Now, what follows will not make me popular. No matter. For, as the State continues to implode, it struck me, how very Fianna Failish this all is. For many things unite Fianna Fail -- a culture of a selective morality, of stroke-pulling, of short-sightedness, and, of course, of a pietistic reverence for the heroes of the Golden Thread.

But also something else -- something altogether more mystical and inexplicable: a love of failure. All Fianna Fail projects end in tears. For the party seems to be addicted to the allure of disaster, either to 1798 and 1848, or the great projects of the 20th-century, starting with the 1916 Rising. This in itself embodied most Fianna Fail vices, including the stroke-pulling: hence the covert role of the IRB, and the kidnap and silencing of the IRB's own Bulmer Hobson to prevent him thwarting the insurgents' plans.

However, other parties could lay claim to 1916. So, the Civil War was really Fianna Fail's inaugural failure. Ten years later, in government, it embarked upon a series of ruinous policies, starting with the Economic War. For a small country like Ireland to seek to confront the world's largest trading empire was vainglory at its most futile, for the British barely noticed the resulting inconvenience.

However, Irish agriculture was nearly broken by the conflict, and thousands of people were forced to flee the country.

Meanwhile, a revival of the Irish language became the centre stone of our education system, but with failure guaranteed from the outset. Children were never taught to speak Irish, but to pass written exams only. A new constitution declared this unspoken tongue to be the first national language, and also called the state 'Eire': but anyone who actually used that term about the state was then called anti-national, even though 'Eire' was on the stamps and coinage.

Neutrality was the only practicable policy in the early stages of the war, but the failure to protect the south-western approaches -- and the terrible loss of allied life there -- meant that skilful diplomacy was essential. Instead, de Valera's condolences on the death of Hitler was nationalistic folly of the most ridiculous and self-defeating kind. The political price was appalling. Ireland became a pariah state, which was excluded from the new UN, and from most of the Marshall Plan. After a brief and melancholy interlude with an inter-party government, de Valera was back in power.

Cultural isolation, crushing poverty, and emigration were again the prevailing norms (so reduced were the Irish people by this time that emigrants were routinely deloused before being allowed on the ferries).

In the 40 years after independence, mostly under Fianna Fail, Ireland went from being the 11th richest country in the world to being about the 90th. This was not through misrule by dictators, as with Albania or Portugal, but, uniquely, through democratic choice. With the Whitaker reforms, the 1960s provided some hope. But then we were back to abject political failure again, with Fianna Fail's refusal to prevent the IRA from using the Republic as an operational base. This made no economic, moral, cultural or political sense. It created a culture of tolerance which even the mid-Seventies' coalition government was unable to undo. And it wasn't just a failure of sovereignty: as a means of indirectly bringing about a united Ireland, it was another failure too, ending finally in the abandonment of the constitutional claims over the North.

During the Lynch-Haughey years, the State failed in the rules of law, of decency, honour and economic probity. We abandoned fiscal prudence and became a greater laughing stock than communist Poland. With the IMF at the door, emigration once again became the norm, as it had been for all but a single decade since independence.

Then came the Celtic Tiger, with Fianna Fail as its ringmaster, and again, with inevitable failure imprinted on its DNA. Two-up/two-downs in Drimnagh costing more than chateaux in Normandy meant only one thing: so, too, did unfettered borrowing, a depraved banking sector and the demented molly-coddling of the public service.

We're back in that familiar place called fiasco, to which the Fianna Fail compass one way or another always leads us, through stupidity, greed, nationalism or corruption. It is as if the party never acquired the consequence gene, and can't understand that if you get things horribly wrong, you will, sooner or later, pay horribly. Yet, they're invariably returned to office.

So, this Fianna Fail appetite for failure is actually an Irish one. We are a serial maker of collapsed societies, a habit which we conceal with a disingenuous vainglory, as we trumpet the joys of Irish culture and language (usually in English).

We were not invaded by Nazis, as was most of Europe, or conquered by the Soviet Union. We were spared the harrow of war, and yet, out of whatever available metal, we have repeatedly make rods for our own backs. Why, we even had our own needless war: 1970-96. We are, it seems, addicted to endless re-enactments of national dysfunction. In the words (almost) of the song: There was an old woman who lived in the woods, Fianna, Fianna Failure.

kmyers@independent.ie

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