by John Waters
But, when you rummaged through the wrapping in search of George’s solutions, all that seemed to be there was George’s intense belief in his own abilities and insights.
He said that, if we wanted to put things to rights, the best thing was for him to become part of the Fine Gael team and get elected as a TD for Dublin South. It was clear to him that Fine Gael under Enda Kenny was the party best placed to provide the kind of leadership and vision the country needed.
George won the by-election to much fanfare. The people of Ireland smiled for the first time in many months, and then went back to work and waited for the revolution.
Nothing happened, and this nothingness was followed by more of the same. Eight months later, George emerged, virtually in tears, from a broom cupboard he had been given in a building on Kildare Street. Nobody would listen to him, he said. Nobody cared what he thought about anything. He was in total disagreement with Fine Gael party policy and nobody gave a toss. Everyone was still being mean to him. George ran screaming out into Kildare Street, saying he was jacking it all in and returning to his job in RTE.
George Lee’s experience tells us many things about the deep malaise at the heart of Irish politics. It illustrates the madness that arises from the absence of true idealism in the Irish body politic that a man known only for being paid to criticize economic policy can come to be seen as a national redeemer. But it also highlights the cynicism of politicians who think they can use such a figure to give the impression of vision where none exists, and also perhaps the vulnerability of journalists to the power of their own delusions. It took about a year for the complete George Lee drama to unfold. The only thing that changed, in the end, was that George had a free space for life in the Leinster House car park.
48 Brian Cowen
In May 2008, when Brian Cowen replaced Bertie Ahern as Taoiseach, the national mood was one of increasingly fragile denial. Within months, media commentators would come to describe the new Taoiseach as a disaster, the worst ever. But, for now, the talk was all about his unparalleled intelligence, his history of toughness on the football field, the fact that he could hold a pint or ten and sing a song in the snug of any public house in which the gauntlet was thrown down.
Deeper down, the implication of such commentary was that we were still on the hog’s back. What we needed was another affable actor to maintain the mood of the previous decade. To suggest otherwise might have been to acknowledge what was already known in the bones of the culture: that we were in deep trouble.
Cowen, as Minister for Finance over several years, and as a key member of the team that had been running the country since 1997, was unquestionably centrally responsible for the situation faced by the Irish economy in 2008, and in particular for the failure to anticipate the meltdown of the banking sector, which all but bankrupted Ireland back to the nineteenth century.
In good times, Brian Cowen had seemed an effective number two, but there was scant evidence that he had either the charisma or the vision for the top job. His much-vaunted intelligence had yet to be demonstrated in any significant context beyond the party rooms, but had become an off-the-peg cliché to be lobbed into articles about the new Taoiseach by journalists who would later turn on Cowen with a vengeance rarely encountered in Irish political commentary.
Despite the carnival atmosphere that greeted his election as Taoiseach, Cowen had no moral mandate and was never required to justify his claims as titular leader of the Irish people. Indeed, such was the sense of his entitlement within Fianna Fáil that he was never even called upon to set out his stall as would-be leader of his own party. This would reveal itself as the most debilitating factor of his leadership as it progressed. Had he subjected himself to a contest in that summer of 2008, he might have acquired a stronger sense of entitlement to the position of Taoiseach. Instead, he acquiesced in his inheritance of the Fianna Fáil leadership on the basis that he was an able party animal, a good number two to Bertie and, above all, because it was his turn.
Almost immediately upon Cowen’s coronation, the excrement started hitting the extractor. Within weeks, it began to look as if Bertie had timed his departure, almost to the minute, to coincide with the end of the good times. If his predecessor had stayed another three months, Cowen might have had a chance of being seen as the new broom come to clean up the mess. Then again, nobody really believed it was pure accident that Bertie, the jammy dodger to bury all jammy dodgers, got to leave in his blaze of martyred glory just before the pipe began to spew forth bad news, followed by worse.
Soon, as the awful reality began to roll out, the national mood came to resemble that extended instant just after you’ve had a prang at the traffic lights, when, as you get out of the car in slow motion to survey the damage, you think, ‘I don’t need this, therefore it can’t be happening.’ At such moments, there is a sensation of being lost in time, of feeling, against the apparent facts, that the past is still recoverable, though the future is already making itself clear.
The appalling suddenness of events seemed to insinuate that it was possible to go back in time and erase the whole thing, to wake up from the nightmare. The rhetoric of the previous decade had so convinced people that we had finally emerged from the mists of history and penury that this could only be a terrible nightmare. The utter unfairness of it all seemed to render the circumstances momentarily implausible, and therefore redeemable. But then reality reasserted itself. The facts began to sink in.
The Taoiseach and his ministers began to break the bad news – at first gently and then rather more forcefully. But their words were incapable of penetrating the public mindset. Cowen and his cabinet seemed to be banking on a residual public memory of the 1987 Ray MacSharry cutbacks, retrospectively credited with rescuing the Irish economy and laying the foundations for the subsequent boom. But, that had been two decades before, when half the 2008 electorate had yet to be born. And for those who remembered the 1980s, this new crisis seemed of an entirely different order.
