The Death of Brian Lenihan June 10, 2011
Posted by Garibaldy in Fianna Fáil.trackback
Just saw on the BBC website that Brian Lenihan has died at the very young age of 52. An undoubted tragedy for his family. I’m sure there will be a lot said about him, positive and negative, over the next few days, but it seems to me the most important thing is that when considering his contribution to the disastrous state of the Republic’s finances and economy, or that of Bertie Ahern or Sean Fitzpatrick, or any other individual, is that it is the systemic weaknesses of capitalism that caused the crisis, and that the government’s response was shaped by the interests of the class which benefits most from capitalism. Certainly Lenihan et al made decisions that made the situation worse, but their faults cannot be allowed to obscure the over-arching cause: the nature of capitalism itself, and of governments that serve its interests. Nor the fact that the only answer to the problems of capitalism is socialism.
Well said Garibaldy. Lenihan’s actions mark him as a class enemy, one who willingly colluded with capitalism. Death is inevitable for all of us obviously, that it happens should not in itself be sufficient reason for sympathy. Lenihan did little in his role as FF politician and government minister to earn respect or sympathy. No RIP from this quarter.
No compassion from you then? You obviously have no idea of the enormity of his job. Say no more. I met the man and as a man he was courteous and engaging, a gentleman. Rest in Peace, Brian.
Well apparantly Hitler had those same human qualities Brenda. Not equating Lenihan with Hitler obviously, just making the point that judging a person on their personality is not the same as judging them on their actions. As for the enormity of his job, well one could argue that he wasn’t up to that enormity, given the results of his tenure.
I met the man, a number of times, and he was a pompous lying cretin.
Very well mannered but.
“A fairly stormy interview Pat Kenny conducted with Brian Lenihan on the morning after his last budget, December 8, 2010 has been removed from the RTE radio website.”
http://www.broadsheet.ie/2011/06/15/ah-now-7/
Surely the best response to the death of a person you don’t respect is to say nothing rather than offend those who did?
Ok, but maybe there’s too much silence and not enough anger being displayed around the place. Death is tragic but inevitable, the loss for his friends and family will be immense, in private life I’m sure he displayed the same positive human qualities that we all share, but I didn’t know him myself in private life, I only know his public persona, and there is little positive to say about that, and much negative. These are not times for politeness and for respect to be shown to those who do not deserve it. There is an ideological war underway and Lenihan was an enthusiastic collaborator and supporter of capitalism’s assault on society at large. They aren’t showing respect for us, why should we reciprocate?
If his death weren’t going to be used by the IT and others to propagandise TINA… but we saw how when Garret Fitzgerald died, it was immediately put to use to further the concerted messaging about Lizzie’s visit.
Sympathies to the family, but I won’t be joining in lauding the public life of any Lenihans.
I half agree with Tumbles on not speaking at all about someone who had died who you have little political respect for but that notion will be sorely tested when Thatcher dies.
I think there’s ways of being critical without personalising it. So in that I too think Tumbles has a point. I think Garibaldy’s post was good in that respect, noting that the system within which Lenihan, and all of us operate is ultimately culpable. There’s no reason if one doesn’t want to to laud the man on a political level. I wouldn’t be doing that myself, but today isn’t the day for a forensic dissection of his faults.
I’d agree with Tumbles funny enough. As regards Thatcher, I definitely won’t be posting anything on CLR on that day as both my hands will have glasses of champagne in them.
More paddywackary from Tumbles – the purveyor of Gaelic speaking, mass going communes that only existed in Sean O Bradaigh’s backside.
I never had anything good to say about Lenihan during his life, although he has gone up in my estimation since he died because I never believed he was really sick.
Well I would agree with you on the lack of positive energy being displayed by people in the face of what is going on.
But the Irish tradition of not speaking ill of the dead, especially on the day that they pass away, is not the worst aspect of us!
So………
The By-Election, eh?
Two socialist seats within reach in Dublin West?
I wouldn’t think so.
Maybe not.
A lot could happen between now and the writ being moved though.
Its actually very hard to call. FF won’t win it.
