If Fianna Fáil ‘ruined’ this country, nobody admits that it also built it
This is balderdash. If Fianna Fáil “ruined the country”, it also built it. Sean Lemass was the architect of modern Ireland. When he was elected taoiseach, in 1959, half the houses in this country had outside toilets and hot, running water was a luxury confined to one in three houses.
Lemass applied for Ireland to become a member of what is now the EU and embarked on a massive campaign of economic expansion. Education was key. Under Lemass, Donogh O’Malley brought in free secondary education and free school transport in rural areas, and he moved to establish the regional technical colleges.
Our next big phase of economic expansion, the Celtic Tiger era, began with the minority Fianna Fáil government of 1987, supported by Alan Dukes’s Fine Gael in opposition.
During the years that followed, this country’s economic fortunes were transformed, and, in political terms, this was mostly Fianna Fáil’s achievement. Foreign direct investment led to the growth of industries new to Ireland — financial services, medical devices, software — and created hundreds of thousands of jobs.
It makes me sick to see college lecturers sitting at their cushy desks fulminating that Fianna Fáil “ruined the country”, when it is mostly Fianna Fáil policies that have paid their wages.
It is easy for them to sneer, because nobody they know will contradict them.
Fianna Fáil belongs to a different class. Fianna Fáil is “not our sort”. In fact, we use our abhorrence of Fianna Fáil as shorthand to prove that we are the right sort.
Don’t get me wrong, I have many issues with Fianna Fáil. But they are not answered by Fine Gael. The only difference between them is class. Class difference informs the voting choice of most people who vote for the Civil War parties.
Fine Gael are associated with the “haves”, Fianna Fáil with the “have nots”. This despite everything: Fianna’s Fail’s mad espousal of PD tax-cutting; Fine Gael’s “constitutional crusade” under Garret FitzGerald.
The only exception are Protestants, who identify with Fine Gael whether they are “haves” or “have nots”. Bono is a prime example. I remembered Bono’s support for Fine Gael’s Garret FitzGerald in the 1982 election when I read that the journalist who wrote the cover story on Enda Kenny for Time magazine is a friend of Bono’s. Having the right friends may be as important as having the right policies.
As a Dún Laoghaire Protestant myself, I know how important it is to stay away from Fianna Fáil. My family voted for Labour, a party which, from the 1960s on, had a middle-class constituency. Having a similar class basis is the reason Labour gets on with Fine Gael. Fine Gael were OK in our house, too. My father knew Garret FitzGerald well. We voted for his feminist candidates.
I could have come home married to a woman, or pregnant by an unknown father, but I really don’t think I could have come home as a member of Fianna Fáil.
Nearly all the commentariat is similarly biased. One of my first assignments as a journalist was given to me by an editor in a national newspaper who asked me to approach politicians about what they read, but the editor cautioned: “It’s hard to find a Fianna Fáiler who has read a book.”
I thought this was hilarious. I repeated it all over town.
What was also hilarious was to hear friends and colleagues wondering about the late Brian Lenihan’s erudition, particularly in the classics. Two of them told me that, “had they known about his knowledge of Herodotus”, they would have taken a completely different view of his handling of our finances.
Most of us are pretty stuck trying to work out where we stand in the shifting sand of this country’s finances. But I don’t think class is a good place to start. Because changing the class of our ruling party doesn’t change anything.
Fine Gael is run along exactly the same clientelist lines as Fianna Fáil, a model built by Daniel O’Connell. It was so influential as a political model that it was exported to the US and found its zenith in the Democratic Party.
Clientelism has its advantages, in the form of people power, but it also has massive disadvantages, and we can see these in the histories of both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael.
But Fine Gael clientelism doesn’t matter as much to the commentariat, because they are among its clients.
The Government can get away with fighting against compensating Persona and Comcast, who lost out to Esat Digifone in the granting of a mobile phone licence by then Fine Gael minister, Michael Lowry, in 1997, although Lowry had received payments from Esat’s director.
If he had been a Fianna Fáil minister, the entire tribe would be sent into exile. But because it’s Fine Gael, it’s considered an isolated incident in the past and the Government will ride it out.
IT would be grossly unfair to blacken all of Fine Gael because of this chapter, though we should wake up to the potential for corruption in our political system. But nor is it fair to blacken Fianna Fáil, past, present and future, because of the banking crash.
The building of this economy, from the 1960s on, has been an extraordinary achievement, which has changed for the better the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.
It’s not surprising that today’s commentariat recognises none of this. They are ensconced in cushy, well-paid jobs and don’t even notice the businessmen and women who travel from business parks in nasty parts of Dublin and Cork and Galway to business parks in nasty parts of the rest of the world trying to sell things.
It’s hard to sell things. But unless we do — unless we sell software and milk and medical devices and the financial services developed in Charlie Haughey’s ISFC — we will not have any ABA schools or theatres or child benefit or universities, any of the things the commentariat gets steamed up about.
I have never worked in a nasty business park and I don’t intend to start now. But it turns my stomach to see this achievement rubbished by people who have never, in their lives, had to compete hard in any market place.
It’s the terrible unfairness I can’t stand. And the terrible snobbery. But the truth is that Fianna Fáil doesn’t matter very much.
What matters is that our political parties are clientelist. What matters is that our media are bigoted. What matters is that our political differences are tribal.
And, in a sense, Fianna Fáil’s rise in the polls reopens these questions, none of which were answered by Fine Gael’s triumph last year.
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