Have FF been struck dumb by McDowell’s self-serving twaddle?
It was both, and great credit is due to everyone involved the Taoiseach, his colleagues, his advisers, and our diplomats. The last six months will reflect well on Ireland in a whole lot of places for a long time to come.
But it's over now, and it's time to get back to our own politics. There can be a tendency, after a hectic period of involvement on the international scene, for politicians to regard what's happening at home as parochial and petty. But it's not. In fact there is a major debate going on in Ireland, and Fianna Fáil, of all parties, seem to have been completely subverted by it.
I've been bothered by the subterranean nature of this debate for a long time because I think the whole thing is so dangerous. But I began to realise just how deeply it has taken hold when I saw one of Ireland's great national institutions, the Irish Times, falling for it hook, line and sinker last week.
What am I talking about? Well, if you happened to see the front page of that august newspaper last Wednesday, the lead story was headed 'McDowell argues for liberal economic agenda.'
The story concerned a speech given by Michael McDowell to the IBEC dinner the previous night, and the speech in question was described as both 'powerful' and a 'rallying call' by the Irish Times' normally very astute political correspondent.
Are we now to infer from the Irish Times' choice of lead story that they are willing to accept what McDowell says as some kind of gospel? No doubt if Pat Rabbitte (for instance) were to make a speech on similar lines, the Irish Times would cover it, somewhere close to page 9. But I'm reasonably certain that you will never see a lead story in the Irish Times headed something like 'Rabbitte argues for social democratic agenda.'
What is truly remarkable about this is that the speech in question was a load of specious, self-serving twaddle, in which McDowell claimed credit for everything good that has happened in the last 15 years and, like the great propagandist he is, managed to convey the impression that all the ingredients of our success were started by him and/or his party.
I would love to have the space to look at the McDowell 'rallying call' paragraph by paragraph. He divides the last 30 years into two periods of 15 years each, and ascribes ideology to each period.
The first 15 years were social democratic and sneered at as a complete failure. The last 15 have been dominated by liberal economics and were a huge success. The rewriting of history involved in this analysis is remarkable no mention of the oil shocks of the 1970s, or the Lynch FF election manifesto of 1997, or the Haughey FF irresponsibility of the early 1980s.
And look at the list of things that (according to the gospel of McDowell) are part of the liberal (ie, free market) success story of the last 15 years: sound public finances, a new approach to embracing liberal market economics, a new low rate approach to personal and corporate taxation, social partnership, generous help from the EU, foreign direct investment and a stable currency.
Hands up anyone who recognises social partnership as an example of the free market at work? Are we supposed to forget that the most generous EU programmes from which Ireland benefited were essentially devised by Jacques Delors, a committed socialist? Since when are sound public finances or a stable currency the inventions of free marketers?
And are we really supposed to forget that the low taxes we all enjoy followed the expansion of the wealth of the economy rather than caused it?
Like any good propagandist, McDowell wants to have both sides of the argument, of course. So before going on to claim even more credit for the success of free market forces, he says: "No liberal believes in unbridled market forces. And no-one I know has ever argued for them to be unleashed. It is the essence of the liberal, republican tradition that the market is the servant, and not the master, of the people. No-one I know argues that Ireland is or should be an economy rather than a society."
Actually, the minister's friend, Judge Adrian Hardiman, now a learned and influential member of the supreme court and another exponent of 'liberal economics,' came close to saying precisely that in his contribution to the notorious Jamie Sinnot judgements, when he opined: "The constitution is directly concerned with such economic topics as natural resources, with the gathering and allocation of public money, with the human rights to earn a livelihood and hold property and with the regulation of these rights in the interest of the common good."
BUT no matter. According to the gospel of McDowell, it is possible on the one hand to believe that we cannot be "complacent and comfortable in the face of the great number of problems that still confront the newly successful Ireland. On the contrary, problems in relation to health, education, disability, housing, infrastructure, planning and criminality are all the more pressing especially now that we know that we can create the resources to tackle and overcome them."
But on the other hand we are supposed to accept that "market economics have not impeded or held back progress in (the health area). Nor have they contributed to worsening the other issues which were raised most recently by a clearly dissatisfied electorate."
So clearly, if liberal economics has worked so well, and if there are still all these underlying problems in so many areas, someone else must be at fault. It couldn't be the PDs or their philosophy. We wouldn't have rip-off Ireland, according to McDowell, if we had more free-market economics, more adherence to profit as a moral motive, more commitment to wealth creation as a primary incentive.
Where, you have to wonder, does he think all the money that has been stolen from Irish consumers has gone? Has he really forgotten that the golden age he talks about, the period from 1987 to now, began with a host of business and political scandals that spawned many of the tribunals we live with still? This shallow and superficial cant might have captivated the Irish Times. That's bad enough. What's really frightening though is that no-one in Fianna Fáil seems able or willing to stand up to it.
Dermot Aherne made a half-hearted effort in the immediate aftermath of the election (before McDowell's speech) but appears to have been silenced by the PD barrage. I don't know whether they lack bottle, or maybe it is just that they have lost all intellectual convictions. Whatever the reasons, free market economics will continue to dominate the political decisions of this Government, whatever they might say in light of the election results.
Michael McDowell might take satisfaction from that. The poor, the sick and the handicapped won't.
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