Cowen just didn’t seem to know what to do about anything. In one speech he would try to upbraid the public for not grasping how serous things were; in another he would declare that everything was really okay. One moment he seemed to be blaming the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund for having validated mistaken decisions made in the good times; the next he was citing the approval of these same institutions for decisions being made about turning the economy around.
In as far as a strand of thought could be identified, the government’s thinking was clearly more focused on preserving the image of our political class on the world stage than with securing the future for Irish children yet unborn. Because of his personality and the way he came to lead, nobody had any confidence in anything Cowen proposed to do. Everybody struggled against the twisting of fate. Precious time was lost. The problems grew worse. But the time the Minister for Finance, Brian Lenihan, finally unveiled his package to save the banking system, there had been a slippage of €10 million from his original estimate of the damage. The decision of the two Brians to insist that the Irish taxpayer must bail out the entire failed Irish banking system was subsequently declared by all and sundry to be the single most disastrous political decision in the whole of Ireland’s independent history.
There were radical alternatives available from the outset, but it soon became clear that Brian Cowen was not the man to implement them. For example, there was nothing crazy about the idea, proposed by a number of eminent economists, of temporarily pulling out of the euro. There was something deeply sane about the idea of leaving the banks to sink or swim in the consequences of their own recklessness. This was not, after all, the first time a country had been in a situation like this, and many of the options being brushed aside by Cowen and his cabinet had already worked elsewhere. But not only did Cowen not consider such ideas – even as a way of opening up a potentially liberating public discussion – he treated them with a silent disdain that suggested they had no merit at all. There was a stra
nge sense that all these unprecedented initiatives, which threatened the long-term future of Irish society, were being implemented because nobody in authority was prepared to think the unthinkable until it was too late.
The really frightening thing was the absence of dialogue. Cowen behaved like a morose parent on a rained-off picnic – refusing to explain or discuss events in their broader context. The commonsensical questions of either eminent economists or the man and woman in the street found no purchase in the corridors of power. Was it, for example, really axiomatic that, in the midst of global financial meltdown, when half the Irish population had acquired debts rooted in nothing but banking science fiction, a generation of Irish workers had to face lives of penury and pain? Why, if the crisis arose from a dysfunctional banking system, did the banks have to be accorded every assistance to escape from the mess they’d created for themselves, while the ordinary citizen was being hammered for his minor part in the same mess?
The final meltdown of Cowen’s period as Taoiseach, in the opening weeks of 2011, was almost too gruesome to behold. The Green Party, seared beyond healing by its period in power, had already indicated its desire to withdraw from the government to enable a general election take place. For a brief moment that January, Cowen seemed to be about to wind down his tenure as Taoiseach with a modicum of dignity. But then, having seen off one half-hearted attempt at a heave, and with the nation agape in disbelief, he tried to pull a fast one by reshuffling his cabinet and placing a new batch of dummies in the shop window. It was too much: within days, he had been replaced as Fianna Fáil leader by Micheál Martin, who would go on to lead the party into an election in which it would lose nearly three-quarters of its seats.
Had Brian Cowen been required to be leader of Fianna Fáil only, without the added responsibility of leading the country, he might well have become an unqualified success. Had he become Taoiseach a decade earlier, his weakness might similarly have gone unnoticed. He was unlucky, yes, but so, alas, were we.
For nearly three years, he refused to stand up and speak of the country’s difficulties in plain English, to offer reassurance, contrition or hope. This, more than any error or incompetence, was at the core of his failure. History will most likely decide that the greatest damage wrought by Brian Cowen resulted from his deficiencies of courage, imagination and radicalism, failings which in turn derived from a personality forged out of small-town values – cautious, deferential and driven by, above all, a desire for respectability and approval abroad.
The truth is that just as they were entering a time of national emergency, the citizens of the Republic had woken up one morning to find at their head, without being able to remember quite how or why it had happened, a Taoiseach elected on the basis that he was a helluva nice fella and it was his turn to wear the captain’s jersey.
49 Thierry Henry
For nearly a thousand years, the English did their utmost to grind the Irish into the dust. For the best part of a century in the wake of independence, the Irish seemed to be attempting to complete that project. But then, one night in November 2009, a dark-skinned Frenchman, employing to deadly effect his left hand, finally landed the killer blow.
After fifteen months of unremitting misery, in which the Irish people had observed their hopes of material well-being melt before their eyes, there had been just the slimmest possibility of a place in the World Cup Finals. This would have been much more than a sporting achievement. We Irish were not exactly accustomed to winning things, but we had some good memories of coming third or fourth. Moreover such sporting adventures always seemed, when seen in retrospect anyway, to awaken in the Irish psyche something deeper and more resilient. The idea that the seeds of the Celtic Tiger germinated during Italia 90, when Ireland almost made it to the semi-finals, is impossible to shift from the Irish orbitofrontal cortex. All this rendered that night in November 2009 an episode beyond tragedy and pathos.
