by Colm Keena
In his article on the background to the election, Gary Murphy, a politics academic, noted that there was little difference between the manifestos of the main parties. Health was recognised as a difficult subject by all, including the Government parties, but the range of solutions proposed failed to excite the electorate. Similarly there was little by way of real debate on taxation. Though the Government had been heavily criticised for the nature of its personal taxation cuts, no party was proposing undoing them.
Raising taxation for spending or to cope with any possible downturn in the economy was not an option [the parties] were willing to put into their manifestos. The Taoiseach provided the best evidence of this overlap in terms of macroeconomic policy when he stated that there was nothing in the manifesto of the PDs or Labour with which he fundamentally disagreed.
The Irish Voter was published in 2008 and so provided the authors with an extended period for assessing the 2002 election. Again they concluded that the governing parties, and Fianna Fáil in particular, were rewarded by the electorate for doing ‘a good job’. Where there were negative assessments, such as with crime or with the quality of the health service, the Government was not held responsible, or was seen as, in any event, probably being better than the opposition parties would have been. Interestingly, however, the authors played down the importance of Ahern’s popularity.
In the period before the 1997 poll, Ahern had enjoyed only a very small lead over Bruton and Spring. However, as that Government’s period in office progressed, Ahern’s lead over the Fine Gael and Labour Party leaders (later Noonan and Quinn) widened, so that by the time of the 2002 election Ahern’s lead over Noonan was an unusually large one. What had happened was that, in the period since 1997, Ahern’s star had ascended, while those of the opposition leaders had fallen. The authors looked at survey data on what it was that people liked about Ahern, Noonan and Quinn. Respondents were asked to rate the leaders in relation to honesty, competence and closeness to the people. Ahern won on all three counts, particularly in the last two. An analysis of the data, in conjunction with figures on popularity, found that in Ahern’s case honesty had a particularly strong correlation with his general evaluation. ‘Had the opposition been able to persuade more people that Ahern’s character was more dubious, they might have damaged him, but they were unable to do so.’
Ahern’s huge lead over Noonan in the popularity stakes had a limited impact on the performance of their parties, the authors said. ‘It is clear that where the popularity of leaders and parties diverge, and they often do, voters follow parties rather than leaders. This is not to say that a popular leader is not an asset, but that the asset is one that makes only a marginal difference to vote totals.’ However, they noted that a marginal change can make the difference between being returned to office and not. Fianna Fáil placed a huge emphasis on Ahern during the election campaign, but the conclusion of the authors’ analysis was that the perception of the advantage this had conferred was exaggerated.
Ahern was back in office, but he was not happy with the election result. Micheál Martin met him in St Luke’s soon after the poll, and they discussed the outcome.
He [Ahern] went through every constituency with me. It was extraordinary. The man was amazing in his detailed grasp of every constituency. He was really annoyed after 2002 in terms of not winning the overall majority, and he felt people had let him down in terms of telling him, We are going to win that seat, win this, and then they didn’t. It was party organisation, ministers and TDs and so on that he was angry with, not Michael McDowell.
Chapter 9
TAOISEACH, 2002–8
Charlie McCreevy nominated Bertie Ahern for the position of Taoiseach after the 2002 general election. McCreevy rose to address the Dáil just before noon on 6 June as Ahern’s partner, Celia Larkin, looked on from the public gallery.
The Government leaving office today held it longer than any other in peacetime. At the end of five years it also became the first Government in thirty-three years to receive the people’s mandate to continue in office and did so on the basis of increased representation in the House. Central to these unprecedented achievements has been the steady and clear leadership of Deputy Bertie Ahern. Although he has held high office for a significant period, he continues to be in touch with the people, and they continue to have faith in him. Over the past five years they saw a leader who helped deliver a historic breakthrough for peace, helped the largest sustained period of economic growth in our history and ensured economic growth meant real social progress throughout the country. He went before the people with a clear message of wanting to build on this peace, prosperity and progress, and they gave him a mandate.
Ahern was elected by 93 votes to 68. He got the support of his own party, the PDs and some independents. Accepting the result, Ahern spoke again of the honour involved. Politics was a noble calling, he said, and the justifiable pride those who had been returned to the Dáil could feel had to be matched by a sense of duty and by ‘the determination to earn our place by hard work and with integrity.’ He praised Michael Noonan, who had been replaced as leader of Fine Gael by Enda Kenny, and also spoke generously about Mary Harney, Ruairí Quinn, Trevor Sargent of the Green Party and the former party leaders Proinsias de Rossa, John Bruton and Dick Spring. ‘I pledge to work ceaselessly . . . and never to give less than my very best.’
Ruairí Quinn congratulated Ahern on his political achievement and his return to office—a testimony to his extraordinary popularity and his dedication to politics and public life. He also spoke of the Lazarus party of Irish politics—the PDs—and noted that his constituency colleague, Michael McDowell, had on his third attempt managed to get into the Dáil at the same time as his party was going into government.
