Promise of the Proclamation can help us to right wrongs of our lost decade

ON SUNDAY I was at a ceremony in Arbour Hill commemorating James Connolly, a man who believed with all his heart that a free country had to exist for a free people. It was a moving ceremony, with a fine speech by Eamon Gilmore.

He remembered Connolly, and related his times and values to the challenges we’re facing now. “In this place,” he said, “we are surrounded by men and women who responded to the needs of their country — and their fellow countrymen and women — with courage; with selflessness; and with honour. Their sacrifice was not just for a free Ireland, but a better Ireland.”

“Each generation has its own challenge,” Gilmore said. “Today’s generation of Irish people finds itself called to serve at one of Ireland’s most difficult moments since Independence. There are no easy answers. There are challenging days ahead. Our future together depends on us acting together. We can do it, and we will, reminded that we are not the first to answer that call.”

One of the striking features of Arbour Hill is the huge stone wall that forms a backdrop to any speeches made there. On it are etched the words of the Proclamation from 1916. The signatories of that document all believed that a free republic of Ireland could be “exalted among the nations”. But the most striking words that appear throughout the Proclamation are words like sacrifice, valour, discipline. It’s clear from its tone and language that these were values that mattered to them.

I found myself wondering as I left Arbour Hill was it the loss of those values in the last 20 years of our politics that has left us in such a mess. I’ve probably said this before, but there’s one thing the last government, and its immediate predecessor, should never be forgiven for. I know, I know. Your immediate reaction to that statement depends on where you’re coming from. If you didn’t vote to get the last government out in the recent election, you’re probably thinking, here he goes again — the usual old anti-Fianna Fáil bias.

If on the other hand, you were one of the sizeable majority that voted to see the back of them, you’re probably thinking that there’s lots more than one thing we should neither forget nor forgive.

But I travel around the country a lot. And increasingly, the more I go round, the more I see things that all point in one direction. Lost opportunity. A decade and a half of lost opportunity. I think when the history of this period is written, the thing that will be most glaringly obvious is that they had the most incredible chance to change this country for ever, and they blew it.

Of course it’s true that they mismanaged the economy. Of course it’s true that they allowed what Joe Higgins calls a small and unaccountable elite do whatever they wished. Of course it’s true that they didn’t just fail to regulate, they threw regulation out the window. Every time they did something to grow the economy further, they lit another fuse in the time bomb they were building under the economy.

But in the middle of all that, they had wealth. Untold wealth, as it happens – wealth far beyond the imaginings of the people who founded this State.

There was no wealth then, and no prospect of it. By the time the wealth arrived, it was to be distributed by people whose cynicism was complete — they perfectly met Oscar Wilde’s description of men who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing.

In the name of social progress, they used the wealth of the nation to buy elections, with massive and ultimately unsustainable increases in things like child benefit. In budget after budget they gave away billions in unnecessary tax cuts, dangerously narrowing the tax base as they did it and creating a fatal dependence on taxes from the sale of property. They invented a hugely expensive savings scheme for the specific purpose of enabling it to mature within months of an election. And when they had nothing to give away they created meaningless (and damaging) diversions like decentralisation.

In their years in office, they wasted not billions, but tens of billions. It was like a spending spree with nothing to show for it at the end. It was chaotic, unplanned, lacking any sense of long-term vision or strategy.

And in a way, that was the real scandal – not what they did, though that was bad enough, but what they didn’t do. With the money that was available, there was an opportunity for real reform.

For instance, they could have completely overhauled our system of family support. It would have been possible, with money in the bank, to go back to scratch, to put a sustainable system in place that would have targeted resources where it was most needed. We could have maintained an element of universal support for all children, but ensured that more was available for those in the deepest trouble.

Years ago we could have put a proper national system of pre-school education in place. It would have been the one sure way to give every child a decent start in life, and we could have afforded to do it right, rather than the ad hoc, patchy measure that’s there now (and that is already in financial trouble).

WE could have built universal health care with the money we had, and made sure that all our schools operated to a minimum standard of accommodation and care. We could have put proper systems in place to ensure dignity for elderly people, and to protect families from being bankrupted by the effect of conditions like Alzheimer’s. We could have ensured that no-one had to die of neglect if they had cystic fibrosis or detectable and treatable forms of cancer. We could have regenerated the housing stock in communities living with decades of disadvantage.

You know what? We could have done all that and still have had modest tax reductions. But our leaders had only one thing on their minds, and that was to buy our votes with our money. Our failure was that we didn’t shout stop sooner.

If Connolly — or Pearse or any of the others — were alive today, and if the values etched on that wall still meant something to them, they would have to be entirely scornful of a generation that squandered so much wealth and left nothing behind but the loss of sovereignty.

But I fancy they would agree that we still have to do the things we could have done. We still have to keep the promise of the Proclamation, only now we have to do it with far less resources. That will, as Gilmore implied, require us all to rediscover things like courage, selflessness, and honour.

The men we honoured on Sunday died for their principles. The people who followed them squandered and in come cases corrupted those principles. There is a new generation now — not just of politicians, but all of us — who have to rediscover the values that others fought for. They died for them. It falls to us to live by them.