzGerald was a colourful but hyper-ambitious Dublin Four academic who understood little about ordinary people: I doubt whether he had ever been in a pub or a football ground in his life. And contrary to his cuddly image, he was also something of a bully, often treating dissent with a high-handed arrogance. He was good at talking, poor at listening, and poorer still at doing. That he is remembered so fondly today speaks volumes about the motley crew against which he must be judged.
Irish Independent
