Hello Roy, goodbye troika — perhaps we’ve turned the corner

IS IT just me, or do you have a sense that we’re turning a corner? That, as a nation, we’re beginning to have reasons to be proud? That maybe, just maybe, we can make it after all?

A number of things happened in the last few days that I believe give us reason to begin to hope again. The first was on Thursday, when the Taoiseach and Tánaiste told the Dáil that we were going to leave the troika and the infamous bailout behind.

I can still remember how I felt when the last government, after weeks of prevaricating and outright denial, finally admitted that they had done a deal to bring the troika to Ireland, and had handed over the management of our affairs to a third party. It was done by stealth, in the dead of night, without any proper discussion. And that was after months of political and economic chaos, that started with a bank guarantee decided while the majority of the Cabinet was asleep in bed.

Of course it had started years earlier, with a decade of reckless and improvident policies. There was a discussion on the radio over the weekend about the demise of the PDs, with one of their former members Stephen O’Byrnes recalling with shame how they had sat at the Cabinet table while Charlie McCreevy drove up public spending by more than 20%.

All those years of buying elections and driving up a property bubble led to the spectacle of a small and proud country, generations of whose people had fought and died for independence, sneaking into a deal that seemed as if it would place our future in the hands of others for a further generation to come.

Last Thursday, three years after we had sneaked into the IMF with our hands out, we walked out of the same deal with our heads held high. If this government never achieves anything else, they achieved that. They were entitled at the very least to a hollow laugh when they listened to Micheál Martin, of all people, lecturing them in the Dáil about prudence. He only just stopped short of claiming the credit, when he told the Dáil: “The Taoiseach and the Tánaiste spoke about the implementation of the programme but the bottom line is that the Government voted against 70% of the proposals contained in that programme. Every member of the Government condemned the programme but they are now slapping themselves on the back for implementing it with such aplomb.”

This Government honoured a contract — they had no choice. They honoured it so well that they were able to hand it back, without a single blemish, bang on time. And they chose to do that, and to face whatever the future brings as a sovereign state again. I felt it wouldn’t have been amiss if they had declared a national holiday to celebrate the fact that we are standing on our own two feet again.

A huge and heavy price has been paid in the last three years. The present Government is getting the blame for that, even though it was the last government whose actions guaranteed austerity, and is deeply unpopular as a result. But as much as I might disagree with some of the things our present Government has done, I’ve never felt ashamed of them. And all of us, I reckon, should refuse to forget the deep sense of shame and disgust we felt at the Government that destroyed our economy.

Of course there’ll be challenges ahead. Of course it would be great if there was a guaranteed line of credit waiting for us in the event of trouble. But we all know that any such line of credit would have come with a lot of strings attached — if it were free of terms and conditions, then of course the Government would have availed of it.

There are two things we have to do now. First, as they say in sport, we have to control the controllables. Whatever happens in Europe or Britain or America, we have to resolve that there will never be a return to the recklessness and hubris of old. Every chance we get to build something, we must build it — but on solid foundations.

The second thing we have to do as a people is to rediscover the concept of society. I said earlier that a heavy price has been paid in the struggle to stand on our own feet again. Too much of that price has been paid by people who simply can’t afford it. In the midst of the undeniable sense that we are beginning to recover, there are too many families in Ireland who are dreading Christmas. I’ll write more about this in the weeks ahead, but for now I want to say that our first duty — the Government’s first duty — is to begin to repair the pain and hardship that austerity has caused.

But Thursday morning saw the first ray of hope. And then on Friday night a second shot in the arm. This time the unlikely duo of Martin O’Neill and Roy Keane gave us something to shout about. It has to be the first time that nearly 50,000 people went to the Aviva stadium to watch what was going to happen on the sidelines rather than on the pitch. But they got to see an Irish team that was full of energy and no little skill.

There was hope in this performance, hope of a brighter future. Hope that we could perhaps revisit the glory days of the past when an Irish soccer team and its followers helped us to overcome a previous recession.

AND then yesterday morning, the announcement that our President will pay the first ever state visit to the UK. That too will be something to be proud of. I was in Britain when President Mary Robinson broke the mould by having tea with Queen Elizabeth II. Behind the pomp and ceremony of that occasion there were intense and difficult negotiations which led ultimately to the Joint Frameworks Documents. Those documents in their turn formed the basic agenda of the Good Friday Agreement.

Those of us who took part in those negotiations will feel a lot of quite satisfaction when we see President Higgins arrive at Buckingham Palace to be greeted as an equal. I hope that event will also come to be seen as yet another building block in Ireland’s new sense of pride and hope.

Amidst all the good news, I’m choosing to draw a veil over Ireland’s performance against Australia. A team trying to learn a new way of attacking completely forgot to defend, and we paid the price. At least it means we will go into next weekend’s match against the All Blacks as rank underdogs.

I suspect there’s at least a few members of the Irish rugby team that will be quite content to prepare for next week’s match against the best team in the world as complete outsiders, completely dismissed by all the experts. After all, what have we demonstrated throughout the last three years? When their backs are to the wall, you can never write the Irish people off.