I do think Ruth Coppinger has a decent enough chance. God knows what further austerity measures will have been put through by our current government by the time the by-election takes place.
It was campaigning on the bin tax in 1996 that took Joe Higgins within a whisker of winning that by-election (which Lenihan won) .The constituency has been redrawn a good bit since then.
Depending on how advanced we are with water charges (ie bills have arrived) then I’m sure a similar campaign could resonate with the voters.
Also people wont be voting on a government. ‘The Left’ also has a decent enough record in By-Elections in recent times.
I’d make Labour pretty strong favourites, as long as they hold the by-election before the full depths of their malevolence in government becomes widely understood.
Just had a quick look at the GE result and it was pretty close to an even 4 way split, albeit with Lenihan trailing a bit (roughly 20-20-20-15%)
Given that there’ll be a sympathy vote for FF (would they run Conor?), and Government unpopularity, and it could get interesting. FF -> SF-> SP transfer patterns deciding it?
Jesus I forgot they could very well choose Conor the kebabs
FF are going to have serious problems here – most of the vote for Lenihan last February was entirely out of sympathy for the man. If he hadn’t ran than Dublin would be a FF free zone. It could be likely that their candidate could lose their deposit even if it was a relation.
Just looking at it now it’ll wind up a three way fight between the ULA, FG and Lab.
Don’t forget that their will be a large sympathy vote for FF, will it be enough. There are many people here, who have battered wife syndrome.
I’m sorry for his wife and kids on a personal level but I feel absolutely nothing regarding him.
It’s interesting that the Irish Times page for leaving comments (http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2011/0610/breaking18.html) has only had 10 in the last 90 minutes. I think most thoughtful people will have a problem with delivering the usual platitudes, that are always rushed out on the death of anyone powerful, when faced with the sheer enormity of the crisis which he created and perpetuated while Minister for Finance. On the same day he died, Reuters reported: “Irish banks’ reliance on funding from the European Central Bank (ECB) and their own central bank eased a touch in May to stand at 156 billion euros (138.4 billion pounds), data showed on Friday. Irish banks, at the root of the country’s financial crisis and its 85 billion euros EU-IMF bailout, are reliant on central bank loans to fund their day-to-day operations due to tens of billions of euros in deposit outflows and their exclusion from interbank lending markets.” Faced with numbers like this, and the devastating effects they have on people’s lives, the usual spiels about achievement and patriotism sound a little hollow. I have the same sympathy for his family and friends that I would on the death of anyone I didn’t know personally, but his legacy is a nightmare that we’re still trapped in for the vast majority of this country’s inhabitants.
RTE have gone to full on ‘day of national mourning’ mode, which might be a misjudgment – not that he was personally hated, and he managed to escape a lot of the calumny that Ahern and Cowen got, for no really good reason – but neither was he an unarguably important figure in our history like Garret or even Chas. He was a Minister for Finance for just over two years is all. And it wasn’t as if a glittering career was cut off in its prime either, because his career, like that of anyone else of his generation in FF was over anyway, and had he been well, I bet he’d have left politics
But the blanket tragedy approach cuts off any honest assessment of his career, which is presumably the intention.
“RTE have gone to full on ‘day of national mourning’ mode”
I think you meant to say “Pravda RTE”.
Brian Lenihan died for somebody’s sins but not mine.
[...] the day to reflect upon that, and I’d argue that Garibaldy’s thoughts here strike the right note by positioning the man in a broader [...]
He shafted the irish people and gets away lightly by death, should have been jailed.
The name Lenihan will be remembered in history for selling the soul of Ireland.
Good Riddance – No Sympathy Here.
He came from the elite, reflected the elite, had the inbuilt contempt for ordinary people, remember ‘we all partyied’?
But worse, when Haughey died he was on Primetime and asked about how CJH robbed his father’s medical money bottled it and refused to condemn Haughey. No balls. A mouthpiece for the Seanie Fitz-Fingelton mafia.
But I honestly take no pleasure in his death, there’s no point.
Is he still dead. Things line it can have an afterlife.
