Critiquing Brian Lenihan…

It’s fascinating to see the dynamic of the critique of Brian Lenihan that has been offered over the last few days.

We started early here on the CLR, granted, though neither Garibaldy or myself in the day of and after Lenihhan’s death did more than note firstly that this was a tragedy for him and his family and friends before reference briefly our sense that his policies were catastrophic and positioned this within a broader framework of criticising capitalism and engaging with the political ramifications of his death. Some comments went further, others suggested we were premature. Perhaps so, but we’re not a mass media organ, those who come here choose to do so and know that we will try to be fair as best we can.

But you’d think that Vincent Browne, writing in the Irish Times today, would be able to write a column critiquing Lenihan’s policies without it being considered too soon.

Not a bit of it. While most comments are supportive and suggest that it is was long past time for such a critique, there’s still quite a few berating him for analysing the man’s politics and policies – despite a warm word by Browne about Lenihan.

And what’s interesting to me is that where in some contexts blunt outspokeness is seen as defying ‘political correctness’ in this case even Browne’s fairly emollient and focused words are seen as out of order. Perhaps that’s a function of his age, there’s no doubt that it is a personal tragedy for him and his family that he was taken so relatively young.

But the problem is that whatever Lenihan’s personal virtues they are if not entirely irrelevant, largely so in the context of his politics and his approach to politics. Or to put it a different way, on that level it’s simply not an issue if he was courageous – which he most certainly was in personal terms, or courteous to those who met him – which he appears to have been, or highly intelligent – and again there’s a consensus that he was, when set against the policies he implemented and the decisions took.

To suggest otherwise is toytown analysis where the kind word is more important than the action that accompanies it. Because Lenihan was political, intensely political, and how could it be otherwise? The man had been a Minister in the Irish government in various areas across a decade, had been a full time politician for a decade and a half or more and was a party member for longer again.

To say that his personal qualities were somehow more important than what he did is to misrepresent political dynamics. It’s rather like those analyses of Ian Paisley back in the day when one would hear that he was very kind to all his constituents and looked after them all without fear or favour. Sure, no doubt, but there was a lot more to Paisley’s political actions than what he did on that level. And this isn’t to suggest that Lenihan was malign, though I think it’s fair to say that he was in no sense a radical figure and appeared to have little even of the fairly residual social democratic instincts that apparently informed the politics of his father and a certain strand that was once extant within Fianna Fáil.

His courage on the personal level of remaining at work throughout a horribly debilitating illness is unquestionable. When, though, that personal courage is translated without qualification by some into a political courage there is a problem. The political decisions he took weren’t anywhere near as courageous as is proposed. Years ago on this site I made the point that if one were to look at the experience of the Progressive Democrats then coalition with FIanna Fáil should be the goal of all small parties because that larger party will always bear the imprint of whichever smaller party is in government with it. There’s a degree of truth in it, but, as was pointed out to me, the PDs were different – say to the GP – in that they were pushing an open door with FF. It was considerably easier for them to push a low tax pro-business agenda with the larger party than say for a smaller party of the left to push an higher tax agenda. And this is true of the talk about Lenihan dealing with the public sector, imposing cuts and so on.

Truth is in this society that’s actually a lot more straightforward than – for example, raising tax rates or increasing spending. Almost all the media are in concert in support. Bien-pensant opinion is in lockstep on the matter. Politically it’s an easy meme to transmit.

It’s worth adding that arguably he and the government he represented, and this is true as well of the Green Party, were responsible for some of the most divisive and unnecessary rhetoric ever heard in Irish political life in reference to the public sector, amongst other areas. FF was content to allow its proxies in the media to make the running for it, but that this was more often a sin of omission than commission in no way negates their responsibility for not quashing it.

That Fianna Fáil crashed is more a function of the crisis being extravagantly greater in scale such that the measures taken to ameliorate it, arguably any measures proposed, were going to prove ineffective and indeed did so. Fianna Fáil failed because Fianna Fáil failed, despite the ‘turn the corner’ rhetoric there was no recovery, and let’s be honest here, Brian Lenihan, the man who denied that the IMF-ECB were being called in even after everyone else knew they had been called in, was central to that failure.

Now, one can argue that he himself was blind to this, so much so that he genuinely thought he had a shot at the Fianna Fáil leadership earlier this year. Small wonder though that FF chose someone who while close to the top had at least a small psychological space between himself and the decisions taken by the Cowen/Lenihan axis over the past three years, or at least the primary decisions.

But then that’s the other side of this equation of which we’ve heard remarkably little. For all the efforts to reify Lenihan it is impossible to do so unless one ignores the fact that he was in cabinet with Brian Cowen – a man who it is near unthinkable will have anything like the same approach in the media when he passes – proximity to the crisis and Lenihan’s age not withstanding.

Will history be kind to him as Christine Legarde suggested this weekend? 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 economic approach as best one can – saw the Irish electorate remove 3/4ths of Fianna Fáil’s support and saw Fianna Fáil essentially wiped clean from the capital city. That wasn’t unconnected with the economic approach and crisis, but it is failure on an epic scale.

Whether these issues achieve a prominence in the public imagination remains to be seen.