Authors: Mary O'Rourke
Just Mary (32 page)
In July 2010, about a month prior to the event, the Fine Gael
TD
, Jim O’Keeffe had issued an invitation to Brian, asking if he would speak at the forthcoming
remembrance for Collins. Never before had a leading member of Fianna Fáil been asked to address the faithful at what is naturally a highly significant event in the Fine Gael political
calendar. This was a huge invitation and honour for Brian and, with his own historical and legal knowledge, he was even more intensely aware of the implications of such a gesture. Naturally, he
accepted.
After what would be a very memorable occasion in many ways, I wrote a short piece for publication, which appeared a year to the day in the
Irish Daily Mail
, and after the death of Brian
Lenihan. Written as it was relatively soon after the Béal na mBláth event itself, I think it captures very well the atmosphere and tenor of that day, and so I include it here as it
first appeared:
This Sunday twelve months ago, at around 9 a.m., we left Athlone to travel to West Cork. Anyone observing us loading up so early could see we were going somewhere for a
purpose and yes, indeed we were.
Was it a
GAA
match? No — indeed that day Cork was meeting Dublin in Croke Park, so we were going in the wrong direction. In fact, we were going to Béal
na mBláth in West Cork, where each year on the Sunday nearest the death date of Michael Collins (22 August 1922), the faithful gather to pay tribute to him. Mostly they have one of their
own to give the address, occasionally they have asked an outsider but always with a purpose. On this occasion, their chosen guest was Brian Lenihan,
TD
, the then
Minister for Finance.
During that previous week, the papers had been full of this invitation which had been issued to Brian Lenihan from the Michael Collins Commemorative Committee at Béal na
mBláth, asking him to come and to deliver the yearly address.
A few days beforehand, Mícheál, a close friend of mine in Athlone, had called one night and suggested we should travel to Cork to hear the address and to be part of what we
knew would be a forever-to-be-remembered, historic occasion. We enlisted another dear friend, Seamus, whom we asked to take the wheel and off we went, three Fianna Fáil people from
Athlone, who wanted to travel to Cork to honour the death of Michael Collins. The weather was promised fair, but we loaded our umbrellas and our coats and set off through the soft undulating
countryside of Offaly.
Athlone to West Cork is a long distance, but we hardly felt it as we moved onwards and onwards. As we neared Béal na mBláth, the crowds were swelling and the attentive and
careful Gardaí were on duty everywhere. We pressed on, however, keen to get an advantageous spot, which we eventually did — very near the place where the talk was to be given and
where the crowds pressed most keenly in anticipation.
Neither I nor my two companions had ever been to Béal na mBláth before. Yes, I had traversed all of West Cork further on and on, but had never taken the turn which led to this
hallowed historic spot. Absorbing the scene, notwithstanding the huge crowds, it was easy to envisage what had happened in this narrow gorge 88 years beforehand. It was a spot tailor-made for
an ambush, and which was now taken up by a simple platform where the Committee assembled. Bit by bit, we talked and mingled insofar as we could in the midst of such numbers, with crowds from
counties all over Ireland, including a busload from Dublin West.
Shortly afterwards, well on time, Brian Lenihan appeared to the tumultuous crowds.
Brian spoke generous, strong words. He stood tall and well. It was easy for all of us who watched and listened to desperately disbelieve the stark health prognosis he had been given and to
think that somehow he would surmount it. Anything seemed possible on such a beautiful sunlit day in that narrow West Cork spot. Today, as I write and speak, can I remember what exactly he said?
No, but I can remember that it was stirring and strong, that the sun shone high, that the crowds applauded and sang and willed him to be well.
Long after the formalities were over, Brian lingered and talked personally with every single person who wanted to meet him. They pressed in and pressed in and shook his hand and kissed him
— and I know he was as stirred as they were. It is as if their collective wish was to make him remain as he was — strong, good, firm and steady — and on that day, it seemed
that all old animosities died away.
So how did the Commemorative Committee decide that Brian Lenihan should be their chosen guest for that great occasion? I have never heard the full story of why, but I do know that the
retired Fine Gael
TD
, Jim O’Keeffe, was the purveyor of the invitation and I also know that it took Brian very little time to make up his mind to go.
There is an old Irish proverb: ‘Briseann an dúchas trí shúile an chait’. You see, while we have been a strong Fianna Fáil family for many decades, my
father, as a young man in University College, Galway, was on the side of Michael Collins and took part with other students in manoeuvres in Athenry on behalf of the Treaty side. There was never
any secrecy about it. My mother, in compensation if you like, came from a strong, strong republican family in Sligo. So we were reared in a family where the two traditions were spoken of in an
easy, non-threatening way.
We set off for home and Athlone again. Back through all the lovely counties, and we made no stop until we came to the fine midland town of Birr. Mícheál and I decided that one
drink was in order and that we would get our non-drinking friend a mineral, so we repaired to the County Arms and watched the 9 o’clock news. As we watched, we relived the scene once
more. It is now the 89th anniversary of the death of Michael Collins.
Do we remember what Brian said on that day? No, we can’t remember the exact words, but we have so many perfect pictures in our minds of the shining Cork sun, of the strong stirring
words Brian spoke and of the tumultuous surging crowds. But most of all, we remember that we came back to Athlone with hope in our hearts.
Of course as we all know now, it was not to be, but we have forever those memories of that Sunday Cork visit and the generosity and love of the Cork people of that region who came out to
meet him with full hearts and hopes, and who gave Brian an honour which he never forgot for the rest of his short life.
