More on Garret FitzGerald

It’s difficult to weigh up Garret FitzGerald’s legacy at this point, in a way it’s too early, despite the fact he was Taoiseach as far back as the 1980s. As a character he was a character, albeit a lot more complex than some of what’s been served up over the last while. You’d wonder what it was like to grow up in a house with two veterans of 1916.

Some interesting expressions of sympathy in the Dáil last week. Enda Kenny and Shane Ross might suggest that the arrival of the Queen provided the culmination of his work, but hearing Gerry Adams speak I wonder if that is a greater exemplar of that work (even if GFG might never have expected or intended such an outcome). Mind you, good to hear Ross remind people that all was not sweetness and light along the way for Fitzgerald, not least in the infamous ‘Out, out, out’ response by Margaret Thatcher.

But this in a sense points to a counter-narrative little of which was articulated at the weekend. Partially that was due to the immediacy of his passing. But part of it was due to a subtle and in some instances not so subtle reworking of history.

As a small example a few of us may recall how as recently as March 2010 Leo Varadkar, now a Minister in the government of this Republic, publicly criticized FitzGerald in the Dáil for his stewardship of the economy in the 1980s.

Two senior Fine Gael TDs clashed last night over comments comparing Taoiseach Brian Cowen to former Fine Gael taoiseach Garret FitzGerald.
The party’s spokesman on enterprise, Leo Varadkar, during an exchange with the Taoiseach in the Dбil yesterday, likened Mr Cowen to Dr FitzGerald.

In the course of the debate on the Cabinet reshuffle, Mr Varadkar told Mr Cowen that he was no Seбn Lemass, no Jack Lynch but was like Dr FitzGerald, who he contended had tripled the national debt and had effectively destroyed the country.

He also suggested to Mr Cowen that he should “enjoy writing boring articles in The Irish Times in a few years’ time”.

That, perhaps, was indicative of a somewhat different approach to his legacy than we were treated to during the weekend. One crucial point is that while FitzGerald was largely of the orthodoxy that orthodoxy saw him as in some respects a failure by the time his two terms as Taoiseach came to an end. How else to explain that when the Progressive Democrat’s were founded in 1986 they took both Fianna Fáíl and Fine Gael TDs, but more importantly as a political formation they ate much more into the Fine Gael vote than the FF one.

Indeed the vindication of the man came more from his calling it largely right, though hardly being alone in this, about Haughey and social issues than any great achievements in the economic or other spheres.

Anyway, there has been plenty of laudatory material in the media, and the thread on the CLR was fairly harsh – rightly so in some respects – perhaps not so much in others.

So let me point to an achievement, a disappointment and a sort of achievement, each in turn.

For the first it is difficult to underestimate his effect in political terms for Fine Gael in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Whatever about the rather shabby professorial image he had it somehow connected with a broad range of people pulling them into the FG orbit. I remember meeting some years back people from around the country who had been a little older than me at the time and who had joined FG because of GFG – a happy accident of initials too when one thinks of it. And while he wasn’t quite the anti-Haughey, he was something different in terms of presentation. In that perhaps he was blessed by his choice of opponent.

Lest this seem like a mean-spirited analysis positioned in the left, let’s consider the following. Stephen O’Byrnes, later a member of the PDs and once an FG member, wrote an interesting book on the latter party called ‘Hiding Behind A Face’ [the quote is taken from Bono]. The thesis was that that “face” was twofold, literally in the case of Fitzgerald and conceptually in the sense of a liberalised FG but that FG remained a socially conservative creature. O’Byrnes’s thesis of course came from a right-economic position as well, but that in no sense invalidates it. The PDs were genuinely wedded to socially progressive policies and their appearance was driven in some measure by a sense that FG were failing in that respect. My sense from O’Byrnes when I interviewed him for research I was conducting in the 1990s on contemporary Irish politics was that he genuinely respected Fitzgerald but didn’t see him as able to deliver.

But O’Byrnes considers his work in encouraging Young Fine Gael to be central and important to the later evolution of FG. Indeed one could posit that without his work in Fine Gael in the late 1970s it would have been much much less well able to deal with the mid to late 1980s and much more open to the depredations of the Progressive Democrats [notably the parliamentary party of FG remained solid in the face of the new party].

