Book Review: An overview of Fine Gael's relationship with the status quo
John A. Costello, former Taoiseach: 'A poodle of the Catholic hierarchy.'
- Saving the State: Fine Gael from Collins to Varadkar
- Stephen Collins and Ciara Meehan
- Gill Books, €24.99
IT has been claimed that when Éamon de Valera was asked what had been his biggest mistake, his reply was: “Not accepting the Treaty and working it”. We can only speculate about how different things might have been if Dev had indeed supported the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty.
Sinn Féin would not have split, and there would have been no Fine Gael and no Fianna Fail. And what a blessing that would have been. Instead, these two parties have dominated Irish politics in the Republic since independence.
Their legacy in socio-economic terms is a society of widening inequality, a bourgeois society and one characterised by what the late Dr Garret FitzGerald claimed (in an article written by the former Taoiseach shortly before his death in 2011) was the failure to develop a civic morality.
Instead of the Tweedledum/Tweedledee arrangement, with its proto-Thatcherite underpinnings, we could have had a proper Left/Right divide from which there conceivably could have emerged a “just society” - the promise of which (contained in a 1964 pamphlet by Declan Costello) fleetingly aroused interest in certain quarters in Fine Gael, and is now to be found among the detritus (along with the Democratic Programme of the First Dáil and the 1973 Kenny Report on land prices) of Irish politics.
No doubt this book by a political journalist and a historian (with very obvious Fine Gael sympathies) will provoke by way of a riposte a volume by two very different authors (with very obvious Fianna Fail sympathies) with a title such as Saving the State from Fine Gael.
Meanwhile, what are we to make of the present volume? Given that things happened as they happened, it is an excellent account (though by no means a comprehensively critical one) of a party to whose early leaders we do indeed owe a debt of gratitude.
When the legitimacy of a State is challenged in arms (the people had endorsed the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty) then strong, resolute leadership is called for. That certainly came from within the provisional government (Cumann na nGaedhael, which later morphed into Fine Gael, wasn’t founded until March 1923). It should not be forgotten that the anti-Treaty side in the Civil War was quite prepared to install a military dictatorship.
It is indeed true that the likes of WT Cosgrave, Kevin O’Higgins and Richard Mulcahy were dour, colourless personalities, utterly lacking in charisma. Michael Collins was the exception here, but Fine Gael’s “ownership” of Collins is open to challenge (about which more later). But these men, along with Arthur Griffith, were outstanding patriots and did indeed play crucial roles in “saving the State”.
They were also deeply conservative, and that was to leave its mark on the nascent State. Former UCC historian Joe Lee noted this in his acclaimed book Ireland 1912-1985: Politics and Society. “The regime publicly rejoiced in its commitment to the conservative conventional wisdom. ‘We were,” boasted Kevin O’Higgins, ‘probably the most conservative minded revolutionaries that ever put through a successful revolution’.”
That mind-set would remain deeply embedded in Irish political culture, and would infect Fianna Fail just as much, the “Lemass revolution” notwithstanding. And there’s nothing in this book that would compel a rethink. The preservation of the status quo was the order of the day, including the acceptance of a degree of ecclesiastical influence on public affairs, that would much later on prompt former Labour Party leader Pat Rabbitte to suggest that Ireland for long periods was in effect a theocracy.
The failures on the socio-economic front (you need only think of health and housing) have resulted in the growing disillusionment with the two civil war parties that contributed greatly to the massive surge in support (especially among young voters) for Sinn Fein in the 2020 general election.
The book, understandably, is organised around the personalities and policies of the party leaders, taken in chronological order. But for me the book’s real interest is to be found in the various controversies and crises with which the leaders had to cope.
If we fast forward from the foundation of the Free State in 1922 (with a Constitution that did not include a prohibition on divorce) to the first Inter-Party government of 1948-1951, then the “events” that caused real headaches for Fine Gael-led governments included most notably the Mother and Child scheme, of which much has been written.
It was a shameful episode, not least because the Taoiseach John A Costello showed himself to be a poodle of the Catholic hierarchy. In the midst of the crisis he told the Dail: “I, as a Catholic, obey my church authorities and will continue to do so”.
This harks back to the admission by the authors that a “notable feature of the early years in office was a decided shift by the government towards fostering a Catholic ethos in the Free State”. Illustrative of this was the decision by WT Cosgrave to consult the Archbishop of Dublin, and then showing no hesitation, following the consultation, to introduce a Bill in the Dail banning divorce.
Yes, the government had shown itself to be steadfast and even ruthless in facing down the IRA, and the decision to join the League of Nations in September 1923 was followed 25 years later (Fianna Fail was in power from 1932 to February 1948) by the declaration of a Republic (in Canada) in September 1948 were notable achievements. But on the socio-economic front, the Cumann na nGaedheal and Fine Gael (which the former had morphed into in 1933) governments were woefully inept.
One of the most bizarre episodes in the history of Fine Gael (we’ll skip over the Blueshirts) was the decision by the then Taoiseach Liam Cosgrave to vote in the Dáil against his own government’s contraceptive legislation in July 1974.
An inability to separate Church from State in legislating on socio-moral issues in a democracy was something Fine Gael couldn’t finally overcome until Enda Kenny was Taoiseach, and that’s notwithstanding Garret Fitzgerald’s “constitutional crusade”. Kenny was a surprisingly brave leader.
Yes, Peter Barry as Minister for Foreign Affairs, had made an important speech in which he sought to recalibrate Church-State relations in September 1985 at a luncheon in Iveagh House in the presence of the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Casaroli. But that was long before the Murphy, Ryan and Cloyne reports and the horrors they revealed.
So it fell to Kenny to demonstrate that the age of deference to the Vatican in Ireland was no more. He did this in striking fashion in July 2011 with his philippic in Dáil Éireann, an eloquent and powerful rebuke to the Vatican following the publication of the Cloyne Report on clerical sex abuse. It was his finest hour, along with his oversight of the same-sex marriage referendum in May 2015.
His successor, Leo Varadkar, also deserves credit for his speech in August 2018 in Dublin Caste in the presence of Pope Francis, calling for a “new covenant” between Church and State. And Varakdar’s handling of the Repeal the Eighth referendum in May 2018 won him deserved praise.
One other thing: a political scientist coming in from outside might consider it odd that a party, Fine Gael, could claim as one of its own a man, Michael Collins, who had been shot dead eleven years before that party was founded. In fact, as Colum Kenny, author of a new and excellent biography of Arthur Griffith, has pointed out, Collins was dead even before Cumann na nGaedhael was founded in March 1923.
Question: What would Michael Collins have done if he had survived the Civil War? Answer: Nobody knows.
For what it’s worth, I think of the later leaders of Fine Gael, Collins would have liked Garret FitzGerald (though the latter’s obsession with minutiae would have irritated the West Cork man) and Enda Kenny. He wouldn’t know what to make of Leo Varadkar. All guesswork on my part, of course, but that is characteristic of much that has been said and written about Collins since that fateful day in Béal na Bláth.
