FF may be out of political purgatory, but we’re still paying for its sins

PRODIGAL party Fianna Fáil is no longer the pariah of Irish politics, but has it really learned anything from its time in political purgatory?

This time last year, following the publication of the damning Mahon Report, which found Bertie Ahern had given untrue evidence about the source of £215,000 lodged in his byzantine accounts, its political obituary was being written.

The epitaphs were premature. By January, the party had topped two successive opinion polls, becoming the most popular party in the state. Its recent performance in the Meath East by-election, in which Thomas Byrne secured 34% of the vote, has confirmed, beyond any doubt, that the party is back in contention at the top.

But does it deserve to be there? And what are the chances that the party, having assured voters of a complete rehabilitation, will relapse if it again enters government? As members prepare for its annual conference at the end of this month, it’s an apt time to consider these questions.

Perhaps the most unlikely aspect of Fianna Fáil’s redemption story is Micheál Martin’s successful reinvention from cosseted cabinet member to crusading opposition leader.

If the party continues to build on its recent opinion poll success, it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that Mr Martin could emerge from the next election as Taoiseach. In the private sector, prospective candidates for jobs are judged on their record and Mr Martin’s is a chequered one.

His most successful initiative as Health Minister was the introduction of the smoking ban, the first of its kind in the world, in the face of virulent opposition from a powerful lobby group, the Vintner’s Association.

Conversely, many of the problems plaguing the health service today, particularly the bureaucracy endemic in the HSE, can be traced back to Mr Martin’s time in office. Mr Martin set up the HSE with the laudable aim of removing political influence from health policy decisions, but the failure to rationalise staff, when the health boards were merged, has plagued it since its inception.

Not only were staff retained, they were promoted, with the ranks of just one grade of civil service manager, grade 8, swelling from six to 600 in a deal struck with unions. Another cock-up during this period was the PPARS payroll system which was supposed to cost €9m but ended up with a price tag of over €200m, although it was never fully implemented.

The scandal of 315,000 elderly medical card patients, illegally charged for their nursing home care, also came to light on Mr Martin’s watch. A series of extraordinary coincidences first resulted in Mr Martin missing a 2003 meeting, at which the scandal was discussed, while, the following year, a file fell down the back of a radiator in the department and never reached his desk. He has always disavowed any knowledge of, or responsibility for, the mess, which ultimately cost the state over €600m in compensation payments. It was during his time that Mr Martin also developed a reputation as an indecisive ditherer with Health Minister James Reilly recently claiming he had commissioned 117 reports, at a cost of €30m, most of which were left gathering dust on shelves.

While Mr Martin second-guessed policy decisions, he never second-guessed his cabinet colleagues and rarely hesitated before jumping to their defence when they were under fire in the media.

In 2007, after Judge Alan Mahon said there were “significant gaps” in Mr Ahern’s testimony, which was so ludicrous that people in the public gallery were rolling in the aisles laughing, Mr Martin joined the chorus of credulous cabinet members who loudly proclaimed their support of the then Taoiseach.

He was still singing from the same hymn sheet a couple of weeks before Mr Ahern finally stepped down in disgrace in 2008, averring his full “confidence in (Mr Ahern’s) capability”.

In 2009, when former Ceann Comhairle John O’Donoghue was accused of prancing around the world like a pampered Saudi Prince, Mr Martin said an apoplectic public was “losing the plot”.

In retrospect, considering what we now know about the excesses in the banks and the lack of oversight in government, maybe we did lose the plot about Mr O’Donoghue’s relatively trifling expenses.

A chastened Mr Martin last year unequivocally apologised for the sins of the previous government but he has always remained rather circumspect about what those sins were.

Certainly, a large part of the problem was the political culture at the time, which valued loyalty, even at the expense of one’s integrity and credibility, to party over country. His sudden conversion to political probity is also rather undermined by his flippant reaction to Judge Mahon’s unprecedented complaint that senior members of the last government had orchestrated a sustained campaign to undermine his work.

Instead of decrying the behaviour of myopic ministers, Mr Martin said he was unable to respond to the charge because no one was specifically named. It would be unfair to doubt the bone fides of Mr Martin’s personal and genuine commitment to politics. Most of his erstwhile cabinet colleagues slunk out of office in 2011 and were immediately rewarded with retirement packages, of combined pension and severance payments, of €300,000.

IT SAYS something of the mettle of the man that he has opted to remain in the political fray and fight to restore Fianna Fáil’s tarnished reputation. Conceding that, it is still legitimate to question whether the party that wreaked so much havoc on this country, can simply mumble a quick apology and spend a few years on the opposition benches, while the coalition mops up its mess, before the slate is wiped clean and it is again deemed worthy of office.

Mr Martin has made much of his party’s “constructive” approach to opposition, saying it will support government measures that are good for the country and oppose what’s bad, but, in truth, he had little other option.

The current government is in the process of implementing a troika deal that was signed, sealed and delivered by Fianna Fáil, so it can’t very well rail against every decision in the document. Latterly, the trenchant opposition of Fianna Fáil to a host of measures, like the property tax and water charges, suggest that this period of constructive détente is over and a return to punch-and-judy politics is upon us.

The current government should be rightly held to account for the decisions that it makes in office but the critique sounds rather hollow coming from the authors of those policies, whose gross profligacy in government necessitated the measures.

When someone drives dangerously and crashes their car they are put off the road and have to sit a test before reapplying for their licence. Unfortunately, no such safeguard is in place for political parties that write-off a country.

If Fianna Fáil has really learned a lesson from all of this, then I, for one, am glad. I just wish the rest of us didn’t have to keep paying for it.