Paddy the Plasterer for President just because he’s Bertie’s friend?

ENDA KENNY delivered what many people considered his finest speech ever at the recent Fine Gael ard fheis during which he promised “a contract for a better Ireland.”

For some he may have evoked memories of Garret FitzGerald’s views expressed in Towards a New Ireland.

Back in the early 1970s Garret was promising a pluralist Ireland in which we would respect the rights of Northern Protestants and they would, in turn, respect the rights of the minority in Northern Ireland.

For years it seemed like the impossible dream. When Garret tried to speak to the Catholic Church leaders about the need for the legalisation of birth control and divorce, they would not even talk to him.

Cardinal Desmond Connell had been in school with Garret but was hardly prepared to even acknowledge his presence. The Pro-Life Amendment turned into a farce. Garret warned that it would lead to the legalisation of abortion, but his constitutional advice was rubbished. Yet it turned out to be accurate.

Fianna Fáil then tried to undermine the New Ireland Forum and the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985, as well as exploiting the divorce referendum in 1986. Garret seemed to achieve very little in political terms.

He was rejected at the polls in 1987, as Fianna Fáil decried the budget cuts that hurt the poor, the sick and the elderly. Of course, the people who were hurt most were the young men and women who were forced to emigrate.

On coming to power Haughey introduced further budget cuts, and he enthusiastically implemented the Anglo-Irish agreement that he had opposed.

The economy was turned around. Today, Ireland seems like a wholly different place from the despair of the late 1980s with a queue of people outside the American Embassy waiting to apply for green cards.

Securing the right to emigrate was hardly Padraic Pearse’s dream when he and his colleagues took over the GPO in 1916.

In terms of political ideology the two great protagonists of the last quarter of the 20th century were Charlie Haughey and Garret FitzGerald. Ask people who won that political fight, and most would probably say Charlie, but when the history of the period is written, I believe Garret will win hands down.

Even 10 years ago, if you had said that Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams would one-day share power and that people would sing God Save the Queen in Croke Park at a rugby match without so much as a murmur of disrespect, you would probably have been considered certifiably insane.

The Ireland that we have today was what Garret was talking about when he advocated a constitutional crusade for a pluralist Ireland. He was talking about building bridges to the Northern majority. He was not able to build them himself and he seemed to lose most of the political battles, but he fired the imagination of people who got the job done. That was real leadership.

In terms of morality, there can little doubt about the choice between FitzGerald and Haughey. Of course, Church leaders backed Haughey, or rather, allowed him to use them, possibly in the naïve belief that they were pulling his strings.

The whole sorry saga may well explain why our churches are now half-empty on Sundays. It is the upshot of their crass hypocrisy and their betrayal of the vocations of the tens of thousands of idealistic Irish people who joined religious life to serve humanity, not to serve as pawns of so-called superiors.

When people talk about political integrity, they’ll hardly talk about Charlie Haughey, not in a positive sense at any rate. It is a pity because he was a great administrator and a brilliant minister, but he destroyed it all by shamelessly feathering his own nest.

Maybe he was the greatest bucker of all time, in that he was never convicted of any of his crimes or misdemeanours, but he did not really get away with them either. He destroyed his legacy, and he knew that at the end.

If Enda Kenny was trying to associate himself with Garret’s idealism, it would be understandable, but I found myself recoiling in horror, because his call for a Contract for a Better Ireland reminded me, instead, of the Republican Party’s Contract with America in 1994.

That was when the Republicans won control of the US Congress for the first time in 40 years.

At the time some people thought the contract was a great political move. The Republicans had had control of the White House for 26 of the previous 40 years, which was 65% of the time, but they did not win control of Congress even once.

Eisenhower won re-election in 1956 by a landslide and Richard Nixon won an unprecedented 49 states in his re-election in 1972, while Ronald Reagan essentially won two landslides, but their party failed to win Congress each time.

Thus some people made the mistake of exaggerating the importance of the Contract with America.

In a public opinion poll after the election only 13% of voters said the contract influenced how they voted. Just 7% said that they voted for Republicans because of it, while 6% said that they disliked it so much that they voted for Democrats. Its influence was therefore minimal.

One of the architects of the Contract with America was Dick Armey, who was a professor of economics in the early 1970s at North Texas State University. I was there at the time and one of his colleagues became notorious for his abuse of academic freedom.

If his students learned nothing else in his introductory class on economics, he figured they should learn the importance of a contract. On the first day in class he would ask the students to draw up their own contract stipulating what they would do in his class during the term. If they did it, he would give them an A, and if not, they would get an F for the course.

This had a particular appeal to some. Three wise asses wrote that they would not attend lectures and would not sit any exams. In American universities the professor alone ultimately determines a student’s grade for a course, as they do not use external examiners at undergraduate level.

BEFORE the finals the professor wrote to the three students that he was under pressure from the administration and would personally appreciate it if they would sit the exam. Two of them did, and they failed. The other one stayed away, and he got an A for fulfilling his contract.

Newt Gingrich will be remembered as the main architect of the Contract with America, as well as his role in the impeachment of Bill Clinton. This was too much to stomach for some of the people who knew him best. One aide claims to have seen him having sexual relations with a secretary in his car in broad daylight.

Newt was such a hypocrite that he was ousted as Speaker of the House of Representatives, and “contract” became a dirty political word.

Enda Kenny doesn’t need gimmicks; honesty should do!

We have a Taoiseach who has been appointing his friends to state boards. The fact that they gave him money only makes it worse, and now they are more than trebling the gift allowance for politicians.

Fianna Fáil and the PDs are so blinded by their lust for power that they see nothing wrong with such behaviour.

What’s next? Paddy the Plasterer for President, because he’s Bertie’s friend?