Ireland Since 1939

by Henry Patterson

  The author of a historical sociology of the Irish Catholic Church described the results of these scandals: ‘The media have driven a stake into the heart of the institutional church from which it will recover, but never fully. We will never see the likes of the Catholic Church's moral monopoly again.’118 Mass attendance rates had remained impressively high throughout the 1970s and 1980s, especially by international standards. As late as 1990, 85 per cent of those surveyed went to mass at least once a week. By 1997 this had dropped to 65 per cent.119 This was still high by international standards and, as one historian noted, ‘it would be wrong to write off the Catholic Church's grip upon the mores and the outlook of its Irish members.’120

  Yet the Church's capacity to defend its power and influence was even more profoundly sapped by a sharp decline in vocations. Ordinations for the priesthood dropped from 412 in 1965 to forty-four in 1998, while there were even starker declines in the numbers of those entering the religious orders. Between 1967 and 1998 the total number of priests, brothers and nuns in Ireland fell from almost 34,000 to just under 20,000.121 An ageing, shrinking Church was unable to staff the schools, hospitals and other public services that provided much of the institutional basis of its power. The political significance of this was twofold. First, it removed the ‘Catholic card’ from electoral politics, to the disadvantage of the party that had been most proficient in using it: Fianna Fáil. Second, it revealed the hollowness of the argument that the main motivation behind Ulster Unionist resistance to Irish unity was a fear of Catholic power, as the weakening of the Church did little to undermine support for partition amongst the northern majority. Despite this, the political leader identified with this analysis, Garret FitzGerald, was responsible for the biggest political advance for Irish nationalism since partition.

  The Republic and the Anglo-Irish Agreement

  The marginalization of those in the Fianna Fail leadership identified with a more conciliatory line on Northern Ireland provided Garret FitzGerald with an opportunity to establish Fine Gael as the sensible, moderate alternative on the North and Anglo-Irish relations. At a time of considerable tension over the hunger strikes and the Falklands War, this was an approach that appealed to an electorate that ranked Northern Ireland far down on the list of issues that would influence its vote. It also made FitzGerald seem more the sort of Taoiseach with whom Thatcher might do business.

  In September 1981 FitzGerald had announced that he wanted to launch a crusade to create a ‘genuine republic’ with which northern Protestants would wish to have a relationship. He declared: ‘If I were a northern Protestant today, I cannot see how I could be attracted to getting involved with a state that is itself sectarian.’122 Although FitzGerald's willingness to criticize the Catholic ethos of the Republic and his desire to open up dialogue with unionists, rather than appeal over their heads to London, raised his popularity ratings in Belfast, the honeymoon was short-lived. His ‘constitutional crusade’ did not survive the pressures of the abortion debate, and the victories of Sinn Féin candidates in the Assembly elections put paid to his earlier objective of seeking a solution to the northern conflict through dialogue with the unionists: ‘I had come to the conclusion that I must now give priority to heading off the growth of support for the IRA in Northern Ireland by seeking a new understanding with the British government.’123

  FitzGerald's decision to establish the New Ireland Forum in 1983 was related to an immediate political crisis: the threat posed by Sinn Féin to the SDLP. It was also prompted by Hume's idea that all the main constitutional nationalist parties on the island needed to produce an agreed statement of the principles believed to be at stake in the Northern Ireland conflict. This statement would then be the basis for an approach to the British government. The Forum comprised representatives of the SDLP, Fianna Fail, Fine Gael and the Irish Labour Party. Although, contrary to Hume's original idea, it was open to unionist participation, its stated purpose of unifying and revivifying the non-violent nationalist tradition ensured that none of the unionist parties participated, although some unionists gave evidence as individuals.

  Professor John Whyte noted that the Forum, with government funding and a full-time staff, was in a position to make a weightier contribution to the discussion on Northern Ireland than any previous body on the nationalist side since the All-Party Anti-Partition Conference in 1949.124 Given that the latter resulted in little more than a restatement of old nationalist attitudes, this was not a very exacting criterion of success. In fact its final report was an unimpressive document. This in part reflected the need to ensure that Charles Haughey was kept on board. The demands of pan-nationalist unity amongst the constitutional parties ensured that the historical section was untainted by any of the ‘revisionist ideas’ that had increasingly influenced the professional writing of Irish history. Similarly, it was Haughey's veto power that resulted in all the party leaders agreeing to a unitary thirty-two-county state as the report's preferred constitutional option. It is true that the report referred to two other options – a confederal Ireland and joint authority – and that the latter implied an acceptance that a total British withdrawal might not be necessary for a solution of the Northern Ireland problem. However, as neither constitutional nationalism nor physical-force republicanism was any nearer to achieving British withdrawal in 1984 than they had been in 1949, this might be interpreted as a not very substantial concession.

