Authors: John Waters
A decade before, James Gogarty, since deceased, had been a national hero – the cantankerous old whistle-blower who would come to claim the scalp of a former government minister, Mr Raphael Burke, jailed in 2005 for tax evasion. In return for his testimony to the Flood Tribunal, the State gave Gogarty indemnity from prosecution and paid his legal costs. Burke memorably called Gogarty ‘an assassin in the middle of the night’. Gogarty retorted: ‘I’ve been insulted by experts and this guy doesn’t rate.’
In a strange and incongruous way, the tribunals seem to have gone hand-in-glove with the mentality of the Celtic Tiger. Most of them were established towards the end of the 1990s, partly as the result of pressure arising from various revelations suggesting corruption by politicians and others. For a decade and a half, the tribunals created vast amounts of material for journalists and mimics who relayed the proceedings to a nation increasingly in the grip of self-satisfaction. It was a pantomime to accompany the hubris of sham prosperity.
The very existence of the tribunals in the boom years suggested also that Ireland was doing something radical about corruption. Few remarked on the inconvenient circumstance that Fianna Fáil, the party most likely to come under scrutiny in this connection, had readily agreed to the tribunal mechanism. One way of describing what happened is to say that Flood, Moriarty et al. enabled Fianna Fáil to continue in office for those fourteen disastrous years between 1997 and 2011 by functioning as lightning rods for any inconvenient allegations that might crop up along the way. The standard mantra, ‘It’s a matter for the tribunal’, enabled any potentially damaging accusations to be rendered safely to earth.
The tribunal of inquiry, in other words, was Irish society’s greatest discovery of the 1990s, a perfect device for media and for the new breed of politician to carry on the various kinds of pretences that enabled public opinion to be appeased while business continued pretty much as usual. Tribunalism allowed us to dig up the past in a selective way, so as to dramatize our imagined ‘progress’ without admitting what was really at the root of our collective ill-health. Just as it suited Fianna Fáil and its various junior partners to have the tribunals acting as a kind of sin-bin for inconvenient questions about political chicanery, it suited the society as a whole to create the impression that the war against corruption was being waged without fear or favour. Meanwhile, the bankers and developers got down to making some serious hay.
As the whole charade drew to an ignominious conclusion, it became increasingly clear that the only real benefit of the tribunals was bestowed on lawyers, who received fantastic sums of taxpayers’ money to create enough hot air to send a balloon to the moon. The alleged ‘money trail’ in the phone licence saga – the amount of money allegedly paid to Lowry by O’Brien – was about
€
550,000, or 2 per cent of the amount earned by the top three senior counsel working for the Moriarty Tribunal.
The mechanism whereby the retraction was extracted from Master James Flynn was instructive in its orchestration. Key players with vested interests immediately began whipping up pressure for sanctions. Politicians like Mary Harney and Michael McDowell, who had come to power by accusing others of moral failings, made solemn statements of their concern. Attacks were launched by journalists, whom tribunals have made into stars. Once it was announced that the Attorney General had conveyed the government’s ‘deep concern’ to the President of the High Court, Master Flynn’s climb-down or removal was a matter of time. In the end, he capitulated and apologized, and the veil once again fell down on one of the truly great scandals of Irish life.
It was inevitable, given the set-up he was fingering, that Master James Flynn would be made to eat crow. If his remarks were allowed to stand, other public servants might take to speaking their minds, and the public might have been enabled to see behind the veil of bullshit that protects the true nature of political processes.
He should have stood his ground, should Master Flynn, for few things that have been said in the recent history of Irish public life were as correct and as perspicacious as those remarks of his about Frankenstein monsters and Star Chambers. Had we allowed ourselves to listen to and act upon his analysis, we might not have become quite as distracted as we did with our own smug sense of probity, and might have seen the real tsunami coming before it swept all our self-satisfaction away.