For my part, the Labour Party will provide a critique of the politics of choice, this centre-right Government which has pursued a deliberate political ideological agenda masked in the cosy populism of a very popular man, who sincerely believes what he says but allowed his Minister for Finance to contradict him at every twist and turn in terms of the policy that was implemented.
At four in the afternoon Ahern was back in the Dáil chamber to announce his new Government. Harney was Tánaiste and Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment. The other members were Michael Smith (Defence), Joe Walsh (Agriculture and Food), Charlie McCreevy (Finance), Brian Cowen (Foreign Affairs), Noel Dempsey (Education and Science), Dermot Ahern (Communications, Marine and Natural Resources), John O’Donoghue (Arts, Sport and Tourism), Micheál Martin (Health and Children), Séamus Brennan (Transport), Michael McDowell (Justice, Equality and Law Reform), Martin Cullen (Environment and Local Government), Éamon Ó Cuív (Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs) and Mary Coughlan (Social Affairs and Family). The Attorney-General was Rory Brady SC.
In his remarks to the Dáil after the announcement of the Government, Quinn touched on an issue that was going to define much of what was to come politically. He referred to the media debate over whether the public finances were out of control.
We have seen a sustained splurge in public expenditure over the past eighteen months or two years. It was deliberate, considered and carefully measured, down to the timing of its delivery. We are now about to get a reversal of that splurge.
Sure enough, as the summer progressed a range of announcements were made about efforts to cut back on the pace of increase in public expenditure. The isolated announcements on such matters as health, education and overseas aid were not, the public was told, part of an orchestrated programme of expenditure restraint; but for a society by then used to a continuous flow of new expenditure announcements, the application of the foot to the brake felt like cutbacks. It was also in conflict with the merry message from the Government parties that had seen them re-elected.
The change in tune caused a sharp fall in the Government’s popularity and also created internal strains. Ahern was persisting with his plan for a new stadium and with the related bid for Ireland to
host the Euro 2008 soccer finals; but the PDs, and even some of his Fianna Fáil colleagues, were resisting the plan, given the strain on the public finances.
On 16 September the then political editor of the Sunday Tribune, Stephen Collins, reported that McCreevy was contemplating introducing a tax on child benefit in his coming budget. The arrival of de facto full employment, and the movement of more women into the work force, had made childcare costs a major political issue. The Government had responded by granting significant increases in child benefit to everyone, regardless of their income or whether they worked in the home or not. Rates had increased dramatically in the two years before the election and had trebled since Ahern first become Taoiseach.
The pressures of full employment and wage and cost increases had also seen the Government creating the process whereby the pay of public-sector workers was to be benchmarked against those in the private sector. The INTO representative and senator Joe O’Toole famously referred to the process as an ‘ATM for teachers’. Now the downturn in the Irish economy and the public finances threatened the promised pay rises under that process.
The discord between what the public had been told before polling day and what it was now being told was crystallised in a report by Rachel Andrews in the following week’s Sunday Tribune. ‘Exclusive!’ shouted the headline over a genuinely great scoop. A lengthy and secret memorandum from McCreevy to his Government colleagues, drafted within weeks of the poll in May and days after Ahern’s re-election as Taoiseach, set out the dire position of the public finances and the need to cut public expenditure in 2003 by €900 million. If a return of high unemployment and forced emigration was to be avoided, the proposals set out in the memorandum and its appendix would have to be introduced. Furthermore, the proposal for a reining in of public expenditure was based on a set of forecasts for the economy that were more likely to be over-optimistic. Ministers were told that if there were no cutbacks in expenditure there would be no money for benchmarking, no money for social welfare increases and no money for the Government’s health strategy. Furthermore, a failure to implement the measures foreseen would lead to a reversal in the thrust of taxation policy of recent years.
The lengthy memorandum contained figures that dramatically illustrated the way in which public spending had been used as an electoral tool. Current spending had increased by an astonishing 27 per cent in the twelve months up to the election. Collins, in a piece forming part of the paper’s four-page inside package on their scoop, said the document raised serious questions about the ability of the Government to run the country, and contended that its reputation was now ‘in tatters’.
Matt Cooper, the paper’s business editor, wrote of McCreevy’s appearance on ‘The Late Late Show’ the previous Friday and of the way his usual confidence had wilted under the sustained hostility of the audience, many of whom were affected by the cutbacks that had already been introduced. McCreevy had been booed, and his syntax had become mangled as the audience laid into him. Yet the audience had not known about the memorandum, Cooper wrote, which illustrated in stark terms the scale of McCreevy’s ineptitude.