  That was certainly the predictable Ulster Unionist response. However, despite Thatcher's vigorous rejection of all three options at a press conference after her summit meeting with FitzGerald in November 1984, the Anglo-Irish Agreement did for the first time provide the Irish state with considerable leverage on the governance of Northern Ireland. Public opinion in the Republic was supportive of the Agreement and Charles Haughey's denunciation of it as ‘copper-fastening partition’ was not well received. As leading members of Fianna Fáil announced that the party was proud to be ‘the sole party with the nationalist forces’, Haughey appeared to take a position on the Agreement that was indistinguishable from that of Gerry Adams. Such extremism was damaging. Support for the Agreement rose from 59 per cent, with 32 per cent supporting Haughey's position in its immediate aftermath, to 69 per cent by February 1986.125 It was becoming increasingly clear that public opinion in the Republic, while still robustly nationalist, saw the Agreement as achieving a shift in the balance of power in Northern Ireland that favoured the SDLP and Dublin, while still keeping northern passions and violence at arm's length.

  The unpopularity of Haughey's negative reaction to the Anglo-Irish Agreement had forced him to backtrack,126 and by the time of his resignation in 1992 his ambitions for the North did not seem to go beyond joint authority, a position he had execrated when it was supported by FitzGerald in the 1980s. In an analysis of public attitudes in the Republic towards Northern Ireland written two years after the Agreement, Peter Mair demonstrated that, while the aspiration to unity was pervasive, less than a third of the electorate was prepared to pay extra taxes to achieve it. Elections were fought and lost on economic issues. He concluded: ‘Irish voters will be primarily concerned about their pocketbooks for the foreseeable future while Northern Ireland will remain a foreign country.’127 While the Agreement would do much to increase the involvement of the Irish government in the day-to-day governance of the North, it did little to undermine popular aversion to what were seen as its two squabbling and murderous tribes.

  The Republic in the 1990s

  Although the economic boom that began in the 1990s had its roots in the resurrected social partnership that Haughey's governments had developed from 1987, it did not provide his party with the electoral boost that Lemass's investment in economic programming and corporatism had given Fianna Fáil in the 1960s. Haughey was forced to resign in January 1992 when his former Minister for Justice, Seán Doherty, revealed his complicity in the phone-tapping of two journalists in 1982. However, even before the Doherty revelation, his leadership had been u
nder renewed pressure because of increasing public concern at what became known as the ‘Golden Circle’: prominent businessmen who had used various sharp practices to make multimillion pound deals and whose accountants and lawyers had created complex structures to conceal their identities and reduce or eliminate their tax liabilities. The ‘Golden Circle’ had close personal and political connections with leading politicians.128 At the centre of these concerns was Larry Goodman, the dominant figure in the Republic's meat-processing industry. Goodman was a friend of Haughey and of other leading members of Fianna Fáil, and after Haughey returned to power in 1987 his business had received substantial assistance from the IDA and also from the Ministry of Industry and Commerce for an export credit insurance scheme to cover its beef exports to Iraq.129 The beef industry had long been the subject of allegations of corruption, and in May 1991 the ITV programme World in Action alleged that serious malpractices were commonplace in Goodman's plants. The PD leader in the coaliation, Des O'Malley, insisted on a tribunal of inquiry, which revealed that many of the allegations, including millions of pounds of tax evasion, were true.

  Haughey's successor, Albert Reynolds, had as Minister for Industry and Commerce restored export credit insurance for the Goodman group's venture into the Iraqi market – insurance that had been withdrawn by the previous Fine Gael minister. A millionaire from Longford who made his money in dancehalls and dog food, there was never any suggestion of personal corruption on Reynolds's part. Nevertheless, the tribunal led to the collapse of the government when Reynolds accused O'Malley of committing perjury in his evidence and the PDs withdrew from the government. The subsequent general election produced a spectacular result for Dick Spring and the Labour Party, whose vote increased by almost 10 percentage points to 19.3 per cent – its highest since 1922 – and whose number of seats increased from fifteen to thirty-three. Fianna Fáil's vote declined to 39 per cent, its worst since 1927, while Fine Gael, which had been shaken by the emergence of the PDs, saw its vote decline by almost 5 percentage points to 24.5 per cent.130

  Labour's victory had been anticipated in the 1990 presidential elections when, for the first time since the inauguration of the office, Fianna Fáil's candidate had been defeated. Spring had persuaded the constitutional lawyer and champion of divorce and contraception Mary Robinson to stand, even though she had resigned from Labour over the Anglo-Irish Agreement. The first woman candidate for the post, Robinson also gained the support of the Workers’ Party, the Greens and many women's groups. Her declarations of support for gay rights and for a radical improvement in the state's family planning services did not endear her to many male voters in rural Ireland, although her sex and some of the crasser attacks on her by male Fianna Fáil politicians may have led their wives and daughters to a different conclusion. There was a strong correlation between support for Robinson and a ‘progressive’ stance on abortion and divorce, leading one commentator to claim that ‘the “new Ireland” had emerged victorious after two referendum defeats’.131 This exaggerated the implications of Robinson's victory. The only region in which Robinson outpolled the Fianna Fáil candidate, Brian Lenihan, was Dublin city and county, and Lenihan's first-preference vote was 44.1 per cent to Robinson's 38.9 per cent. Robinson's victory came about through the distribution of the second-preference votes of those who supported the Fine Gael candidate, Austin Currie. Moreover, Lenihan was a seriously weakened candidate: during the campaign Haughey was forced to sack him from the cabinet after it emerged that in January 1982, upon the defeat of the coalition government, Lenihan had phoned the President to try to persuade him not to dissolve the Dáil.

