Authors: John Waters
37
Frank Dunlop
I
n the early summer of 2009, Frank Dunlop was sent down for eighteen months on a charge of corruption. Because he was a former government press secretary, the culmination of Dunlop’s long-chronicled downfall was a big story. As usual in such circumstances, his incarceration was attended by a spate of vindictive and gloating newspaper headlines, including references to his being taken away handcuffed in a prison van, rather than in the ‘top of the range Mercedes’ in which he had arrived for the sentencing hearing. In a country once famed for its Christian compassion, anything to do with money or politics has recently begun to attract the kind of venom and unpleasantness previously reserved for crimes like paedophilia and premeditated murder.
Dunlop’s crimes were serious and inexcusable. He was also, to be frank, not the most likeable of men, being burdened with a personality characterized by smugness, superciliousness and an intellectual arrogance without visible means of support. When he first appeared before the Flood planning tribunal, these characteristics were abundantly observable. But, after some initial resistance, Dunlop had begun singing like a nightingale. The nation watched him fade away to a shadow of his former self and saw in his eyes the look of humiliation and disgrace. And yet it was noticeable that he did not hide away, nor seek to justify his behaviour. He stood his ground, told his story and accepted his medicine without complaint. He went on working, writing books and studying for a law degree. He faced the music and still held his head high. Dunlop accepted his wrongdoing yet retained his essential dignity as a human being.
Yet, there were those who continued to believe that Dunlop was being highly selective in his musical repertoire, which may have gone some way to explaining the vindictiveness that greeted his incarceration.
Sentencing Dunlop, Judge Frank O’Donnell said the public interest required a custodial sentence, not just a rap on the knuckles. ‘The word must go out from this court that the corruption of politicians, or anyone in public life, must attract significant penalties,’ he told Dunlop. He said that, although there was no readily identifiable victim in this case, Dunlop had actively undermined the confidence of the public in the democratic system and had been motivated by gain.
Dunlop was by now clearly not a well man. He was into his 60s, his life-expectancy radically foreshortened by recent experiences. Contrary to what the judge implied in sentencing, Dunlop had already been grievously punished for his sins. He had been humiliated and disgraced, albeit as a consequence of his own actions. He had, by all accounts, lost his friends. As a national figure, he had become the target of public rage and vindictiveness in a way ‘ordinary’ criminals do not.
Nobody could have suggested that Judge O’Donnell was a man lacking in compassion. Just a few days beforehand, he had suspended the entirety of a sentence of three years’ imprisonment he handed down to a man who was before him on charges of robbing a pharmacy, apparently by demanding money with menaces. The man had twenty-three previous convictions, including a number of counts relating to drugs and robbery. Judge O’Donnell said it was a ‘stupid’ robbery, but accepted that all the cash had been recovered.
Judge O’Donnell pointed out that the charges against Frank Dunlop related to separate acts of corruption in 1992 and 1997, and noted that Dunlop had shown no hesitation in renewing his corrupt practices after a long gap. He had had every opportunity to reflect on what he was doing. The Judge added: ‘Some people who come before me knowingly commit crimes through a haze of addiction. What you did, you did with a long-range, focused, criminal intent.’
It was an odd thing to interject, as though the Judge felt a need to justify himself. What possible connection could there be between Frank Dunlop and the kinds of people Judge O’Donnell was referring to? Indeed, it might be argued that Dunlop, too, was an addict: addicted, like so many of his countrymen, to money and power, and therefore perhaps just as worthy of compassion and mercy as an addict who endangered public safety in order to get his fix.
It is interesting how what is called justice often seems to follow the contours of public piety. Dunlop, with his not entirely attractive personality, made rather a good scapegoat. His jailing at this point went some little way towards appeasing a public seemingly insatiable in its need to see people walk the plank and climb the scaffold. Judge O’Donnell’s words therefore caused a great outpouring of satisfaction in the land.