Fintan O’Toole
I
n the three-year build-up to the 2011 general election, there was a growing sense of radicalization in Irish society. It is true that the focus of much of the exploration was dismayingly narrow, and the energy behind it the product of an uncritical and often selective rage. But still, there was the possibility of the crystallization of Irish self-awareness in a moment of resolution and constructive hopefulness, perhaps even a political initiative of some sort.
One by one, the great institutions of Irish life had fallen into disrepute: the Catholic Church, the banking system, the apparatus of government, the European ‘project’ and the political party system. There had been scandals affecting An Garda Síochána and the business community. Through the second half of 2008 and into 2009, every day seemed to bring further bad news. The Irish people contemplated the extent of the confidence trick that had been perpetrated upon them. Their blind faith in a political/economic system driven by the avaricious desires of the few, rather than the modest needs of the many, had delivered Ireland into a degree of perdition that even the most morose of Jeremiahs had failed to predict. By 2010, the Irish people had become so shell-shocked that even the arrival in November of the International Monetary Fund was, by the time it happened, something of a relief.
Out of this dismal picture emerged the unspoken possibility that everything might be persuaded to change, if only because everything had to. As 2011 dawned, it seemed that all was set, at last, to change utterly. For more than two years, the incumbent Fianna Fáil/Green coalition government had resisted innumerable calls to allow the Irish people a say in the drift of some of the most calamitous events in Irish history. Then, an announcement by the Green Party of its intention to withdraw from government in early 2011 was followed by a series of slapstick events that led, on 1 February 2011, to the announcement of the general election.
For a brief moment it seemed that anything might happen. As the public waited for the election date to be announced, the mood was strangely subdued. It was already clear that the two government parties would be routed in the coming poll. But it was also obvious that there was no great stomach for the most obvious alternative: some kind of coalition between Fine Gael and the Labour Party.
There had been rumours for some time about a new political movement, gravitating mainly around a handful of media personalities who had been vocal in criticizing the policies and performance of the outgoing government, identifying the nature of Irish political culture as the key factor in the national undoing. Over the previous couple of years, journalists like Fintan O’Toole, Shane Ross and David McWilliams had been delivering fiery speeches to large gatherings all around the country, affirming that they were as mad as hell and a change was gonna hafta come. Then, as 2011 dawned, it was whispered that these people were meeting in smoke-free rooms to discuss the possibility of snatching the steering wheel from the political establishment that had driven us into the abyss. In the Dáil, Mary O’Rourke, the Great Irish Mammy of one of Ireland’s oldest political dynasties, spoke mockingly of ‘wonderful gurus standing in what one could describe as posh areas’. The Irish people could hardly wait for this to happen so that they could give Mary the bum’s rush.
And then, one Saturday morning in late January, the Irish people woke up to the announcement that the revolution had been aborted due to difficulties in obtaining a babysitter. In a lengthy article in the
Irish Times
, the assistant editor of that newspaper, Fintan O’Toole, told the distraught Irish people that he could not lead them after all. Yes, it was true, he and a number of others had been planning to run for election. In the previous few weeks, Fintan confided that, over the previous weeks, he had been considering putting his deposit where his mouth had been by running for the Dáil. It was time, he had resolved, to go beyond the idea that ‘somebody somewhere should do something’. There was, he acknowledged, ‘a very deep hunger for someone (almost anyone) from outside the existing political culture to step into the arena and champion a process of radical change’. Even ‘nice, sensible people’ had been pleading with him to run for public office and save Ireland from itself.
Having ruled out running for an established party or as an independent, he had, he revealed, joined with David McWilliams and unnamed others in an attempt to launch a movement that would seek to reclaim Irish democracy from the deathly grip of the party system. The idea was for a bunch of candidates with a track record of civic achievement in business, the arts, community and voluntary activity, sport, and single-issue campaigns to get together and seek a common platform. It was to be called ‘Democracy Now’.
Fintan spelt out once again the many deficiencies he had identified in Irish political culture. He reiterated his belief that the austerity measures being promoted by most of the established parties would be socially and economically disastrous. The Irish people were not arguing. ‘Bring it on!’ they essayed as the toast burned – this was just what the doctor ordered.