21
| IRELAND GETS A BAILOUT |
B
y late autumn 2010, despite the imposition of budget after brutal budget and the enactment of a series of aggressive cuts in government spending,
it became clear that a new crisis point had been reached for Ireland. Put simply, by the beginning of November, it seemed that no-one in the international financial markets was prepared to lend to
the Irish banks, and so other European Finance Ministers were putting Brian Lenihan under increasing pressure to accept a bailout from the
IMF
/
ECB
/
EU
Troika, fearful that ‘panic’ in Ireland might spread to other countries such as Spain and Portugal.
The reason for this critical lack of confidence in Irish banks has been summed up by Morgan Kelly, the eminent Professor of Economics at
UCD
, as ‘the certainty that
[Irish] bank losses would far exceed the estimates of [the governor of the Irish Central Bank], Patrick Honohan’. Appointed by Brian Lenihan as Governor to the Irish Central Bank in September
2009, and thereby as the government’s chief financial advisor, Honohan was effectively in a position to take control of important aspects of our economic policy, such as the banking and
finance sector. An inherent weakness in Honohan’s position, however, was that as well as his other offices, he was a member of the Council of the
ECB
, and thereby
bound to follow their directives in key matters. And so a potential conflict of interests — between what was good for Ireland and what was good for the
ECB
— lay
at the heart of any decision-making process he undertook.
As Finance Minister, Brian Lenihan however was determined to hold out for as long as he could against the pressure of seeking a bailout, in order to get the best possible terms from the Troika
for the Irish people. He knew that in some ways, we were in a stronger negotiating position than might have first appeared and he was intent on exploiting this advantage, however small it might be.
It was a very difficult position to be in, and he was very well aware of that.
I remember so clearly a telling incident of the night of 17 November 2010. I had stayed late in the Dáil and was in the canteen with Terry Leyden, having something to eat. It was about
nine o’clock. I saw Brian Lenihan come in and, once he had ordered a salad or something light for himself, he joined us at our table. Not long afterwards, Brian’s Private Secretary
Dermot Moylan came into the canteen, looking harried. Dermot came straight over to where we were sitting and told Brian that Patrick Honohan, the Governor of the Central Bank, was on the phone from
Frankfurt and wanted to speak to him urgently.
Brian duly went away to take the call. When he came back about twenty minutes later, he was quietly fulminating. It appeared that Honohan had wanted him to call a Cabinet meeting that night, in
order to say that we were going to accept help from the
IMF
. Brian had replied that it was not he who called Cabinet meetings — that this was only within the remit of
the Taoiseach — and that therefore he couldn’t do it. Clearly, he had no desire for his hand to be forced in such a way.
All hell broke loose the next day, 18 November when, speaking live from Frankfurt, Patrick Honohan did a radio interview on
RTÉ
’
S
Morning Ireland
, in which he said that the
IMF
were coming in and that Ireland would need a bailout of ‘tens of billions’. That Honohan should have made
such a statement without the input and agreement of the Cabinet or the Taoiseach was remarkable in so many ways. Uproar ensued, as, for example, Ministers Dermot Ahern and Noel Dempsey, who had
both attended public functions some days earlier, had been put in the excruciating position of denying that the Troika were coming in — because to their knowledge, nothing official had been
ratified to suggest otherwise. Brian Cowen and Brian Lenihan were livid, of course. As I say, they had been holding out so that the best deal could be secured for Ireland and for some time had been
trying to keep public speculation as to a possible bailout under tight control, knowing how easily this would paint us into a corner, and how dramatically such a development might affect the
confidence of the markets and the public too.
In hindsight, Patrick Honohan’s intervention on that fateful day has been widely regarded as deeply controversial. He had made a statement that was clearly at odds with what had been, up
to that moment, the public position of the government. In doing so, he had left the government in an impossible situation. In an article which appeared in
The Irish Times
in May 2011,
Morgan Kelly summed up the episode most incisively: ‘Rarely has a Finance Minister been so deftly sliced off at the ankles by his central bank governor . . .’ I must agree
wholeheartedly with his assessment here.
Thinking about that period and looking back on it now, however, I am still not able to reconcile in my mind the huge sense of shame that was supposedly associated with the fact that we had had
to invoke the
IMF
. Was it not better that we got money to pay our nurses, doctors, teachers, Gardaí, council workers, than to beggar ourselves completely and renege
on our debts? That would never have been an honourable way to go. As far as I was concerned, we were part of Europe, we had chosen to be part of Europe, and better it was that we now made use of
the monetary facilities available to us through the European structure, to put our house in order while we could. In my view, it was not the Bank Guarantee which weighed so heavily upon us, but
rather that we were paying out far more — in wages and subsidies and everything else, per week, per month, per year — than we were ever taking in. It was that financial imbalance in our
domestic set-up which got the better of us in the end.
So, in the bleak situation we found ourselves in once more during that winter of 2010, further austerity measures were clearly required. And of course the unenviable task of formulating and
implementing these fell on Brian Lenihan’s shoulders. Accordingly, he brought us the budget of 7 December 2010. Looking back on it now, it is incredible to contemplate how much Brian had to
deal with during the three years of his tenure as Minister for Finance, and how much he managed to pack into that time in terms of the number of emergency measures and strategies he put in place.
Between 2008 and 2011, he guided us through four budgets and enacted no fewer than 24 pieces of ‘fire-fighting’ legislation, which he himself introduced into Dáil Éireann
with the very able and loyal assistance of Martin Mansergh, his second-in-command. In addition to this, there were the hugely significant events of the Bank Guarantee, the
IMF
bailout, the arrival of the Troika to somehow be negotiated — and Brian was the one everyone looked to here too.