Leaving the matter of the man himself to one side the amount of worship of state power on display in print and broadcast media of late is pretty stunning. As a general observation I think this whole ‘say only good stuff’ approach to dead public figures is a device for shutting people up. I can’t recall people going ‘now is not a time for politics’ whenever Osama Bin Laden got killed, or saying ‘we can take a look at his terrorist career another day but it’s Osama the family man we remember today’.
To be clear, I’m not comparing BL to OBL, but the example of the latter cited above shows that urging people to not speak ill also contains its own political slant.
he amount of worship of state power on display in print and broadcast media of late is pretty stunning
True of course, but hearing Olivia O’Leary going on about how funny BL was, and how he could play Chopin from memory and his perfect French, and remembering the Garret-fest on VB about the lovely holidays, and so on, and, to borrow a phrase from Melody Maker back in the day, it’s ‘the class the that celebrates itself’ with absolutely no self awareness of how the rest of us hear it. Whereas, when Bertie finally gets his last dig out, it’ll be much more clear- eyed, and his Drumcondra mates won’t be asked into the studio to gush about those pints in Fagan’s or those trip over to Old Trafford. And come to that, when Tony Gregory died, a figure whose political stature, over a much longer period, dwarfed Lenihan, we didn’t get to much guff either.
I think you’re both correct. The end of Ahern won’t be met with this celebratory stuff.
Or consider an example from outside the golden circle, Gerry Adams.. Is it even plausible the IT would have a thread for comments/recollection opened on his death? That the general thrust would be the man, not his politics or the effect of the latter?
The Gregory example is a very good one.
Though clearly an awful lot of this, and I look at the IT in particular is to generate a legitimisation of his approach, in general if not in detail by bringing his personality into the picture.
BTW, that still doesn’t mean that yesterday it was appropriate to go too personalised in critiques, but it certainly underlines why some of us might feel uneasy at the lack of balance.
The Class That Celebrates Itself. Perfect.
Someone wrote: “the class that likes to celebrate itself” with regards to Lenihan’s death, and that resonates with me. They are turning certain politicians into symbolic celebrities post breath. They’re commodifying the attributes of these recently deceased politicians in order to create a narrative boundary that restricts one from making fairly obvious comments about the disastorous policy decisions these individuals have foisted on a disintegrating society in solidarity with their individual and class ideology.
If you ask me, these media mourners/censors are being merely cynical and not all that bothered about the deaths. Like all good capitalistas they mouth appropriate words for public consumption but never waste an opportunity to “profit” from any situation. In this case they are building a pantheon to neo-liberal politicians and pinning on appropriate ideological items in order to build a concensus that the current elite, wether alive or dead, cannot be analysed or critiqued by ordinary mortals.
The most efficient censorship is self applied. Reliance by the powers-that-be on the old Irish societal self imposed censorship is wearing very thin amongst many ordinary folk.
Lenihan’s policies live on in the F.G/Lab govt.
I’m not going to comment on BL, but ask a question: What happened to the radical lawyer in Irish politics?
Many of the great political figures for change in the past have been lawyers in Ireland and elsewhere (and I’ve always been tickled by the notion of the French Revolution being the result of having a couple of thousand under-occupied lawyers concentrated in Paris) but crucially they have been lawyers who regarded themselves as part in the creative process of the invention of constitutions.
With a few exceptions in the North, and arguably Mary Robinson, radical politics and the law seem to be incompatible in Ireland, the profession’s ranks being stuffed the technicians of the existing law, rather than those who aspire to change it.
Counterexamples would be gratefully accepted.
P.S. That’s a nicer edit box. Now all we need is the ability to post facto correct our typos. (?)
Hi Pope,
This guy Sean Ryan has been heavily involved in defending many activists in the Irish courts over the last few years. He’s not a barrister/solicitor whatever and works generally as an adviser or a mckenzie friend.But as a person using law politically he is one of the people I admire most. His focus is on defending the right to protest. Some of his stories here http://roaringandshouting.wordpress.com/ and on Indymedia Ireland are incredible. He works with groups that might be thought of as fringe or ‘extremist’.
