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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
34 October-November 2025
went unremarked. No political leader would
toss in the second invocation in today’s Ireland.
The country has changed in a secular direction
since the 1980s but the Santa Claus political
culture endures. In a 1980 TV address shortly
after his appointment, Haughey lamented the
12% Exchequer borrowing requirement,
admonishing his audience that “As a
community we are living away beyond our
means”. The deficit stayed at this unsustainable
level through three quick-fire elections and
through FitzGerald’s leadership of the four-year
Fine Gael/Labour government to 1987. Hence
Mac the Knife.
After the 1990s economic recovery the
influence of the Progressive Democrats and
Fine Gael under John Bruton shifted the
political centre towards the avoidance of
another fiscal crisis. But Haughey’s protegé
Bertie Ahern succeeded to the office of
Taoiseach in 1997, serving for almost a decade.
The flirtation with fiscal rectitude turned to
pretense and ended in outright state insolvency
and an IMF rescue in 2010, preceded by years
of delusion about what were ephemeral tax
revenues, a property bubble and the collapse
of the banking system. The banks went bust
through incompetence and failure by
regulators but the public finances were
mismanaged by the politicians, the heirs of
Haughey and FitzGerald, respectively an
accountant and an economist.
The financial collapse from 2008 has in the
end seen a brisk economic recovery and
apparent surpluses for the Exchequer due to
tax revenues widely advised to be transient. If
history repeats itself with another fiscal crisis,
on schedule twenty years after the last, the hat-
trick will be completed, and the legacy to Irish
political culture of the titans of the 1980s due
another reassessment.
POLITICS
Haughey and FitzGerald
set in train undying
cycles of boom and
bust for Ireland
COLM MCCARTHY REVIEWS Eoin O’Malley’s absorbing
‘Charlie v Garret: the rivalry that shaped modern
Ireland’, Eriu/Bonnier Books (just published)
U
pon the formation of a minority
Fianna Fáil government early in
1987, Charles Haughey emerged
from his Merrion Street oce, with
obvious theatrical intent, to visit
the Department of Finance next door. He had
come to ‘inspect the books’, with whose
contents Haughey, an accountant, was
thoroughly familiar. Emerging to the cameras,
he announced with feigned surprise that the
money was all gone, blaming four years of
Garret FitzGerald; and appointed Ray
MacSharry minister for Finance. MacSharry,
quickly dubbed ‘Mac the Knife’, presided over
the inevitable fiscal consolidation. It remains a
constant of Irish politics that the basement in
the Department of Finance contains an
enormous treasure chest filled with gold,
jewels and dollars, and that every politician,
from county councils upwards, knows where
the key has been hidden by civil servants.
Haughey was familiar with this game, having
participated on occasion, and elevated
MacSharry because he knew by 1987 that the
game was up.
The UK Labour government which returned
to oce after a 14-year exile in 2014 must be
regretting their failure to follow his example.
Like Haughey in opposition they had bemoaned
the stinginess of their predecessors, declined
to bite the bullet when their turn came round
and are repenting at leisure. MacSharry had
signalled his reservations about careless
public finances during brief stints in oce in
the early 1980s. But MacSharry was also
fortunate – the external economic environment,
including the ‘Lawson Boom’ in the UK, was
benign and the budget measures which
suced were less painful than they might have
been. Napoleon asked “I know he’s a good
general, but is he lucky?”.
Our Santa
Claus political
culture
endures
Haughey won re-election in 1989, this time
in coalition with Des O’Malley’s Progressive
Democrats, an earlier splinter from Fianna Fáil.
Des O’Malley’s son Eoin, adjunct professor of
politics at DCU, has written an absorbing
account of the two principal protagonists in the
party politics of Ireland in the 1980s.
An early portent of the rivalry between the
pair followed Haughey’s recovery from his spell
in the Fianna Fáil wilderness after the Arms Trial
in the 1970s. FitzGerald, opposing his
nomination to succeed Jack Lynch as Taoiseach,
intoned: “Deputy Haughey presents himself
here, seeking to be invested in oce as the
seventh in the line, but he comes with a flawed
pedigree. His motives can be judged ultimately
by God but we cannot ignore the fact that he
diers from his predecessors in that these
motives have been and are widely impugned…”.
FitzGerald later regretted the flawed-
pedigree phrase, interpreted unfairly as
displaying some kind of class condescension,
but his ascription of ultimate judgement to God