Total Government spending had grown by 23 per cent in 2001, while tax revenue had increased by only 3.2 per cent. Yet in his budget for the following year, announced in December 2001, McCreevy had planned for a further 14.4 per cent in spending increases. Not only that: he hadn’t been able to rein in his Government colleagues, and the actual level of spending had exceeded that figure. The public finances were in crisis, and it was evident, Cooper wrote, that McCreevy knew the full extent of the crisis during the election campaign. Yet the minister had told a press conference only a week before the poll that ‘no cutbacks whatsoever are being planned, secretly or otherwise.’ The scoop provided the material for the main news story of that day’s and the following days’ papers, many of which led with opposition calls for McCreevy’s resignation. McCreevy, in his first public response to the report, confirmed that the economic circumstances facing the country were worse than had been envisaged in June.
The effect of the controversy was the creation of a lasting impression with most of the electorate that they had been cheated. In the first two years of the second Ahern Government, it argued unsuccessfully that no cutbacks were being implemented—that in fact public expenditure was growing: it was simply that it was not growing as quickly as it had hitherto. However, efforts by the Government to argue that what it was doing was a responsible reaction to changing circumstances did not wash with the public, who were not inclined to listen to a grouping in which they had lost trust. The first year and a half of Ahern’s second Government was among the worst periods of his political career.
One of the great challenges faced by Ahern’s first Government, according to Micheál Martin, was the resisting of the clamour for increased expenditure.
The sense then was that we weren’t getting the infrastructural work done fast enough. And efficiently enough. People wanted the road and railways done, because of all the wealth. The big political and psychological problem was how you could justify not spending the money when we were trumpeting that we have surpluses. The clarion call was ‘Why don’t you spend on this, on that?’ The whole mindset of society was ‘Gimme, gimme, gimme.’
But the political pressures changed dramatically after the second Government was formed. Martin was still Minister for Health.
The first two-and-a-half years were covered by those cutbacks. The retrenchment regime led to some very tough meetings.
The tension grew in the Government as the local elections approached. McCreevy focused on arresting the growth in public expenditure, and his Government colleagues and their advisers focused on political popularity. But, for Martin, it was not so much the macro area of public expenditure management that created the tension as a certain perceived pig-headedness on McCreevy’s part.
There were crazy things that weren’t done that wouldn’t have affected the fiscal position dramatically. There was a big row coming up to the Special Olympics over spending on disabilities. Bertie was furious about that. I think it was €20 million. We had rows about whether it was in the budget or not. I had incredible rows over opening new hospital facilities which we had built and we couldn’t get sanction to open them before the election. This was akin to having the ball in front of the goalposts and not putting it into the net. You could have been opening these facilities that were going to be opened anyway—and guess what? They were opened after the election. Those sort of incidents really brassed off the Taoiseach, big time.
The opening ceremony of the Special Olympics in June 2003 was a huge event staged in Croke Park, in Ahern’s own constituency. It was the first time the games had been held outside the United States, and they were impressively well organised. Participants came from around the globe, and towns and villages throughout the country hosted particular countries’ teams and put on warm and impressive welcomes for them. The whole country appeared to be involved in a united effort and a sincere unleashing of good will, and the opening night was a genuine extravaganza, with fireworks and a parade of all the participating athletes. But Ahern was booed when he took to the stage during the opening night’s festivities. His Government’s stance on funding for the disabled was portrayed as being in marked contrast with the fund-raising and volunteerism of the organisers of the event. The public humiliation angered Ahern all the more because it was seen as owing more to pig-headedness on McCreevy’s part than to a matter of responsible Government restraint.
Ahern in his memoirs wrote disparagingly about some backbench TDs, bitter about not being included in government, who got the jitters at about this time. He listed four TDs—Ned O’Keeffe, John McGuinness, Jim Glennon and Noel O’Flynn—as being ‘unhelpful’ to the party by giving negative comment to the media, while Michael Smith broke ranks on a controversial report that had implications for a hospital in his constituency. In December 2003 Ahern decided to reassert his leadership of the parliamentary party. According to
his own account, he told the party that he was well used to party division and had been close to Haughey during the heaves against him. He knew every trick in the book. ‘Anyone who wants to come after me, then I will come after you, one by fucking one, and I will rivet you.’ He said that he deliberately used bad language, that everyone in the room was stunned and that it was ‘good fun’. He also said he threw in the line that he would not tolerate ‘kebabs’ in the party, meaning cabals. In his memoirs he leaves it unclear as to whether his malapropism was intentional or not, but he notes that the fact that the media ran with the kebab issue, rather than the tearing strips off his colleagues issue, proved handy.
If the difficult economic circumstances of 2002 and 2003 meant that tax cuts and other forms of state largesse were no longer available for attempting to woo the electorate, Ahern’s resourceful Minister for Finance was not without other ideas. The big story of the 2003 budget, announced in December 2002, was McCreevy’s decision to go for a ‘big bang’ decentralisation of the public service. It had been Government policy for a number of years to decentralise so as to relieve pressure on the capital and to spread the economic benefits of Government activity more widely; but the budget announcement came as a shock. McCreevy had told his Cabinet colleagues that he would abandon the project if news leaked. The most senior civil servants were given only a few days’ notice, and so McCreevy’s Dáil announcement came as a great surprise to many who were at the heart of public infrastructure management.