Opinion

Seán Gallagher has become the highest-profile victim of a new type of anti-Fianna-Fáil (FF) McCarthyism. Pressed repeatedly by Miriam O’ Callaghan to condemn his erstwhile colleagues in the Soldiers of Destiny, Gallagher hesitated and tried to dodge. It’s perhaps understandable that Seán Gallagher would have some residual loyalty to his old friends, but his equivocation on the issue didn’t look good. And no doubt the feedback following the presidential debate led  Gallagher  to quickly rethink his position. Political expedience and sheer media pressure forced him to recant and condemn Fianna Fáil. Charlie McCreevey: not alone in embracing neo-liberalism In this new post-FF era there can be no acceptable line other than ‘FF destroyed the country’. Even the hint of a deviation from this neat narrative  is enough to arouse suspicion that you might somehow be a closet FFer. The new one true faith explains everything. And that’s the problem. If that is the entire explanation for our economic problems then we’re really not seeing the full picture. Let’s be clear: Fianna Fáil are guilty of embracing the new, de luxe, no-holds-barred version of capitalism from 1989 onwards. Charlie Mc Creevy outdid the PDs in his enthusiasm for neo-liberalism. All of that is true. But were Fianna fail the only ones guilty of this ? Even a cursory examination of the manifestos of the main parties in 2002 and 2007 tells you that they tried to outdo each other in their free-market fervour. The ‘FF are to blame for everything’ version raises further questions, like how d’you explain what’s occurring in Greece, Spain, Portugal. Italy and beyond? Perhaps Fianna Fáil special advisers have been working quietly behind the scenes all over Europe, instructing governments on how best to wreck an econom!  The anti-FF backlash ensures that the public doesn’t ask the bigger questions, like ‘is it possible, even remotely possible, that the system itself is deeply flawed?’ ‘Is a system based on infinite economic growth, the creation of debt, the exploitation of workers and a dependency on fossil fuels in any way sustainable in the medium or long term?’ But let’s not go there: that’s just a bit too complicated and dangerous! It’s much easier to see Fianna Fáil as the root of every problem. So toxic was the Fianna Fáil brand that even the most outlandish conspiracy theory gained credence. There are still many who believe that the bank guarantee was a Fianna Fáil inside job. It had all the ingredients – banks, builders, bailouts (BBB) – just add the initials FF and you have a very plausible explanation. The corruption of Haughey, Burke, Lawlor and the closeness of Fianna Fáil to big business  led many to conclude that Anglo was saved because it was a Fianna Fáil institution. Even the Nyberg report, which stated that the ECB had put pressure on the Irish government to save the banks, is still conveniently ignored. But can we  ignore what has happened since the election? There has been no discernible change in economic or financial policy. People have discovered that it is Frankfurt’s way and not Labour’s way; people know now that no bondholder will be ‘burned’ unless such a move is first sanctioned by Mr Trichet. Not even the unsecured debt – that part not even covered by the guarantee – can be touched. The major difference between this government and the last is that Fine Gael and Labour have an overwhelming majority which enables them to put through the social-welfare cuts and tax-increases they had promised would never happen. They have, however, delivered on one election promise – to give greater powers to Dáil committtees. Of course, that’s provided that the people approve such a measure in the forthcoming referendum. Any bets on what the committee’s first Inquiry under the new rules will be? How about an Inquiry into how Fianna Fáil ruined the country? A star chamber is born. All over the world, through movements like the ‘indignants’ in Spain or ‘Occupy Wall Street’, people are questioning the system that gave rise to the global economic collapse. But not here where there appears to be only one valid question: ‘Are you now or have you ever been a member of Fianna Fail?’

