The flipside of this is that events of no small consequence can come to pass in Ireland, and only by chance do you find out about them via a third party. Such as it was with the passing of former Taoiseach (Prime Minister, if you're not Irish) Charles Haughey, announced on Tuesday 13th. His funeral, complete with state honours, was the following thursday.
If ever there is one politician who should form a central part of a college course in political psychology, it would have to be him. Course PS203: How to screw a country out of a substantial part of its collective wage packet, yet still command the unwavering loyalty of its majority and get re-elected into power again and again. Independent reading: How to claw your way back into public favour after suffering a disgrace that would see other politicians retire in ignonimy (cf. arms trial in 1970).
It's the brass-necked hypocrisy, more than anything, that has me open-mouthed in wonder. The 1980 speech where he urged the naton to tighten its belts while he was living his lifestyle on money he had basically grabbed from the hands of the Irish, the speech he gave about family values just after returning from Paris, having entertained his mistress there, oh, this goes on and on. But most striking is the manner in which people have been prepared to overlook his misdemeanours, write them off as not as significant as they actually are. Not as significant, I suspect, as they would be if committed by someone else.
This, of course is it. To get down to brass tacks, what did CJ have, something no-one else had, that allowed him to carry it off?
In one of Nuala O Faoláin's articles in the Irish times entitled 'Spirit of the Nation', she wrote:
The first of the Irelands Mr Haughey commands is the Northside, which is not just Dublin's northside but everywhere people live in streets and kids go to big, tough schools. He knows all that from the inside - playing football, robbing orchards, taking the bike out to Portmarnock for a swim. He was something of an exception in being very clever - first in Dublin for a scholarship - and very bookish. He haunted Marino Library. But not that much of an exception. His personal friends - still Northsiders - a motor trade businessman, a supreme court judge, an auctioneer - would all have been the same kind of boy, reared in modest circumstances, but with the brains to transform them.
There is also the fact that at 15, elsewhere wrote about in the same article, he joined the local defence force.
Could this be it? The fact that he was a bit of a bruiser gained him the respect of the man on the street, to the point where that same man might overlook his waywardness as a consequence of someone with a strong personality, an unfortunate side-effect of the achievements in his lifetime. Most other politicians, having come from privileged backgrounds, don't have this quality, and this is probably what set CJ apart.
What struck me in the tributes left on the ireland.com page was the extent to which his supporters were willing to overlook the flaws in his character, write them off as minor, and focus on the 'great things' he did for his country. Any naysayers are dismissed by these people as begrudgers, symptomatic of the Irish tendency to build people up and then tear them down, as if that was a mindset specific to Ireland alone.
There are a two important flaws in this reasoning, though: His achievements, upon examination, weren't that great, and his misdemeanours were many and substantial.
He screwed Ireland for money in the 70's and 80's in a way that no-one else did before or since. upper band tax rates, a 'reward' for people who had managed to maneouvre themselves into a position where they were high earners, were just totally fucking insane, yet he siphoned off his money to the Cayman Islands so that he himself could escape the financial net he had created for everyone else. More than anything else, this demonstrates complete contempt for the country he had under his watch at this time.
He was involved in gun smuggling in the 1970s, at a time that saw the emergence of the IRA in its present form - an important point, considering that the organisation had deteriorated to little more than a collection of thugs at that point - a form that would prevail until it was disbanded. He had the phones of his opposition bugged so that he could anticipate their next move. Physical intimidation was used in the Dáil to quell dissent. His restriction on the sale of condoms, his opposition to divorce and the Anglo-Irish agreement.
Money that was collected with the intent of paying for important surgery for his friend Brian Lenihan, he used on himself. His friend.
Yet I have never seen denial like that which I have seen in his supporters when confronted with all of this.
And now onto the bloody Celtic Tiger. It has been put forward that he laid the foundations for the prosperity that Ireland enjoys today. I have yet to see an expert in economics conclusively prove that this is the truth. Fintan O' Toole put it best once, when he said that just because sunrise follows someone having an early breakfast, it doesn't mean that the person eating that bowl of cereal has caused the sun to rise. It happened independently of the breakfast. The same logic is applicable to Ireland's economic boom.
It may be closer to the truth that he saw it coming, and made preparations for it. Such as the building of the IFSC, for example. Of course the tax incentives used to attract multinational investment over here could well turn out to be a band aid solution: Of the corporations whose incentives have expired, some have withdrawn from the country. It remains to be seen if the rest will do the same.
Of course all of this deflects from the basic unassailable fact that while he was in power, Ireland was in recession, and after he left, Ireland boomed. It always annoys me when politicians try to claim credit for fiscal successes like these, as if a substantial part of it was under their control, when really, it is not.
Then again, if we are to apply the skewed logic, he is therefore responsible for the current mess in Irish hospitals. We got rich, but our healthcare system got shit. Nice trade-off, CJ.
Free travel for the elderly? A free TV license? The cost of these was borne by CIE and RTE, respectively. The reaffirmation of the artist within Gaelic Ireland? The action of someone with thought processes.
Under his leadership, a guy getting hot n' heavy with another guy? Illegal.
Elsewhere in the aforementioned 'Spirit of the Nation' article, O'Faoláin writes that his background makes him seem "an outsider, an anti-establishment figure, permanently challenging, even when he is in power". Bollocks. He bought into something bigger than himself and became corrupted in the process. For a woman of O'Faoláin's insight, I'm surprised at her short-sightedness. She's just like the rest of his supporters in this regard.
Ultimately his position was made available to him by democracy, so it could be argued that he represented all aspects of the nation, that he represented the best and worst of the Irish people. That someone like him can flourish says something about the people who allowed him to flourish, who elected him into power.
Like many a man with talent in no small amounts, he had his moments, but they were too few, relative to what he was capable of, and capability was his middle name. I have no doubt he could have been a great leader, simply, he wasn't. But we got the government we deserved because we voted him back in again and again. We accepted his many warts, when we should have been demanding higher standards of him. This is what exasperates the most.
He's gone now, and it's over to others to do away with the climate he created in politics, if they see fit. Hopefully it'll happen. Indirectly it'll reflect damningly on the the population of Ireland if it doesn't disappear, because it means they'll have sanctioned it, directly or otherwise.
No comments:
Post a Comment