“All history is contemporary history,” wrote the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce. In other words, when we try to understand the past it is inevitably refracted through the prism of the present. That’s particularly true when it comes to the recent past and events still within living memory.
Over the past three summers, Irish Times political editor Pat Leahy and I have used the relative lull of August to look back at key chapters in Irish politics from the past half-century. The long rivalry between Charles Haughey and Garret FitzGerald in the 1980s. The triumphs and eventual hubris of the Bertie Ahern years. This summer we turned to Brian Cowen and the calamitous events that unfolded during his short, unhappy tenure as taoiseach.
I wasn’t sure at first that it was the right choice. The crash years of 2008–2011 were both dramatic and consequential, but they were also bleak. Hundreds of thousands lost their jobs, families slid into negative equity, young people emigrated again in their tens of thousands. Did we really want to exhume those memories? But during recording it became clear that 14 years was just the right distance. Close enough that the scars are still visible, far enough that the outlines of what happened – and why – come more sharply into focus.
Podcasts are not history books, nor are they television documentaries or even memoirs. The way our format has developed is as a kind of conversational excavation: recalling specific events, weighing them and reflecting on what they mean now. Pat often brings the advantage of having been in the thick of it at the time as a political correspondent. I like to think I bring the perspective of an interested outsider. That’s my excuse anyway.
READ MORE
Politically, the legacy of the era is obvious: the more fragmented political landscape we see today; the collapse of Fianna Fáil from its pre-eminent position (though not the disappearance that many predicted); the emergence of Sinn Féin as the main party of Opposition; the remarkable tenacity with which Fine Gael has clung on to power for more than 14 years since.
The warning lights had been flashing for years but they were ignored
All of this is true, but I find myself more interested in the dogs that didn’t bark. There was no Syriza-like surge to the populist left. Yes, there were protests but nothing on the scale of Spain’s indignados.
Two conclusions seemed inescapable by the end. One is that the Irish political system is especially vulnerable to short-termism and groupthink. The bubble years of the 2000s were defined by those habits, the sense that revenues would never dry up, that the property market was somehow immune to gravity, that no politician could afford to tell the electorate otherwise. When the global crash came, we were woefully exposed. The warning lights had been flashing for years but they were ignored. There’s no great comfort in observing that the same tendencies remain with us today.
The other conclusion is that for all its flaws, the system has proved remarkably resilient in the face of crises. The crash may have smashed the old 2½-party arrangement, but it didn’t deliver the radical upheaval some expected or hoped for. Irish voters, faced with the choice, turned once again to pragmatic centrism in the form of Fine Gael and Labour. More than a decade later that instinct remains intact in the form of the current Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael duopoly.
Perhaps these two traits are two sides of the same coin: pragmatic groupthink, centrist short-termism. They brought us low in 2008. They also kept the political centre together in the chaos that followed. Whether they will be enough in the face of new challenges – climate, housing, migration, global instability – remains an open question.
As for Cowen himself, he remains strangely elusive. His three years in power were book-ended by catastrophe, beginning with the Lisbon Treaty defeat and bank guarantee and ending with the EU-IMF bailout and the farcical collapse of his government. The rest was a slow unravelling – of a party, of an economy and of the authority of a politician who inherited power just as it became undeliverable. A man of obvious intelligence and political talent, he bore heavy responsibility for the mismanagement of the late Celtic Tiger years. Yet he never mastered the communication skills that might have allowed him to persuade, to inspire or even just to explain. Where Ahern or Haughey thrived on the drama of politics, Cowen seemed almost embarrassed by it. When his government collapsed in confusion and disarray at the start of 2011, he slipped away from public life without fanfare, and he has remained there ever since.
Our previous series were shaped by their protagonists. This one is different. Crash is not really about Brian Cowen. It is about a political culture that rewarded short-term comfort over long-term prudence, and a society that was unprepared for what happens when the music stops. That makes it less colourful perhaps, but no less relevant.
Croce was right. We tell this story not to fix the past in amber but to understand our present – and to ask whether, when the next crisis comes, we will do any better.
Crash: Brian Cowen and the unravelling of Ireland is available on the Inside Politics with Hugh Linehan podcast on irishtimes.com and all major platforms.
THE COWEN YEARS
2008
- May Newly elected taoiseach Brian Cowen is greeted by celebratory bonfires in his native Offaly. But economic indicators are already warning of trouble ahead.
- June Cowen’s government experiences its first big setback when the EU’s Lisbon Treaty is rejected by Irish voters.
- September US bank Lehman Brothers collapses, sending finance markets into full-blown crisis and focusing attention on the exposure of Irish banks. Two weeks later Cowen presides over a late-night cabinet meeting that agrees to guarantee all of Ireland’s banks. The decision will define the rest of his time in office.
2009
- January Anglo Irish Bank is nationalised, the first domino in a sequence of bailouts and recapitalisations.
- April A draconian supplementary budget includes tax rises, new levies and welfare cuts. More will follow.
- November The government sets up the National Asset Management Agency (Nama), a sprawling “bad bank” intended to sweep up the debris of the property bubble. Fianna Fáil’s poll numbers are falling fast.
2010
- Anglo and Irish Nationwide continue to devour billions more in capital, while credit rating agencies are downgrading Irish debt. Unemployment continues to rise.
- September At the Fianna Fáil think-in in Galway, Cowen gives an interview to Morning Ireland, sounding groggy and defensive. Whether or not he was hungover, as was widely alleged, the episode crystallises the perception of a taoiseach out of his depth.
- November The government bows to the inevitable and requests a rescue from the EU and IMF. A four-year austerity plan is unveiled, and the €85 billion programme is signed in December.
2011
- January Cowen survives a challenge to his leadership from Micheál Martin, but a botched reshuffle sees a raft of ministers stepping aside, leaving the taoiseach absurdly juggling half the portfolios himself. The Greens walk out of government. Cowen resigns as party leader but clings on as taoiseach.
- February The Dáil is dissolved and the ensuing general election sees Fianna Fáil drop from 77 to 20 seats. Cowen becomes the first sitting taoiseach in the State’s history not to seek re-election to the Dáil.
- March Brian Cowen departs Leinster House.