But the idea that Dunlop’s incarceration would do anything to restore the public’s faith in the planning process was a bit much. Planning in most parts of Ireland is opaque, arbitrary and shot through with a culture of ideological obstructionism. Anyone seeking to use the system soon discovers that it appears to be set up to create a context for people to find unorthodox ways around it. Or, perhaps you might say that it is set up to render necessary some extra-curricular assistance in finding ways around it. One planning authority in the west of the country, for example, requires members of the public who are seeking an appointment with a planner to call immediately after 9 a.m. on a Wednesday, in order to arrange an appointment for the following Monday week. All the available appointments are allocated within a few minutes, and, unless you can get through immediately after nine, you have no chance of getting to see a planner.
Most people seem to think this a normal way of doing business – whether through naïveté, righteousness or poverty, wearily and expensively trudging their way through the myriad of obstacles placed in the way of anyone seeking to get anything done. And when they were told to disapprove of ‘corruption’, most people did that as well, shaking their heads sadly at the criminality of Frank Dunlop and making no connection with their own experiences of bureaucracy and official obstructionism. And Frank, of course, duly obliged by looking the part of a once promising apparatchik gone to the bad. It did not seem to occur to anyone that it was perhaps the most natural thing in the world that businessmen in a hurry might see the need to pursue a different approach – that they might see the benefit of having a man with a brown envelope going around to grease the system’s wheels a little. To suggest that this began or ended with Frank Dunlop was worthy of the constitution of Cloud Cuckoo Land. But somehow this was a lot easier than actually doing anything about it.
38
Charlie McCreevy
I
f they made movies about things as interesting as Irish politics, the story of Charles McCreevy might be among the more emblematic of the age: the Young Turk who blew the whistle on the greybeards who were sabotaging the economy, who was banished to the backbenches, then returned triumphant to become Minister for Finance in what would become the most successful period in his country’s economic history.
In February 1982, Charlie McCreevy appeared on the cover of
Magill
, his face adorned by a headline which in its time did not read as overblown: ‘Charlie McCreevy is Right. The Politicians Have Vandalized the Country.’
‘Our politicians,’ began Vincent Browne’s article inside, ‘have propelled us towards economic and social calamity in the last decade. Wild, irresponsible election promises and commitments, reckless public expenditure schemes, uncontrolled deficit budgeting and an unprecedented falsification of budget figures have coalesced to create the worst economic crisis the State has ever known. One politician has spoken out against this drift in national politics, Charlie McCreevy, and because he has done so outside the cosy confines of his party rooms he is being chastised.’
McCreevy, then a tender thirty-two-year-old, had been making his views on the economy known for some time before the ousting of Jack Lynch by Charles Haughey in 1979. The 1977 Fianna Fáil election manifesto, on the crest of which McCreevy was himself swept into the Dáil, had all but bankrupted the economy, and McCreevy had been among those who had voted for Haughey, believing him capable of restoring sanity to the national finances. On 11 January 1980, just three days after Charles Haughey’s landmark ‘We-are-living-beyond-our-means’ TV address, McCreevy raged in public about the recent drift of Irish politics. ‘General elections seem to be developing into an auction in promises,’ he thundered in
Newbridge
. ‘We are so hell bent on assuming power that we are prepared to do anything for it.’
In April 1981 McCreevy warned: ‘If political parties continue to disgrace themselves, then democracy itself is at risk.’ This speech began a process that resulted in his temporary expulsion from the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party, his long-term political estrangement from Haughey and his exclusion from ministerial office for more than a decade. His banishment continued even as the very prescriptions he had been advocating were gradually adopted by the political establishment and media. When Haughey returned to power in February 1987, he had virtually universal support in pursuing the course McCreevy had been banished for promoting. But, although he remained on good personal terms with Haughey, McCreevy languished on the backbenches for another decade, until Albert Reyolds, on replacing Haughey, promoted him to the cabinet.