  Labour's surge in 1992 was in part a product of the ‘Robinson effect’, but it was also a reflection of widespread public perception of a Fianna Fáil political class embroiled in sleaze. Neither of these factors would continue to favour the party once Spring shocked many of his party supporters by entering into a coalition with Reynolds. After the collapse of the Reynolds government in 1992, Spring had told the Dáil it was impossible to envisage entering into partnership with a party that ‘has gone so far down the road of blindness to standards and blindness to the people they are supposed to represent’.132 However, after the election Spring displayed no real enthusiasm for John Bruton's proposal of a ‘rainbow coalition’ including Fine Gael, Labour and the Progressive Democrats. This reflected the deep-rooted hostility of Spring to Bruton, which had its origin in bitter clashes between the two when they were in the 1983–7 coalition. Spring was also concerned that neither Fine Gael nor the Progressive Democrats would countenance the participation of Democratic Left in the coalition. This party had been formed when six of the seven Workers’ Party TDs had split from the organization in March 1992 over their disquiet about revelations of the continuing links between leading members of the WP and the Official IRA in Northern Ireland.133 Labour, watchful of its left flank, went through the motions of negotiating a platform with Democratic Left to construct a centre-left government with Fine Gael, but this became academic when after a series of recounts it was confirmed that the Democatic Left had lost its Dublin South-central seat, robbing the centre-left option of sufficient Dáil support.

  Although some of Reynolds's colleagues were hostile to the idea of a coalition with Labour, Brian Lenihan welcomed the possibility of a return to Fianna Fáil's social republican past. Spring had sent Reynolds a paper drawn up by Labour and Democratic Left during their negotiations and Fianna Fáil's response was drafted by the Taoiseach's special adviser, the Oxford-educated historian Dr Martin Mansergh. Although the perceived incongruity between his Protestant, Anglo-Irish background and his strong republican line on Northern Ireland was to make him a figure of fascination for many journalists, another side to Mansergh's intellectual make-up was important in the formation of the coalition. This was his firm conviction that Fianna Fáil's social-republican and corporatist tendencies had been the real source of its hegemony in Irish politics.134 Such thinking eased Labour's way into government, but the process was also greatly assisted by Reynolds's apparent success at the Edinburgh EU summit, where he claimed to have secured £8 billion for Ireland in structural and cohesion funds up to 1999. This made it easier to implement those elements of Labour's programme that involved a commitment to extra expenditure on health and social welfare, which in turn enabled Reynolds to insist that Labour accept the budgetary constraints imposed by the Maastricht Treaty. All of the Labour demands on the ‘liberal agenda’ and the issue of sleaze were included in the programme for government, with commitments to an Ethics in Government Bill, Dáil reform, the introduction of divorce, abortion legislation and the decriminalization of homosexuality. Labour's stunning electoral performance was also recognized in an unprecedented profile in government. It had six of the fifteen cabinet posts and a special office of the Tánaiste was created, situated in government buildings, with its own staff and budget, to strengthen Spring's position in the cabinet.

  Despite such an apparently auspicious beginning, including a Dáil majority of forty-two, the largest in the history of the state, the coali-tion was characterized by internal conflict almost from the start. In part this reflected a serious personality clash between Reynolds and Spring: ‘The two men were like chalk and cheese and seemed always prepared to think the worst of each other. In contrast to Reynolds's bright and breezy style, Spring was thoughtful and reserved and quick to take offence.’135 Such tensions were exacerbated by Labour's increasing dissatisfaction with Reynolds's failure to rein in Fianna Fáil's proclivity to favour its business allies and his tendency, when the need arose, to behave as if he were leading a single-party government. Spring, conscious of the shock that his move into government with Fianna Fáil had caused many of those who had voted Labour in 1992, was determined that Labour would play a high-profile and assertive role in government. Labour insisted on a new system of ministerial programme managers whose job it was to ensure that the coalition deal was implemented. The programme managers appointed by the si
x Labour ministers were all Labour Party activists, and the party shocked some of its supporters in the media by the extent to which political and familial nepotism influenced its appointments from special advisers to secretaries and drivers.136

  In 1993 Reynolds insisted on a new amnesty for tax evaders, the second in five years, which was opposed by his own Minister for Finance Bertie Ahern and which deeply troubled many Labour supporters already annoyed by the government's first budget in 1993, which had increased taxes on ordinary workers and imposed a 1 per cent income levy.137 Labour supporters were also uncomfortable with the 1994 Finance Bill, which relaxed the tax regime for wealthy expatriates, and with the so-called ‘Masri affair’, which also became public in 1994. It was alleged that two members of the Masri family, who had been granted Irish citizenship under a Business Migration Scheme, had invested £1 million in a pet-food company that was owned by the Reynolds family. Reynolds in turn was exasperated with what he regarded as Labour's refusal to face up to hard economic decisions: in his view, the budget was a response to a difficult economic situation, which included a rise in unemployment and a currency crisis that had forced a devaluation of the Irish pound.