Fianna Fáil still calling shots from the grave

PERHAPS one of the most perplexing issues of this election is the continued influence of Fianna Fáil in its progress and probably on its outcome.

One might have anticipated that having been in government for the last 14 years and having turned an economy from one of the most dynamic in Europe into one which is effectively speaking bankrupt the party would have been consigned to the sidelines.

Add to that the destroying of the banking system and you would have thought that the only place for them to go was into the dustbin of history. But this is not the case.

What the party has somehow succeeded in doing is to set the agenda on which the election is being fought and they have created the situation where whatever government is elected the dead hand of Fianna Fáil will be sitting on its shoulder.

They have succeeded in keeping their definition of the source of our problems in the public limelight and they have tailored a plan to answer the problem as they have presented it. They have told us what they expect us to do to satisfy international bankers and money lenders and are now saying to the other parties, this is how high we want the Irish people to jump, how high do you want them to?

As the live debates have shown, the opposition politicians are unhappy to be fighting on this territory but Fianna Fáil has forced them to. Equally clearly opposition politicians are also struggling to answer the question.

Fianna Fáil didn’t get to this position easily. In the aftermath of the crisis they had difficulty in explaining their role in its generation. They tried a number of strategies. The first one was to blame Lehman’s. If this bank had not gone belly up we would have had a “soft” landing. The US government refused to come to Lehman’s aid, they filed for bankruptcy on 15th September 2008 and with that the world banking system went into meltdown. In a global world of integrated banking and financial markets it is not surprising that the biggest bankruptcy in US history might have this kind of impact. The only problem applying this to Ireland is that the governor of the Central Bank, at the government’s request, investigated the causes of the crash and dismissed the role of Lehmans. He said very clearly that domestic factors were most important.

The crisis was down to misguided government policies, a weak and ineffective system of banking regulation and the resultant reckless banking lending. Exit stage left, explanation number one.

So if you can’t blame Lehmans, then who do you blame? They tried to blame Joe Duffy for a while. Brian Lenihan even rang the director general of RTE to complain about him. It is great to think that bankers all over the world were tuning into Liveline for guidance and then basing their banking decisions on what the punters were talking to Joe about. They weren’t but what has since emerged about how they actually make investment decisions suggests that they might have been better off listening to him than some of the people they were listening to. However this explanation didn’t catch on either.

The bankers’ argument didn’t work, Joe wasn’t to blame either, and obviously you couldn’t blame the Government as that would involve taking personal responsibility, an underdeveloped concept in Irish politics. So what do you? This is where the master stroke came in. Blame the people.

But how do you do that? You have to be careful but there are a number of ways. One is in fancy technical language. It goes like this. In the socio-political context we wanted more money to be spent on health, welfare and education and we didn’t want to pay tax for it. You can also put it more colourfully and here Brian Lenihan and Mary Coughlan stepped up to the plate.

Mary started it. She told the national confessor, Marian Finucane, that “we took our eye off the ball”, not the Government mind you, but “the country”. Just in case we missed the point, she went on to say that “we were too exuberant in our lifestyles” and that what went on in the property market was “madness”.

Brain was next in to confess to Marian but it was obvious that he was not seeking absolution. He hadn’t done anything wrong as “we had decided collectively” to have a boom, a bubble in the housing market and low taxes. The recession, quite clearly from Brian’s point of view, was “our fault”. As well as everything else, sure didn’t we even want foreign holidays?

So we now find that we have moved from a situation in which the government might have been responsible for the collapse of the system to one in which it is entirely our own fault. Blaming “our exuberance”, first launched as a somewhat defensive reaction by an embattled politicians as an explanation of the current crisis, has moved centre stage and its implications have became the common sense for all proposed solutions.

The source of the problem is down to us, the people. And following the logic of this argument, if we caused the problem then we had to pay to solve it.

As a result the central issue in the election has been framed by Fianna Fáil and that is how we will pay for the crisis that “we” created. What is the balance between taxes and cuts that will satisfy the ECB and the IMF? An older Fianna Fáil might have referred to them as “our foreign masters”. For the new Fianna Fáil they are our friends.

There is a wider question in all of this and that is the public willingness to accept this explanation. Our acquiescence might be reluctant, it might be angry, but with the exception of some parties on the left there is little organised opposition to it. Any protests so far have been for the most part polite and tame affairs and in some cases notable for their poor level of support.

There have been one or two isolated incidents of egg or paint throwing at politicians and of ambushing them dressed in funny suits. But, as Brian Lenihan said, if this had been in France they would have torn the place to pieces. Here? Not even a broken window.

So could we be witnessing the resurgence of what historian Joe Lee identified in the 1980s as the Irish inferiority complex? Commonly found among colonised and formerly colonised people it is the belief that deep down we are incapable of running our own affairs. If we buy the argument that it was our exuberance and our greed that caused the crisis, then we are saying by default that we are incapable of self government.

The possibility of making a few bob come on the horizon, the whole population goes mad, and the government can do nothing to stop them. Every colonial power has believed this about its subjects and its ex ones. It becomes a real problem when the subjects come to believe this about themselves. It is interesting though that despite its history it is this sense of inferiority that Fianna Fáil might now be tapping into?

* Ciaran McCullagh is a Lecturer in Sociology in University College Cork.