Let’s have a new Tallaght Strategy to prevent economic meltdown

THE momentous events in the United States and the outrage in Limerick have been major distractions from our economic plight, but we are going to have to face it, and the sooner the better. A number of political commentators have called for a new Tallaght Strategy.

Phil Hogan of Fine Gael said recently he was sure Enda Kenny would be happy to help Fianna Fáil with a new Tallaght Strategy — as long as Enda was Taoiseach. If we don’t learn from past mistakes, we are going to be in serious trouble.

For the bulk of the first 40 years of the State, the partition question plagued our politics. Neither of the main parties ever produced any practical remedy, but both engaged in endless posturing.

“In regard to partition we have never had a policy,” Seán MacEntee wrote to Eamon de Valera in January 1938. Successive governments said they did not wish to coerce Northern unionists into a united Ireland, but they did nothing to try to win them over.

“With our connivance every bigot and killjoy, ecclesiastical and lay, is doing his damnedest here to keep them out,” MacEntee insisted. Some of their government colleagues were, he wrote, “subordinating reason to prejudice”.

Normal politics were suspended during the Second World War, but they resumed as soon as the conflict was over. In 1948, the Fine Gael-led coalition government launched its anti-partition campaign and de Valera went off on a world tour to upstage the government with his own campaign.

Posturing over partition was a diversion to cover up our economic failings. While much of the world enjoyed a boom in the 1950s, we became immersed in an economic swamp.

My early memories of the 1950s were of school friends whose fathers went to work in England and only came home on holidays, or of whole families who uprooted and emigrated.

For the first time this country was able to provide sufficient jobs for the people in the 1960s. In the midst of unprecedented affluence, Donogh O’Malley came up with the idea of free secondary education, which was right and necessary.

But then Charlie Haughey made an art out of political bribery with a whole series of giveaways to the elderly, such a free travel, free television licenses, free phone rental and some free electricity. Fine Gael tried to outdo Fianna Fáil by promising to remove VAT on food in 1973.

Fianna Fáil topped this in 1977 with the greatest giveaways of all in its election manifest promising to do away with rates on homes and car tax. This nearly beggared the economy. Within a couple of years Jack Lynch was essentially put out to grass and Charlie Haughey took over. He readily admitted the country was living beyond its means, but his opponents within Fianna Fáil would have gutted him if he did what he knew was necessary.

Instead of doing something practical about the economy, the two main parties engaged in a decade of hypocritical posturing. The real victims were the generation of young people who were shamelessly betrayed and forced to seek a living abroad. They are now to be found among the undocumented in the United States.

Fine Gael came back to power in 1981 promising to pay the housewives of the country. It seemed like another great giveaway, but wives would only be able to claim off their husbands’ earnings.

This would just have added another level of bureaucracy in order to take the money from the husband to give it to the wife. It was a crazy idea that was fortunately stillborn.

Instead of paying housewives, the Fine Gael–Labour coalition tried to introduce VAT on children’s shoes. That brought down the government in January 1982, and the country went from the proverbial frying pan into the fire.

Charlie Haughey’s GUBU government of 1982 was probably the worst in our history. After a series of incredible scandals, Haughey brought in an economic plan, The Way Forward. The opposition pilloried him over this and brought down the government. Fine Gael and Labour formed another coalition, which lasted until late 1986.

In the general election of 1987, Fianna Fáil lambasted Fine Gael and Labour over health cuts that hurt the poor, the sick and the handicapped. Haughey should have won an overall majority, but he had split Fianna Fáil by expelling Des O’Malley who founded the Progressive Democrats. They campaigned on a promise to form a coalition with Fine Gael.

Although Fianna Fáil came up short of the necessary majority, outgoing Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald promised Fine Gael would support the government if it introduced the necessary stringent economic policies. This became known as the Tallaght Strategy under FitzGerald’s Fine Gael successor, Alan Dukes.

Although we now know Haughey was lining his own pockets at the time, he was widely credited with having the guts to implement the Way Forward approach that Fine Gael had torpedoed in 1982.

Fine Gael supported the government in the Dáil on all major votes. Haughey demonstrated, however, that he was as politically greedy as he was financially avaricious. He called a snap general election in 1989 in an effort to win an overall majority.

The whole thing backfired badly on him, but the PDs were the biggest losers in that election. They lost more than half their seats. Haughey had done the dirt on Alan Dukes, who put a price on further co-operation. He insisted on a Fianna Fáil/Fine Gael coalition with a rotating Taoiseach.

ALTHOUGH the PDs were essentially founded to keep Haughey out of power, they jumped into the political bed with him and propped him up in government. But they lacerated Labour for going into coalition with Fianna Fáil 1992. Yet at the next chance, the PDs jumped right back in with Fianna Fáil again in 1997.

The PDs really stood for nothing but office. Michael McDowell pulled a masterstroke in promising to keep Fianna Fáil honest in 2002. The PDs doubled their seats that year.

But when Bertie Ahern was exposed with having pocketed ‘dig-outs’, the PDs acted as if it did not matter. At the very end McDowell did try to take a stand, but those he was supposedly leading balked, and the PDs are now history.

They began by offering to go into coalition with Fine Gael, and ended up with Fianna Fáil. Of course, there is really very little difference between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael.

In his book, One Spin on the Merry-Go-Round, Seán Duignan quoted a Fianna Fáil insider. “The difference between us and them is that we never go on with the ‘holier than thou’ bullshit,” he said. “You’ll never find us accusing them of being crooks and thieves, yet they keep throwing that stuff at us. To tell the truth, when we’re faced with one of these blasted allegations, the first thing we whisper to one another is, ‘Did we do it?’ ”

The country is now facing what could be the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression. We’ve had enough posturing politics. We need a new Tallaght Strategy. If this requires a rotating Taoiseach, let’s do it now, not posture for another decade until the country is beggared.