Yet O’Byrnes is in no ways soft in his critique. It’s probably difficult for people at this remove to remember how chaotic the governments he was Taoiseach in actually were. That he managed to eke out the best part of a five year term for the second was, in retrospect, both an achievement but also near incredible. They most certainly didn’t feel stable at the time.

Which isn’t to say that his governments weren’t important. In some ways I’d think of him and them as pivotal, albeit presumably unknowing at the time, in terms of future developments.

For the second, a disappointment, we’ve heard a lot about how he dropped the ball on his ‘constitutional crusade’ (a term which post-9/11 has a curious ring to it). There’s that, but in fairness to the man he did set in motion dynamics which came to fruition – at least partially – a decade or more later. If there hadn’t been the efforts on divorce in the 1980s it’s more than likely that a mid-1990s referendum would have been lost. I remember all too well the difference in terms of the reception campaigning on those issues in the 1980s and in the 1990s. Time had moved on, he had made significant errors – the legacy of some remain with us to this day, but even the half-steps taken were better than no steps at all. It’s also sometimes easy to forget just how difficult those half-steps were in the context of a party, FG, that was riven between social progressives and conservatives during the period. That the conversation moved even incrementally was no small achievement because prior to this that conversation was suppressed.

That said there’s a long history in this state of confusing socially progressive policies with economically progressive policies – in part because [most of] the former have in the long term proven easier to engage with than the latter, in part because this remains a middle and upper middle class dominated polity where their interests are mistaken for the commonweal. There’s also been the additional aspect of a pro-EEC/EC/EU approach being interpreted as a short-hand for progressive thinking and finally and allied to that a technocratic approach being likewise.

In other words far too many in various formations saw the process of social liberalisation as not merely equivalent to a process of economic progression, but ultimately one and the same thing – albeit with the former vastly outweighing the latter. That many of centre and right could sign up to the former only confused matters still further, but it explains – to me at least – how easily parties nominally of centre left and right such as the LP and FG can cohabit.

For me a greater disappointment was that having projected a sort of rhetorical social democrat position he clearly wasn’t a social democrat when in government.

Wrong party – needless to say, as Alan Dukes found out some years later when he tentatlvely sought to rebrand FG as social democratic. But also a party which as evidenced by the infamous shoes incident (and almost entertaining to see how a certain FG potential Presidential candidate’s name is left out of the initial IT report on GFG’s death in that regard) had little instinct for the working class. And that extends directly to him as the Taoiseach of the day.

Wrong instincts, perhaps though perhaps not. More recently his writings in the Irish Times seemed increasingly to attempt to straddle the gulf between the orthodoxy and at least some sense of social equity, to varying effectiveness and with the former winning out again and again. But then again he also seemed to be playing footsie with the PDs in the not so distant past so his politics following his retirement seem a little mixed even if at all times there was a sense of some effort to engage with ideas. As was noted in comments Tony Gregory was no great fan, although intriguingly to also judge from TG’s last RTÉ interview some of those around Greogry expected much of Fitzgerald.

And wrong time, in that even had he nascent social democratic instincts, social democracy itself was already being ‘captured’ philosophically by what would later come to be known as neo-liberalism where the differences between centre left and right of centre were smoothed away by the false allure of technocracy and a curious amnesia on the part of many social democrats as to just what the function of social democracy was.

O’Byrnes’s book, written in the late 1980s, is particularly interesting in this regard. He notes in the first ten pages that FitzGerald was regarded with some suspicion by other FG Ministers in the 1970s as ‘too close to Labour’, but the word social democracy only appears on page 27… ‘Many were uneasy about FitzGerald and his social democratic leanings’. And the term only reappears on page 52 when O’Byrnes notes that ‘By definition the bulk of the party’s Dáil deputies returned in 1977 would reflect [the solidly conservative farming and business sectors] concerns. Neither they, nor the electorate were social democratic or radical innovators.’

And what’s fascinating to me is how this term is never parsed in any great detail. What did social democracy mean in an Irish context? We are never told.