Greg O’Neill who represented the relatives of those killed in the Dublin bombings, the families of the Stardust victims, exploited immigrant workers and the families of republicans comes to mind. Kevin Brophy has done good work for Travellers and for asylum seekers as well. Generally I’d agree with Pope Epopt, and I’m not much of a solicitor fan having seen too many of them in action in the district courts over the years when the whole thing can look like an exercise in collusion by the legal profession against the unfortunates in the dock, but there are some exceptions.
The reason one remembers the ‘radical lawyer’ in Irish history is because they are a rare occurrence. Law is not a ‘radical’ profession – the best way to change a law in a court is to advance the argument that one is not changing it at all rather it is arguing that the law has hitherto been misunderstood and that the interpretation you are putting forward is the correct one.
Thus, most legal argument is quite conservative in this sense.
That said, there are a few radical lawyers knocking around. It’s just that the chances of ‘radical cases’ landing on their desk are greatly reduced due to the number of solicitors/barristers out there. A client is more likely to visit their local solicitor, whatever political stripe they may be, rather than seek out someone with left-wing credentials (How would they know who in any event? This stuff is hardly publicised). Currently, there are quite a few lawyers who are having a go at lending institutions who are seeking repossess – not world changing stuff but something.
I have to say, Sean Ryan and his comrades have the right idea. Filming a protest is an excellent way to protect protestors, especially given the invasive nature of the Public Order legislation. Fair play.
Nearly crashed on the way home when the SINDO ad for tmw came on…’Brian Lenihan, the finest, the bravest’ etc AND ‘the only politician to tackle public sector pay and stand up to the unions.’
Best of luck with your review of that rag tmw
Capt Rock – your bloody danger on the road if that shocked ya! BL and Richard B belonging to the one anti-people party, there maybe political benefits to his death to be welcomed
Elsewhere, we can be glad that Brian Lenihan’s economic stewardship ensured that we avoided the fate of Iceland!!.
In sindo – Harris on BL – “BL was a republican aristocrat” – best I’ve heard yet. Sums up the crack pot of both them.
Constance Harris in for Kerrigan – class.
Nepotism, they’ve heard of it.
Gene Kerrigan hits the right note :
“Bravery alone could never have saved us from ruin
It’s conveniently forgotten that all he did had the approval of the media, the opposition and the experts,”
http://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/gene-kerrigan/gene-kerrigan-bravery-alone-could-never-have-saved-us-from-ruin-2672595.html
Suppose it’s been said before, but one of the ways in which Lenihan may have helped deepen our difficulties was by staying on as Finance Minister. During 2009 and 2010, while the last coalition was so evidently clueless and rudderless, I heard a hundred people say: ‘at least Brian Lenihan is still there.’ I tried in vain to explain that that was part of the problem and would never be part of the solution.
You get this ‘safe pair of hands’ fallacy in sport sometimes – the team’s a shambles but the manager has a track record – he must know what he’s doing. Until he’s sacked. Lenihan was cut so much slack that it prolonged that coalition. Interesting to find out from the Greens if they’d have jumped sooner had he been gone.
And yes I have noticed that the current shower are no better – no different, even.
[...] see there’s already one nomination in the comments on another thread for this week. Some might feel the coverage of Brian [...]
[...] no need to dwell too much on the coverage of the death, but, as noted by Captain Rock last night, the Sindo has chosen to use his death to push its own agenda. Whatever it was, he is the only [...]
“in an interview with the Guardian, Lenihan said it was an unfair characterisation of the Irish economy to draw links with Iceland. “This equation with Iceland is a false equation because Iceland wasn’t a member of the eurozone, it was a state with its own currency, its own central bank and also it wasn’t a particularly viable economy. I know there is fishing and other industries in Iceland, but they had become inordinately dependent on a banking system that was sort of speculative money. It is a bizarre comparison. We are in the eurozone with the European Central Bank standing behind our currency, and the European bank has been a great support to the liquidity of the Irish banking system.”"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/mar/16/ireland-rules-out-imf-help
“Iceland, which averted a sovereign default by refusing to bail out bondholders when its banks failed in October 2008, will enjoy economic growth of 2.2 percent this year and 2.9 percent in 2012 as its budget deficit narrows to 1.4 percent of gross domestic product, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The island’s approach to resurrecting itself from financial ruin has won the praise of Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, who says Iceland is now better off than euro member Ireland.”