Alas, as they read on, the Irish people would have noted the incremental shift in Fintan’s prose from the present to the past tense and, even more ominously, to the past conditional. ‘The challenge’, declared Fintan, ‘is that the project would have to have a large scale in order to be meaningful.’ It would ‘have to have’ a realistic chance of getting at least twenty people elected. Two things had been clear to them from the outset of this project, wrote Fintan: one was that they had a moral duty to do it; the other was that they had a moral duty not to screw it up. A national crisis was not an occasion for enthusiastic amateurism. ‘An inadequate effort wouldn’t be a noble failure. It would be worse than doing nothing at all because it would raise hopes and then dash them. The last thing Irish democracy needs right now is another reason for despair. If the point of a campaign was to remind people that they do have power, it would be unforgivable to leave them feeling even more powerless.’
Yes, yes, yes, implored the Irish people, willfully ignoring Fintan’s shift of tense, but the revolution, the revolution . . .
The revolution, revealed Fintan, was not going to happen. Time, he explained, was against it. They had been expecting the election to be held in late March, not February, and the sudden, ignominious disintegration of the Cowen administration had thrown everything out of kilter. It wasn’t a matter of funding or logistics, but mainly of family and employment issues affecting him and other prospective candidates. As some of these had indicated their reluctance to proceed, the doubts of others had started to grow. The revolution had been stillborn.
Fintan was aware that he would be accused of chickening out, ‘of climbing up the diving board only to scurry back down the ladder’, but this, he had decided, was not a time for glorious gestures. Having been reminded that analysing the world is a lot easier than changing it, Fintan was returning to the job he was ‘best fitted for’.
The Irish people scratched their heads – if Fintan and his mates had really believed things were as bad as they had been saying, how could something as banal as the timing of the election have such a critical impact on their decisions? If we were truly, as Fintan had told them, at a moment of unprecedented national emergency, how could he return to his day job with any real expectation that this day job was going to be safe – safer, that is, than any of the thousands already lost as a consequence of the amorality and cronyism that Fintan had so roundly denounced?
Thus it was that the defining moment of the 2011 general election occurred not during the campaign, on polling day or the day of the count, but approximately a week before the election date was announced. This moment was fateful because, by then, the leaders of the incipient Democracy Now movement had insinuated themselves into the public consciousness as bearers of a new hope that past mistakes and wrongdoings could be overcome. Then, having drawn the hopes and desires of the Irish people to themselves, these men decided – for undoubtedly good, practical and sensible reasons – to withdraw and return to the sidelines.
By briefly confusing their role of commentating with that of representing, Fintan and his fellow would-be revolutionaries led the people on towards the glimmer of light they indicated somewhere up ahead. And then, by their retreat, they implied something else: either that things were not as bad as they had intimated, or that things were beyond redemption. Nobody could be entirely certain which it was.
After this, the election became a matter of settling for the safest option: a secure administration to continue the work of the last – free, to an extent, from the shadows and stains of the past.
Although it did not field any candidates, Democracy Now was the defining force of the 2011 election. It kidnapped the hopes and dreams of the Irish people and subjected them to a controlled explosion in the public square.
Bill Graham
W
hen
Hot Press
emerged in the summer of 1977, promising to ‘make Ireland safe for rock’n’roll’, there was perhaps a weekly total of three hours of pop music on national radio. Coverage of rock’n’roll in the newspapers was arid and dull. Showbizzy magazines, making no distinctions as to quality or wit, came and went. The state of the local counterculture not being what it might, we had been tapping mainly into British pop culture – the
NME
, the
Melody Maker
, John Peel and Whispering Bob Harris on the BBC – and to a lesser extent into the American model, courtesy of
Rolling Stone
magazine. But then, along came
Hot Press
, from what seemed like nowhere. Although we very quickly slipped into searching for its flaws, in reality it was a thousand times better than we had any right to expect. After years of mediocrity, here at last was something made in Ireland that could deliver writing about Irish music to match anything we had encountered in the wider world.