Were that not enough, on economic issues it’s clear that the FG party in 1980 were far from social democratic in inclination. As O’Byrnes recounts Peter Barry was ‘aghast’ to hear Charles Haughey preaching austerity when he became Taoiseach. ‘Charlie Haughey was stealing Fine Gael’s clothes. Telling the Irish nation that they were living behind their means, that the good times were over. There was going to have to be some austerity. But these were Fine Gael lines!’.

Some might suggest that self-described social democrats might indeed be willing to implement ‘austerity’ in 1980s, and as we know there’s been some appetite in subsequent years for them to do so. But in 1980 it is reasonable to suggest that the economic approach of social democracy internationally was to adopt Keynesian policies at odds with the outline above [one can argue that the French SP/PCF government of that period being one of the last to do so openly but one can also point to lower key approaches along that line by European SDPs when in government]. But all of this is to ignore the fact that Fine Gael then, as now, was not a social democratic party.

And Fitzgerald couldn’t deliver across a range of fronts because – well, he couldn’t deliver, not in that party, not in this society as it was then and not as he was then. What then was the legacy for his party? Decency isn’t tangible enough, though he was decent, and on an ideological level it’s thin. Who would call Kenny a social democrat? And many many would have reservations about Gilmore – at least on a functional level. It’s the very fact that this sort of social progressive [and very slightly economically progressive] strand which he represents, at least in the public imagination, has no clear existence in Fine Gael as it now is that demonstrates that that side of his legacy is near paper thin.

As to a ‘sort of an achievement’, it is coincidentally appropriate that the Left Archive should have document posted this fortnight from Sinn Féin and the Workers’ Party issued in response to the Anglo-Irish Agreement. In retrospect this seems to me to have been a curtain raiser for later developments. Most significantly in that it diluted absolute British sovereignty over Northern Ireland. The irony that this was fashioned to blunt the impact of a newly politically oriented Sinn Féin is hardly novel. But it didn’t appear in a vacuum. As was noted elsewhere on the site one can point to a number of things which gave it impetus, not least the politicisation of SF in the aftermath of the hunger strikes and other incidents, such as Brighton. But that he engaged in that process and that the British accepted this was to his credit.

It saw the reshaping of politics in the North and on the island more broadly thereafter. The fact that it bypassed Unionism provided a salutary and educative moment and perhaps demonstrated in a wider context that change could be achievable and could be implemented.

What’s interesting is how in 1985/86 the AIA was regarded – at least in the official pronouncements – as an end in itself. Unionism, though and rightly, knew better. And perhaps others as well. Did Fitzgerald realise what the AIA meant in terms of future developments? Probably not in the specific but he must have had some sense that this would open a chink that would never be closed. And for that he did the island no small service and in a way which was far away from the overblown hype of many another initiative.

But this was an approach fashioned directly to shut down Sinn Féin and Republicanism on this island and to politically sideline it. FitzGerald’s approach to the early peace process certainly sat firmly within at least one part of the orthodoxy. His was one of no engagement at all with Republicanism.

Does that “achievement” outweigh the disappointment? Again, too early to say. It’s worth pointing out that there’s some truth along the lines of the point made here before the weekend that rarely was someone judged more on their aspirations than their achievements. That in itself is not an unknown dynamic on the left, either in Ireland or elsewhere, but the difference was that he operated at the heights of Irish politics for the best part of two decades and was a Taoiseach twice during that period. If not him, in respect of doing something – anything, then who?

But then, perhaps too much is asked of him. He remained coy about the actuality of his devotion to social democracy. It is more the impression that is all and that perhaps tells us a lot both about the nature of Irish political activity [though when measured against the vulpine image of Charles Haughey, well, little doubt that FitzGerald as noted above that was blessed in the nature of his opponents]. Perhaps equally telling in terms of legacies and unintended ironies is that despite his own instance of debt forgiveness on the part of the AIB as recently as the week before last Richard Bruton was dismissing the idea of general mortgage forgiveness in the current context as ‘moral hazard’. Well. Yes.

I never met the man, never came close to him, but by all accounts he was enthused, engaged, courteous and thinking analytically about the issues that affected this state up to the very end. One can demur from many of his political positions while still wishing that there was a bit more of that about.