By Harry Browne As much by luck as by design, I have found myself in recent months spending some days in two of the world’s great conurbations, Chicago, Illinois, and Naples, Italy. It occurred to me that the cities had something in common other than my visits, and even beyond the great food and largely, astonishingly, good-natured citizenry. The poor and working-class people of both Chicago and Naples can see every day the expressions of their culture, mostly but not exclusively musical, celebrated and valorised by élites at local, national and international level, even while they themselves are crushed by poverty, discrimination, oppression and crime. Chicago blues and canzone napoletana remain not only globally popular but integral to the self-image of the cities — even while jazz and opera are far more highly subsidised — and in both places an aura of dangerous authenticity hangs around “the baddest part of town”, where homeboys and scugnizzi are not only picturesque, but probably up to no good. The people of both cities have, over the centuries, exercised some of the most memorably robust resistance to the plans of their rulers, and have been on the receiving end of some of the most savage repression. The rulers themselves have of course been notable both for the ambition that helped to make the cities among the most beautiful in the world, and the corruption that helped to block any equitable or democratic sharing of that beauty. In Chicago, at any rate, a pair of reactionary local newspapers have been, despite a spirited journalistic tradition at newsroom level, bastions of the power structure. Naples and Chicago are, in these and other respects, not unique cities — otherwise it would be pretty pointless writing about them here — but rather archetypal ones. It’s not difficult to project some similar characteristics on to, say, Dublin, with its “Rale Dubs”, captured memorably by writers from Seán O’Casey to Roddy Doyle, those Dubs with their problematic historical relationship to both colonial and national élites. Dublin of course has the added spice of being the capital of a state that has not generally been run by Dubliners, which may be part of the reason that the city’s middle class finds it so easy to express the most vicious snobbery about the inner-city poor, a contempt that was especially evident in the coverage of, and social-media discussion about, the small protests that accompanied the British queen’s visit. Poor Chicagoans and Neapolitans are of course despised too, but I think not quite so openly by local élites. In Dublin the local élites are also national élites. And their “local” newspaper, the Irish Times, is able to think of itself as a national institution despite its readership being overwhelmingly based among the capital’s middle and upper classes. The newspaper’s senior ranks are more geographically diverse, though you’ll rarely hear a working-class Dublin accent among them. The nearest thing to an exception is Fintan O’Toole, in many respects the outstanding, albeit often overstretched, Irish journalist of his generation. O’Toole’s misfortune, if he can be said to have one, is to have attached himself to the Irish Times just as it emerged as the definitive journalistic expression of the needs and priorities of the national bourgeoisie (much of which had previously regarded it as suspiciously Protestant). This meant that O’Toole, with his strong personal and political connection to the historic radicalism of working-class Dublin, could never be editor. To my mind it may also help explain why O’Toole can be seen to flit from a devastating left critique of Ireland’s predicament to a piecemeal reformist strategy in partnership with irredeemably bourgeois figures such as McWilliams and Ross. Our market is too small to afford several upmarket newspapers distributed along a left-right spectrum, in the British manner. The Irish Times must be the Telegraph, Times, Independent and Guardian folded into one. For a while that wasn’t really a problem, as Ireland’s social-liberalising, anti-clerical mission of the late 20th century enjoyed broad cross-class support, especially in Dublin, so the likes of O’Toole were welcome to join the crusade, as formulated in the Irish Times. During the boom years the sideshow of cultural and identity politics could proceed unhindered, with the Irish Times a broad church that could, for example, welcome immigrants just as much as both ICTU and IBEC did. But today the mission of that newspaper, like that of the class it embodies, is much simpler. Its needs and priorities come down to this: to preserve the status and privileges of bourgeois Ireland through this crisis, even if it means the devastation of ordinary workers and the poor. Indeed, if it can use the crisis to advance long-term ambitions, especially to reduce the role of the public service and the power of unions, it is happy to do so. It’s not Fintan O’Toole’s Irish Times. Instead, the newspaper’s economics editor Dan O’Brien, adept at concealing the iron fist of neo-liberal retrenchment inside the velvet glove of reasonableness and “regrettable necessities”, is the living embodiment of the ideological “commonsense” that serves to protect and project these class interests. In the context of the argument over the “bailout”, O’Brien and the Irish Times also reflect the natural habit of that class to kowtow to international corporate and financial institutions. This habit is not merely some cultural cringe but a fundamental consequence of the nature of Irish capital over the last half-century, essentially providing land and services to international companies, thus giving rise to financial and property speculation as the important sort-of-indigenous sectors. Recently I saw historian and blogger Conor McCabe give a terrific talk that previewed his new book, Sins of the Father. McCabe persuasively and humorously argued that Irish capital could not be personified as some Michael Corleone figure, clear-eyed and coolly cruel, but as something much more like Michael’s brother Fredo, making sure every important visitor at the casino had plenty of drinks and “girls”, and in the end, perhaps, too caught up in the