When Thierry Henry brought that ball under control with his hand and slyly knocked it over for William Eric Gallas to slap it into the Irish net, he was bringing to an end not just the hopes of a team and its followers, but the hopes of an entire nation who saw this as a final sign from the gods.
Sometimes, when you have overcome a deep resistance to optimism and found your fortunes improving, you begin to imagine that perhaps the psychobabblers are right when they say that failure and success are all in the mind. In the early years of the Celtic Tiger, people who retained memories of previous false dawns followed by renewed misfortune had held their optimism in check. By the early years of the new millennium, most of us were beginning to let out hair down, overcoming our pessimism to embrace this new and, we were persuaded, permanent sunshine. No sooner had we done so, however, than the clouds started to gather again, and we found this as hard to credit as we had the idea that hardship and want had been consigned to the past. We hadn’t rushed into things, but when we did embrace the new dispensation, we did so wholeheartedly and with abandon, and now we were having to face the possibility that our pessimism had offered the best counsel after all.
Many still harboured hopes that the whole thing had been a mistake, that one day soon we would all wake up and find that we were still on the pig’s back. But Gallas’s goal, achieved on the back of Henry’s handball, put an end to all that – more because of its unfairness than the effect it had on the score line. Afterwards, Henry was a little sheepish but still clearly uncomprehending of the incoherent rage directed at him by the Irish. He was not to know that he had just confirmed for many Irish people that the hind tit was our only reliable and consistent recourse. Life was not fair, at least not to us. We might have cheated the facts for a while, but it had all been a mistake. The good fortune had been, as our deepest intuition had always whispered, intended for a different address. This was more like the normal run of events.
The desire for justice is instilled in every human heart, giving birth to an expectation of being treated fairly, which is to say ‘the same as anyone else’, or ‘according to the rules’, or by whatever other criteria this craving may be measured. But in the Irish personality, this natural desire for justice had long since been suppressed by a violent and abusive history in which fairness was to be found only in the colouring of my true love’s hair. The Irish weather, too, has always exhibited a vengeful caprice that has instilled in the Irish soul a modest level of expectation of what tomorrow may bring.
As a result if these pre-conditions, it had taken a lot for us to trust history again, and now we were being shown the folly of this grudging and cautious faith. Our natural sense of justice having been restored by a decade of good fortune, we were as ill-equipped for Thierry Henry’s handball as we were for a return of Oliver Cromwell.
And when an injustice occurs which inflicts on the human being’s constitutive sense of justice a blow that seems to be both arbitrary and unfair, the resulting sense of metaphysical outrage breaks free of all language and becomes a kind of deep, inner scream. This, in slow motion, is what happened in the days following the Henry outrage.
For more than an hour on that Wednesday night it had looked like Ireland was in with a chance of playing in the World Cup in South Africa. In the depths of recession, this prospect carried with it an enhanced significance, having the potential to lift the spirit of the nation out of the fatalism that had dogged it for eighteen months. The dashing of these hopes, by something widely acknowledged to be unfair, had therefore the potential to provoke in the Irish psyche a twist that threatened permanent damage.
It was made worse by the fact that nobody, not even the French, disputed the unfairness of it all. Thus, at an emotional level, the handball issue offered a simplified version of the infinitely more complicated equation to be observed in the economic context. If everyone could see it was a handball; if the French press and public overwhelmingly thought the French team stole the game, then the solution seemed obvious and simple. But then we noticed that, although everyone was paying lip-service to Irish gri
ef, nobody was actually suggesting that anything be done to put the matter to rights.
This resonated deeply with feelings surfacing in the economic arena. France’s qualification on the back of Henry’s cynical opportunism provoked the same intensity of rage as government bail-outs for bankers who had created massive inflation in house prices, ultimately provoking the crash. In both instances, the beneficiaries of cheating were seen to sail onwards, immune from consequences, while the punters were blithely told that, yes, it’s unfair, but there is nothing to be done. Rules is rules, you know. The winners shook their heads and said how sheepish they felt, but still booked their trips to the sun. Just as FIFA officials intoned that the referee is the final arbiter, those in charge of the economy insisted that, notwithstanding the clear ethical and regulatory breaches at the heart of the banking crisis, there was no possibility of moral redress.
It seemed that, sometime about eighteen months before, the gods changed their mind about us. Before that, we had soaked in a veritable Jacuzzi of good fortune, experiencing a rising tide of prosperity, optimism and occasional sporting success. But then, practically overnight, without any announcement being made, a shift had occurred. Already, it was clear, the plug had been pulled on the economy. Now, it seemed, the sporting successes were suspended until further notice.
If you hadn’t lived through the Celtic Tiger, you might not have understood the mood of the previous eighteen months. And if you hadn’t shared in the hope of those two hours on that night in November, you might have had difficulty in understanding the ructions that followed. When you put the two phenomena together, you were forced to the conclusion that fate had again taken to dealing us the same unkind hand in everything. Ireland going out of the World Cup after a brief resurgence of hope could, in this light, be seen not just as an ordinary misfortune, but as a second bereavement following hard on one we had not yet come to terms with.