McCreevy was bright, charismatic and street-smart in a peculiarly Irish, small-town way. A highly skilled communicator, he employed language in a manner deceptively unpolished. Even when he became Minister for Finance, he continued to speak in the imprecise way people speak in shops and restaurants and bars and across garden fences. There was a characteristic about his delivery suggestive of an unaccountable breathlessness. When, as a reporter, you wrote down one of his sentences, you nearly always had to reinterpret it, ever so slightly, maybe by adding in words that he had left out, or because he had forgotten the construction he had embarked upon and ended up with two sentences stuck together like two odd socks at the bottom of the laundry basket. McCreevy’s sentences were a wonder of the world. In print, even when edited, they required careful study to decipher. And yet, as he delivered them, they conveyed precisely what he intended.
There is something in the Irish personality that resists pretension and what passes for cosmopolitanism, a resistance to the false. Sometimes this seems to manifest itself as a kind of anti-intellectualism, which causes clever people to conceal their intelligence behind a façade of come-all-ye simplicity. For a politician with intelligence to become and remain electable, it is necessary to sublimate any traits of personality likely to frighten the post-colonial horses. So it is with Charlie McCreevy. His public persona – the bluster, the waffle, the effortless familiarity, the backslapping good humour – were genuine. But they were also carefully – albeit perhaps unconsciously – constructed disguises that enabled him to limbo-dance his way from oblivion to the heights of political power, a kind of Trojan horse for the qualities of good sense and cop-on that McCreevy had in abundance.
McCreevy liked to break down his philosophy into lines that might be thrown across a bar or shouted over the roar of a threshing machine. ‘Don’t curse the darkness’, he would say. ‘Turn on the fucking light!’
‘I would like to think,’ he said near the end of his time as Finance Minster, ‘that the approach I’ve taken, and my economic philosophy, has been . . . that you’ll do better with the money in your arse pocket, and make better decisions and put it to better use, than to be feckin’ around and goin’ in circles and I funnellin’ it back out to you some other way. That’s a fundamental view of mine. Every other economy that tried any other way of doin’ it fell on top of its head. Whereas the economies that’ve had that particular approach have prospered. So therefore the philosophy of givin’ people back their own money has worked in my view, and has contributed to the growth of the Irish economy.’
He railed tautologically against ‘left-wing pinkos’, but never dreamt of himself as an ideologue. ‘But like,’ he would say, ‘like I’ve no problem with the socialist system at all, but I’ve decided over the years, is that people, the whole system works best when people have more freedom in everything. In EVERYTHING. In their own personal lives. Everything.
‘There’s a core group that . . . and it’s anathema to that core group of people that what they have espoused for forty years, since the ’60s, of a certain approach, that this other approach, from this bogman from County Kildare, seems to have worked somewhat better. Ninety-eight per cent of them never saw a fuckin’ poor day in their lives. They always came from the class that was well privileged, went to the best schools, ate in the best restaurants, and talked to the same people anyway. And people like you and me, and our people, wouldn’t be allowed in there. And we all . . . Like. Like. Like. They philosophize and hypothesize and theorize and drink the wine and talk all the night at all the dinner parties, and have these economic philosophies that we’ll all be equal and everything else. But they’re always more equal than the rest of us. And always could talk down to us about it. And it really kills them that that other type of philosophy has worked.’
In the flood of accusation and rage that followed the meltdown of the Irish economy in 2008, it seemed to go unremarked that the signs of imminent collapse had been there some six years before that. It was also unremarked that, back in 2002, when Charlie McCreevy announced that the boom was over, he got nothing for his trouble but abuse.
McCreevy had proposed a series of cutbacks in public expenditure he claimed were necessary to rebalance the economy, which he said was beginning to overheat. The press and public went crazy. For once, McCreevy’s populist instincts seemed to desert him. On
The Late Late Show
, he was booed by the audience when he tried to justify the measures being taken.
Back in 1982, it had suited the Irish public to have a hero to say sensible things in the nick of time to prevent national bankruptcy. Now, McCreevy, turned gamekeeper, was again demanding the postponement of short-term gratification for long-term benefit. But this time, cushioned by the tiger-fleece of the early Tiger boom, the Irish public wanted the candy to keep on coming. The media, which for many years had led the clamour for the implementation of fiscal rectitude, abandoned economic pieties in favour of a populist witch-hunt. McCreevy threw in the towel and fecked off, like Ray MacSharry before him, to Brussels.