If Fianna Fáil doesn’t learn from the past it will soon be history

MICHEÁL Martin sent me looking for Edmund Burke, and I’m not grateful. I’ve spent several hours searching Burke’s writings (or as much as I could find online) for one phrase. As great a mind and a philosopher as he was (Burke not Martin), he is no easy read.

But I had to find that bloody phrase, because it kept running through my mind when I read Martin’s interview in Saturday’s Irish Examiner, and I wanted to quote it right. You know the phrase I mean — those who forget their history are condemned to repeat it.

Actually, I was entirely wrong in thinking that Burke was the phrase’s originator. It was the American philosopher, George Santayana, who said “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”. Burke said something slightly different — “People will not look forward to prosperity who never look backward to their ancestors” — although, I suppose, it has the same broad meaning.

Now, I hate to start a column with a cliché, but no other reaction is possible to Martin’s interview. The headline set the tone: “Martin — FF no longer a toxic brand”.

“We are not {a toxic brand}”, he said. “We are moving on. There is a lot of vibrancy in the party. I am having very good engagement on the doorsteps.”

Then, Martin said: “That is not to say that people are not critical, or that people won’t raise issues — not just with me, but with politics in general. There is a broader disillusionment with politics in general.”

That answer revealed that one of the age-old tactics of Fianna Fáil is still very much in play. I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve heard them use that phrase, ‘politics in general’. They are the only party that uses it all the time, and it has a specific purpose. Whenever they’re in trouble, their instinct is to tar everyone with the same brush.

Of course people are disillusioned. Everyone has taken too much pain in the last couple of years. Is that the same as saying that Fianna Fáil, the grand old party we know and love, are really on the way back?

Have they really moved on, with a new vision, a new approach, a new set of policies, and a new relationship with the people?

I’m biased. I might as well say that before they do. But if we are really to believe that FF have moved on, possibly even to the point where they deserve another shot at government anytime soon, then Santayana and Burke must both be spinning in their graves.

And yet, and yet. There have been some signs lately that FF have succeeded in getting past the first hurdle on the way to forgiveness.

Only last week, one of Ireland’s most senior political commentators — a man I wouldn’t always agree with, but whom I would always respect — seemed to be arguing that we have been too hard on Fianna Fáil.

Writing in the Irish Times, Stephen Collins blasted what he called the “bailout myth” as a cocktail of half-truths. In a telling paragraph, he wrote that the present government “has successfully propagated a new political myth in which those two events (the bailout and the bank guarantee) are portrayed as the source of the country’s economic woes, when, in fact, they represented a desperate and largely successful effort to save the State from the disastrous consequences of the Celtic Tiger years.

“Not content with denigrating the efforts of the Fianna Fáil-led government to cope with the crisis, the Coalition narrative has cast the Troika as an alien force, which imposed unnecessary hardship on people.”

I must have missed all that. I am absolutely convinced that history will record that if members of the present government blamed Fianna Fáil for the disaster that befell us, it was (a), because they believed it, and (b), because it is true.

To be fair, I think Collins was setting out to make a more rounded point. Ironically, the day before he wrote the piece from which I’ve quoted, he had written another piece, based on the release of Cabinet papers of 30 years earlier. In that piece, he had reported how Charles Haughey had effectively ignored senior civil-service advice to drop overly optimistic claims from the draft of its economic strategy document, The Way Forward, which was published in the autumn of 1982.

As Collins would know very well, this was a year after a Fianna Fáil government had famously ‘cooked the books’, effectively falsifying the Budget figures in 1981, an act that was to lead to nearly a decade of hardship.

And all that was after Haughey had made his famous address to the nation, suitably clad in a Charvet shirt, while telling us all we were living beyond our means. In short, I think it’s fair to say, Fianna Fáil has form. Throughout my adult life, they have been trusted again and again to manage the economy. They have been booted out each time, after making an unholy mess. And each time, the government that has replaced them has restored the economy to better health, and Ireland’s reputation to better credibility.

AND at the end of all that, the people of Ireland have always decided to give Fianna Fáil another go. I’ve never understood the logic of it.

It’s as if we decided, long ago, that while we couldn’t trust Fianna Fáil, we couldn’t bring ourselves to like any alternative.

Not, I believe, this time. Are we all really to believe that when the people of Ireland next choose a government, they will kick out the government that restored Ireland’s economy and reputation, and put back in the people who destroyed us all in the first place?

In a sense, Collins is arguing that we’re angry with Fianna Fáil for the wrong things. He says that they built a bubble, but when it collapsed they did the right things.

I believe they built a bubble all right, but, worse than that, they built an economy based on greed and selfishness. They destroyed the country because, fundamentally, of a deeply unhealthy alliance between one political party and certain aspects of big business. And no-one will ever convince me that the blanket bank guarantee was the right thing to do in the face of the crisis.

Martin is, no doubt, a decent and honourable man, and there have been many aspects of his political career of which he can be justifiably proud. But if he really believes the time has come to forgive and forget all the damage his party did, he needs to think again.

In fact, I suspect he needs to take Burke’s advice. If he really wants a prosperous future, he needs to be a lot more honest about the destruction his ancestors did.