Where is the new Whitaker to save us from betrayers of our republic?

ON RTÉ’s Morning Ireland during the week, Dr Garret FitzGerald said “the crisis is a very serious one, much more serious than we ever faced”.

There is a huge gap between what the Government is taking in and what it is spending, and this is a recipe for financial disaster.

“I see no sign of either Government or opposition facing up to that,” he said. FitzGerald initially made his reputation as an economist. That may well be why Charlie Haughey called economics “the dismal science”.

“Would you buy a used car from Haughey?” some people used to ask.

“No, but Garret would” was the standard reply.

Politically, Haughey won all the battles with FitzGerald, but Garret won the war. For the past decade he has undoubtedly been held in higher public esteem not just because Haughey was discredited over the manner in which he enriched himself, but more so because the new pluralist Ireland that Garret advocated in the 1970s is much closer to current thinking.

It was FitzGerald who negotiated the Anglo-Irish Agreement and thus laid the foundations for the Good Friday Agreement, whereas Haughey initially tried to undermine it in the most cynical way. He was playing with the lives of people for sordid political gain.

FitzGerald, on the other hand, was also the one who first advocated what became known as the Tallaght Strategy. When Haughey was elected Taoiseach for the third time in March 1987, it was FitzGerald who announced Fine Gael would back the Fianna Fáil government if it implemented the necessary harsh policies.

“The manner in which this Dáil will have to carry on their affairs will be different from any previous one,” FitzGerald said in 1987. “That is going to require, on our part certainly, a degree of goodwill and constructiveness in opposition greater than any of us in opposition have previously found it possible to accord and, on the part of the Government, necessarily a corresponding response in terms of a willingness to be open with the opposition and the House and to seek and rely on our support when things need to be done for the sake of our country.”

Alan Dukes implemented the Tallaght Strategy and some people think he got kicked in the teeth as a result. Haughey tried to exploit the situation by calling an unnecessary general election in 1989, but people recognised what was happening and Fianna Fáil — despite having enjoyed majority support in public opinion polls — actually lost four seats. Fine Gael made the greatest gains, winning five extra seats, so the Tallaght Strategy did not bring down Dukes.

He can be proud of it because the strategy helped to rescue the country from the recession of the 1980s. Within weeks of first coming to power in 1979, Haughey announced the country was living beyond it means, but he did nothing about it.

Instead he continued to spend as if there was no tomorrow.

His own financial situation was in much the same precarious shape. He was essentially bankrupt, but AIB wrote off most of the interest he owed just to get him to settle his other debts with the bank.

FitzGerald always claimed he did not realise how bad the country’s financial position was until he came to power in 1981. His government promptly introduced a mini-budget in an attempt to address the problem. Six months later they introduced the annual budget with an attempt to impose VAT on children’s shoes, which brought down the government.

We were then confronted with what was probably the worst government in the history of the State — Charlie Haughey and the GUBUs.

Within the year FitzGerald was back again, but the economy was in even worse shape. “The country was nearly bankrupt, but it was not half as bankrupt as it is now,” FitzGerald said this week.

The current Government has begun to recognise the need for more tax revenue, he added, but it has taken no real action. Instead it is waiting until the Commission on Taxation reports in the autumn. This Government is always waiting on somebody else to take the lead — whether it is in cutting expenditure, scrapping the voting machines or tackling the revenue gap.

There has been a lot of twaddle about taking hard decisions, but it has been empty rhetoric. Time and again the Government has funked the hard decisions. They are obviously fooling very few, seeing that 86% of the electorate are dissatisfied with the their performance.

That is the most dismal showing by any democratic government anywhere that I can remember.

We need a kind of Ken Whitaker to knock heads together, according to FitzGerald. In 1957, Whitaker essentially warned the Government that if it did not change its policies the country would be essentially bankrupt and we would have to rejoin the United Kingdom. De Valera took this advice and did what Whitaker advocated. In an attempt to placate the Fine Gael opposition, de Valera took the unprecedented step of giving Whitaker, a civil servant, full credit for the initiative. It became known as the Whitaker Plan.

At the time, if de Valera had suggested that all of the Dáil should go to heaven, Fine Gael would have wanted to go to hell. That was Irish politics as they had developed. Fine Gael blamed Fianna Fáil, but it was equally guilty.

In the midst of the Great Depression, when Fianna Fáil first came to power in 1932, de Valera cut his own salary by 40% and cut all his ministers’ pay by one-third. That leadership allowed him to take a hard economic line.

WHEN Garret FitzGerald returned to power in 1982, however, one of the government’s first acts was to accord politicians a 19% pay increase and then call on every one else to hold the line. That was the antithesis of leadership and the present crowd have gouged the country themselves and are now calling on everyone else to pay.

This week we had the one-day strike in protest against the pension levy. The strikers would have had little public support if the Government provided proper leadership. But this Government has squandered all credibility. People on the minimum wage are being asked to pay in the face of outrageous exceptions.

The constituency and office staff of TDs are exempt from the pension levy. Of course, in many cases the staff are members of their own families, which is an abuse in itself.

In addition, politicians are the only people who pay themselves pensions while still on the job — and that after only a handful of years. Other people must retire, or at least quit the specific job, before they can collect the pension, but the politicians have exempted themselves.

The manner in which they have been behaving in relation to pensions and their inflated expenses — which bear little relationship to their actual costs — is an affront to the republicanism to which they pay so much perverted lip-service. In a republic all people are supposed to be treated equally under the law, but greedy politicians have betrayed our republic.

They have been blaming bankers, but they are just as greedy and as guilty because they have been behaving without ethics, integrity or intelligence.