Interview: Seán Barrett: Still telling it straight.  By Derek Owens Fine Gael’s trusty Sean Barrett, spokesperson on Foreign Affairs, with 37 years in electoral politics,  champions the market and the European project. “You cannot make commitments like that to anybody… Governments don’t create jobs”, insisted Sean Barrett. He looked evenly at the studio audience (and particularly at a student, who’d asked how Fine Gael could ensure he’d have a job in four years) as he continued over the interruptions of his fellow Frontline panellists. “They create the environment where people can organise their business and create jobs”. The remark was as close as any candidate on the programme – a special episode devoted to the General Election in the Dun Laoghaire constituency – came to a succinct outline of their political philosophy. It was also the first time many viewers have seen a politician turning to a voter and flatly refusing to make a promise. Barrett’s performance on the programme was praised, even by sometime constituency rivals, as “assured” and “mature”. Where he stood out from other candidates in what Pat Kenny dubbed the “group of death”, though, was in his willingness to disagree with members of the audience – he had a back-and-forth challenge with the job-hungry student, and seemed to relish outing a different audience member as a supporter of another candidate – even as others fell over themselves to agree with all but the daftest contributions. The approach was distinctly old-school and, strangely perhaps, refreshing. If Barrett’s style in campaigning seems to belong to a different time, that’s probably because the 66-year-old first entered politics back in the 1970s. Having won election to the Dáil in 1981, he rose quickly in Garret FitzGerald’s Fine Gael to become Government Chief Whip and Minister for Sport in 1982, and held the job through the fractious lifetime of the Fine Gael-Labour Government. When Fine Gael returned to power again in 1994, he returned to the job for five months, before becoming Minister for Defence and the Marine. A sudden retirement in 2002 came as a surprise – so too did his successful return in 2007. Still, he remained a significant player behind the scenes during ‘retirement’, as a party trustee involved in fine Gael’s finances and in selecting candidates. Few politicians have held such influence on a party for so long while flying firmly below the radar of most political writers. Even in Gemma Hussey’s diaries, a soap-opera account of FitzGerald’s troubled 1982-7 coalition, Barrett is on the fringes of drama, a figure offering solace and emotional support to Fine Gael ministers who, like Hussey, wanted to do “the right thing.” (Most readers would take this to mean imposing harsher spending cuts than that Government actually did – Barrett, who says he hasn’t read the diaries, agrees with this interpretation). By his own account, that Government went through “traumatic experiences”, facing a controversial referendum on abortion and an economic picture that was almost as grim as is today. “It was a very, very tricky period. And an awful lot of good things were done. More probably could have been done in terms of bringing about the correction in the economy earlier”, he says. “Dick Spring had just taken over as leader of the Labour party… He couldn’t carry the sort of things that should have been done in the first year or two, that’s the reality of it. And in 1982, instead of making the savings early in the first two budgets by reducing expenditure and becoming more efficient, we shied away. We increased taxes, and it took much longer to recover as a result”. The Government from 1994 to 1997, by contrast, “was a bit of a cakewalk. The people who were in from 1994 to 1997 were mostly guys who’d been with us in 1982 to 1987. We all said ‘we’re not making the same mistakes this time as we made the last time’”. If this year’s general election throws up the Government that most people expect – a coalition of Fine Gael and Labour– there’ll be considerably fewer Government veterans around, particularly on the Fine Gael benches. Aside from Finance Spokesman Michael Noonan, Barrett has more ministerial experience than any other sitting TD, making it surprising that he only returned to the front bench (as Foreign Affairs spokesman) in the wake of Richard Bruton’s failed leadership challenge last year. Barrett, a personal friend of Enda Kenny, was one of the few Dublin TDs to support him. “I was in favour of the leader, yeah. It’s a very serious thing to change a leader, and we’ve had a bad experience of doing that as a party,” he says today. “People misunderstand, in my opinion, what a leader should be, or what a leader should be doing. A leader is more than a high-profile individual who gives the impression that they’re in charge of every department. When it comes to the actual day when you’re appointing a cabinet, what you need is a team of fifteen people, sixteen with a chief whip. The Taoiseach is not going to be running over to my department, or your department or everybody else’s department. No, he’s saying ‘I’m expecting you to do the job’. And then, when it comes to a cabinet, you need solidarity – you need to be able to bind people together to get decisions and to keep a good atmosphere, especially where there’s a coalition. And, you know, there are different types of people for those particular jobs. Enda Kenny, whether the people know it or understand it, has been very successful at running a team approach to things”. @font-face { font-family: “Calibri”; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; line-height: 115%; font-size: 11pt; font-family: “Times New Roman”; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; } Locally at least, Barrett has some experience of teams breaking down. In 2007, clashes between Fine Gael candidates in Dun Laoghaire were happily relayed by the local press, and sometimes got national coverage.