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/06/09/bloomberg1376-LMJLQD0YHQ0X01-3OK5IE89UOVDHO0POGHFOCS887.DTL
I hope the Society of the Irish Motor Industry (sic) are properly grateful.I hate this practice of singing the praises of every dead person. He was a cheap and nasty politician, part of a class who destroyed our economy and the hopes of at least 2 generations.
As for lawyers. Some good some bad like every other profession. But the profession as a whole will use a little pro bono as a shield to protect their lavish salary.
Or of the terminally ill. Lenihan skipped free over the past few years while Cowen was lumped with all of the blame.
May I be the first to report a sighting of the risen again blessed Brian of the IMF – seen him robbing sweets off a kid on the Lwr Drumcondra Road.
Where do all you cynical leftists come from?”We’re all in this together”,this country is just a multitude of events and a multitude of individuals there are no class interests,and didn’t “we” turn a corner a while ago?
I do hope there will be symbolic corner on the funeral route for the cortege to turn.
The trouble is there isn’t enough cynical leftists. Greatly overwhelmed by the entryist ‘no use crying over spilt milk’ tendency. I vouch for the Amen Corner.
Yes, we did turn a corner. So many we are dizzy.
“I vouch for the Amen Corner.”
The Amen Corner. Were they Brian’s favourite band like…?
I suspect this was his favourite Amen Corner track…
is it just me or did a combination of Collins/De Valera/Lemass die last Friday? The coverage of the funeral has been the usual puke-inducing shit. ‘His bravery’…he had a terminal illness and he fucking croaked. He didn’t die destroying a German machine gun post on Monte Cassino.
This hagiography has reached its depths in John Waters’ ‘tribute’ that was broadcast by our public service broadcaster yesterday – as part of its lunchtime news bulletin.
I was told that Lenihan was described on the radio the other evening as “The Uncrowned King of Ireland”..
You kind of get fed up with journalists just saying things which they known damn well bear no resemblance to reality.
First up we have the notion that the Queen’s visit changes fundamentally and irrevocably the relationship between Ireland and Britain.
Second we have the idea that because Obama said Is Feidir Linn, there is a new spring in the national step and hope has returned to the country.
And thirdly we have the idea that the nation loved a man whose disastrous financial policies gave us the extraordinary spectacle of Fianna Fail losing three quarters of its seats in a general election.
An eight year old could see that none of these things are true, yet they were the dominant media tropes in the coverage of these events. It’s all as bizarre as those newspaper columns which purport to believe that the characters in Coronation Street or East Enders are real.
It all’s a bit like told being that the grain qoutas have been exceeded again this month and that production figures are up for the eleventh year in succession.
Eamon, I spent many an evening as a kid listening to Radio Moscow’s reports on the grain harvest, careful now!
I think RTE have (had) ‘A prayer at Bedtime’. I think yesterday they brought us a puke at lunchtime.
LATC, you weren’t the only one. I noticed last night that even the greatest moral philosopher of our age sometimes has to stand naked.
GypsyBhoy. +1.
The whole retreat from empirical reality is kind of interesting. It’s as if RTE in particular have decided that what they’re actually doing is presenting a form of theatre. It doesn’t have to be true, it just has to play well. The problem I suppose is that while social realism might be a bit of a dead end for the novel you do kind of need it in news coverage.
[...] but history – and the Irish media – might well reflect on this fact noted by EamonnCork here, that he was an integral part of the leadership which saw the Irish electorate remove 3/4ths of [...]
[...] Perhaps, but history – and the Irish media – might well reflect on this fact noted by EamonnCork here, that he was an integral part of the leadership which even by its own lights – putting aside the [...]