A win-win-win weekend as bailout exit gives us all a sporting chance

THIS weekend, justice was done. Sam Bailey won X Factor, Munster had a thrilling, last-gasp victory over Perpignan to keep Heineken Cup hopes alive, and we exited the bail-out, heads held high. All in all, highly satisfying.

It wasn’t easy to keep abreast of events: endless protest in our house when I insisted on watching the Taoiseach’s address just as Dermot O’Leary was announcing the winner of the X Factor.

We’d backed Sam Bailey from the beginning, and watched her grow and develop throughout that gruelling competition. It’s satisfying watching someone perfectly ordinary doing something perfectly extraordinary.

I only hope Sam’s allowed to build a decent career on the back of it.

It had been easier on Saturday to concentrate on the rugby from the French-Spanish border, although that didn’t make it easier to watch. I don’t think I’ve ever been as incensed by the actions of a referee — he seemed to be bending over backwards to deny Munster at every turn.

But sheer resilience and leadership kept them going. I know I’ve said it here before, but, surely, there’s no team in any code, in any part of the world, that you’d rather follow.

They combine heartbreak with exhilaration, excitement with frustration, and sheer class with occasional disasters. The commitment to the red jersey elevates Munster rugby to more than just a game.

It was a weekend of anniversaries, too. It was the 20th anniversary of the signing of the Downing Street Declaration, and, I must say, that brought back memories. Everyone, nowadays, seems to believe that peace in Ireland is the legacy of Bertie Ahern. But nothing he achieved would have been possible without the extraordinary process — worth a book or two in its own right — that led to Downing Street in December, 1993.

That declaration was a triumph for one of Bertie’s almost forgotten predecessors, Albert Reynolds, who was entirely steadfast and focused on an impossible outcome. It was a triumph, too, for Dick Spring, who became a master of difficult negotiation and timing.

People forget now that the Downing Street Declaration was negotiated with a British government, led by John Major, that was frequently dependent on Unionist votes in the House of Commons. That made the negotiations often tense and difficult, and the outcome — which led directly to the first IRA ceasefire and to the permanent Loyalist ceasefire — all the more remarkable.

There was another anniversary last weekend, not much noticed, perhaps, but an interesting bookend to the exiting of the bailout.

On Dec 14, 1982, Garret Fitzgerald and Dick Spring formed a government. It’s a date I remember because my youngest daughter, Sarah, was born the same day (another reason for riotous behaviour in our house at the weekend).

That government inherited a terrible mess. It followed the Haughey government that had cooked the books in 1981, and which had driven up public spending to unsustainable levels, even though it knew we were on the brink of a crisis.

The Fitzgerald-Spring government, often criticised since, nevertheless did a huge amount in retaining international confidence in the Irish economy, and forged the first real breakthrough in Anglo-Irish relations since the War of Independence.

It seems to be the lot of quite a few governments to come to office when Fianna Fáil have wrecked the economy, to clean up their mess, and then to be turfed out as soon as the job is done.

I imagine that thought is very much in the mind of the present government right now, and was, perhaps, in the back of the Taoiseach’s mind as he addressed the nation on Sunday night.

There’s been a huge amount of sneering about that address. Before and after, it was dismissed as meaningless. Taoisigh, it seems, are only supposed to address the nation in times of crisis.

And in an era in which television only seems to work if there is endless colour and flashing lights, a plain, simple address, by a man looking into the camera, is hopelessly old-fashioned.

But it helps for the leaders of our country to make the point, again and again, that we have to plan our way into the prosperous future that people deserve. And there were a couple of lines in that speech that I see as absolutely fundamental. The Taoiseach said: “It will be a plan based on enterprise, not on speculation. A plan to ensure that never again will Ireland’s stability be threatened by speculation and greed. We are never going back to that culture.”

We have to be totally clear about that. We can see only too clearly, from some of the scandals that continue to unfold — including in the sector in which I work — that the culture of the past is still not quite dead.

The spectre of that awful sense of entitlement that pervaded the ‘good old days’ has to be buried. If we learn no other lesson from the collapse of a policy of self-centredness and a politics of greed, we have to learn that.

BUT it’s entirely right that the Taoiseach should say ‘thank you,’ on behalf of his government, to the people.

For the last three years, there have been an awful lot of Sam Baileys in Ireland — ordinary people doing extraordinary things. They deserve to be recognised and thanked, as the Taoiseach did in his address.

And the Government has done an extraordinary thing. I heard Tanaiste Eamon Gilmore say, on Saturday, that one of the darkest moments in our crisis happened shortly after the Government took office, when they realised that there was enough money to keep the schools going until June, but not enough to re-open them in September.

What would have happened, I wonder, if the Taoiseach had addressed the nation then, and told us precisely that? For sure, there’d have been a lot of anxiety, maybe even panic.

But if that message had been delivered back then, perhaps there’d be a greater realisation now of the magnitude of what has been achieved. The way in which news is reported, nowadays, means that we tend to live in the present far more than we did.

So many of us have forgotten what it felt like when we realised how badly the last government let us down.

Of course, a heavy price has been paid for our recovery, so far — and the wrong people have paid some of that price. But it seems almost weird now to realise how close we came to the brink. It does no harm at all for the Taoiseach to tell us that we have hauled ourselves back from almost certain disaster.

Resilience and leadership have stood us in good stead — almost as if we were all wearing Munster jerseys.