Post-War consumerism and licentious liberalism are senseless. by Desmond Fennell “There were whispered arguments between our parents while we watched TV—arguments about changing the rules, we gathered, that applied to all of us, the dads and moms as well as the kids…” Naomi Wolf in Promiscuities (1997) on San Francisco in 1970. During the last ninety odd years Western civilisation has been coming to an end in three revolutions: the Russian and German revolutions, and the Second American Revolution which is still shaping life in the West today. Let me clarify three key terms. First, a civilisation. A civilisation is essentially a grounded hierarchy of rules covering all of life and making sense, which a community’s rulers and ruled subscribe to over a long period. The community is motivated to keep reproducing itself by the sense that it finds in its set of rules, its framework for life. Some of the rules are circumstantial and therefore changeable; others are essential, forming the civilisation’s defining core. European or western civilisation. Constructed in Western Europe in the twelfth century AD by Latin, Germanic and Celtic Christians, it later crossed the Atlantic and other seas and lasted into the twentieth century. Its set of essential rules of behaviour made sense to our ancestors for nearly a thousand years. A revolution. It begins with a group of people who adhere to a new ideology which they believe contains the formula for a good and just life. These believers take possession of a nation’s central government and by unconstitutional means increase its power. Using that augmented power, they preach their ideology, establish new rules derived from it, empower those who support these rules, and disempower opponents. This process takes at least twenty years, maybe thirty or more. Until the first half of the twentieth century there existed a tacit agreement of European nations, at home and overseas, that all political and military action must respect—or after a transgression re-assert—the essential rules of European civilisation. This tacit agreement applied also to revolutions: the new rules which a revolution enduringly established must not breach the essential European rules. The Irish Revolution and the Italian Fascist revolution operated within this framework. But three revolutions, in three powerful countries, Russia, Germany and the USA, rejected the rules system of European civilisation. The revolutionaries, finding that European civilisation unjustly limited their power to create the good life they envisaged, made new rules that, while forbidding certain behaviours, justified states and individuals doing things which European civilisation forbade. The Russian revolution maintained its post-European rules system for 70 years. The German Revolution was beginning to establish its rules when it was overthrown. From the 1960s onwards the second American revolution established its post-European rules system in its own country and, by proxy, in Western Europe. That rules system is still in force. The second American Revolution The second American revolution began in 1933 during thee Great Depression when Franklin D. Roosevelt became President. The American revolutionaries were Left liberals who called themselves simply “liberals”. Their liberalism required a big and powerful State shaping the lives of people for their good. Roosevelt brought them to power as advisors and colleagues because he was convinced that their demand for a “Big State” was the best means of tackling the Depression. His New Deal programme greatly increased the power of the Federal Government. When the Supreme Court pronounced twelve New Deal measures unconstitutional, Roosevelt, in effect, got a new Constitution by appointing left-liberal judges who declared the measures constitutional. In 1940, in disregard of American precedent, Roosevelt was elected President for a third term, and later, while America was at war, he sought and won election for a fourth term. The Big State which the left liberals created reached its apogee with the manufacture of the atomic bomb, its use against two Japanese cities, and the official justification of the resulting massacres. This justification of massacre signalled to the liberals that the State they had worked to create was likely to approve those elements of their programme that rejected other core rules of Western civilisation. The aim of their programme, given the Big State, was to bring about a perfect human condition. For that purpose, first, there must be an end to the tacit recognition of Christianity as America’s ‘national’ religion, and to the consequent role of Christian morality as a determinant of behavioural rules. Second, categories of citizens who were legally or otherwise unequal must be raised or lowered to legal equality, so as to bring about a fraternity of individuals, equal in law and in their treatment by their fellows. Third, all citizens must have access to education and health services and be equipped with buying power. And finally, with due regard to the rights of others, the desires of individuals must be recognised as rights and realised as far as possible. Implicit in that programme were Black civil rights and radical feminism; normalisation of homosexuals and of unmarried mothers and their offspring; political and financial empowerment of young people; maximal facilitation of the physically deficient; invalidation of intrinsic personal authority such as that possessed by clergy, males, parents, teachers and the aged; ample social welfare; unshackling of sex and of pornography; legalisation of abortion; and a blank cheque for science. Implicit, therefore, in their programme was a new collection of rules many of which would replace essential European rules, which were traditional in the USA and which they deemed oppressive or unjust. The culmination of the revolution Their chance to implement their programme fully came in the 1960s and early 70s. when the US Government and manufacturing industry needed to increase consumption, with its dual yield of revenue and profit. The Government, committed to reaching the Moon, was waging the Cold War and the Vietnam war. Manufacturing industry with the help of computers and automation was producing more goods than it could sell. First Government, then also manufacturing industry, perceived in the unfulfilled parts of the liberal agenda the means

Agenda for reform: a rightist programme. The events of recent months have clearly shown that current policies only serve to maintain the status quo. This is the sole and unavoidable conclusion currently being reached by all independent analysts and commentators, whatever their ideology. It is a non-partisan concern that informs the rising tide of discontent within the Fianna Fáil and Green parties, recent changes within Fine Gael, the positions of all other opposition parties, and indeed of the entire electorate, as reflected in the opinion polls. There is no longer any need to outline the facts that frame this reality – they are all around us. The tide of international opinion concerning the prospects for Ireland should the current policies persist has turned against us. The IMF (since April 2010), the EU Commission (since May 2010), markets-makers and participants – all have put out sceptical assessments of official Irish Government projections for the recovery. Irish banks – far from being repaired by Nama – just keep asking for more taxpayers’ bailouts with the frightening regularity of a drug addict returning to a methadone dispensary. It is, therefore, time to challenge the prevailing policy consensus. It is time to put forward proposals for reforms, to debate real alternatives and to provide those political parties and individual politicians willing to champion change with new ideas to energise the electorate. Here is my own set of ideas – the offshoot of the ongoing ‘Manifesto Project’ I have decided to run on my blog. Fine print aside, let me outline the backdrop to the policies – the backdrop of the specific crises we face as a nation. The Irish economy has been hit by a Perfect Storm that combines: a deeply-rooted crisis in the public finances; a structural collapse of the banking sector; an unemployment crisis stemming from the collapse of employment and jobs creation; a competitiveness crisis that is not limited to wages and labour costs, but the cost of living and doing business; the crisis in the quality and efficiency of domestic services – dominated and restricted by the excessive market power of the incumbent State-owned and State-regulated oligopolies. These crises have been exacerbated by Government policies since 2008. These policies have saddled ordinary families and individuals (regardless of whether they work in the public sector or private sector, are employed or unemployed, young or old) with the full cost of bailing out vested interests and élites. This manifested itself in a rising tax burden, falling provision of public services, and lack of reforms in the banking and public sectors. The resulting devastation of private entrepreneurship and businesses, contracting investment and availability of operating capital and a catastrophic lack of confidence in economy are the corollaries. The accompanying spikes in unemployment and businesses failures, and a hike in precautionary savings are additional manifestations of these. The current crisis has clearly shown that the corporatist State – where vested interests, including Political, Business, Social and Environmental sectors collude with the State to set economic and social preferences and priorities – is morally, politically and economically bankrupt. I believe that Irish democracy cannot be surrendered to these vested interests, no matter how broadly-based or high-minded they might be. There are only two possible futures. The first follows the path we are travelling – the path of a generations-long and painfully-deep crisis of stagnation and declining standards of living. The second one is a path of structural reforms aimed at realigning the current political system to serve the interests of the ordinary citizen. This path is also painful and disruptive. To counterbalance an existing system that promotes pressure groups and élites, an agenda for reform must include changes to our systems of politics and governance, to the provision of the public services, to the private markets and, lastly, to our financial system. For the sake of brevity, I will focus on the first two objectives. Changes to political and governance systems Transparency, accountability and social partnership The core changes to the political and governance systems must put transparency and accountability to the front. This will require the creation of systems of disclosure and control that are not susceptible to being tampered with by individual office holders. It also requires ending Social Partnership – delegating all authority and responsibility for developing, implementing and monitoring economic and social policies solely to the Legislative and Executive branches of the State. In terms of transparency, the default setting must be public disclosure and unrestricted free access to all data not subject to State-secrecy considerations. Sensitive data should be published – with the exclusion, if necessary, of sensitive information and identifiers until the time when it can be published in full. Accountability requires that performance and productivity metrics should be designed and refined through experience for all branches of the public sector. All earnings in the public sector should be linked to individual productivity. Local authorities Local authorities must be reformed, reducing the overall number of local authorities to, say, seven, covering: West & North West, South, Greater Cork, Greater Dublin, Greater Limerick, Greater Galway and the Border & Midlands. Seanad and Dáil The Seanad should be given the powers to be expected of a real upper chamber and be elected directly by the people of Ireland, with equal representation for each of the seven geographic regions outlined above. The Dáil should be reformed by reducing the number of TDs and to cover both local and national mandates. The former will preserve a number of seats allocated locally, while the latter would allocate some proportion of seats based on national polls. Both chambers along with the Executive should accord no privilege to their members that will put them above the ordinary citizens of the State. This will require the abolition of unvouched expenses, enforcement of the benefit-in-kind principle of taxation and removal of un-provisioned pensions entitlements. On-line purchasing All State purchasing should be effected on-line, made public and transparent, and subject to annual audits by an independent external board.