An Emmet beyond any satire

There is a wonderful Denis Johnston play, written in 1928, called The Old Lady Says No! Near the start, an actor playing Robert Emmet in a patriotic drama gets knocked on the head by accident when an overenthusiastic Maj Sirr comes to arrest him.

He then wanders around contemporary Dublin in Emmet costume, thinking that he is in fact the great romantic patriot, and delivering largely unintelligible speeches about "dead generations" and "patriot graves".

He arrives at a fashionable soirée hosted by a newly-rich minister in the Irish government. He moves on to a tenement Dublin of squalor and poverty. Everything he sees is a mockery of the romantic aspirations of Emmet and his fellow-revolutionaries.

I was reminded of Johnston's play over the weekend when I read the Taoiseach's choice for Book of the Year in the Sunday Tribune. He picked Marianne Elliott's superb Robert Emmet: The Making of a Legend. It is probably too cynical, even for me, to suggest that it was picked for him, though he did seem to have missed much of the point of Elliott's book, which scrapes away the romantic myth-making that has encrusted the historical reality.

Anyway, Bertie's conventional view of Emmet, untouched by any notion of historical revision, is of interest mainly for what it tells us about his view of himself. He holds up Bold Robert as a political exemplar, an embodiment of the public virtues to which an Irish leader should aspire. And in doing so, he unconsciously shows us why no one could write The Old Lady Says No! now.

Back then, Johnston's idea of putting Emmet into the company of contemporary gombeen politicians counted as satire. But Bertie's utterly unselfconscious bracketing of himself and Emmet is entirely beyond satire. Satire becomes redundant when its intended targets do the job so well themselves.

The Taoiseach tells us: "Robert Emmet was a hero, a rebel and a romantic. But he was more. The genuine romance for his fiancée, Sarah Curran, did not extend to his politics. In public life, he was both hard-headed and clear-sighted. He saw clearly that the United Irishmen were undermined by too open an organisation and he resolved on secrecy. The theory for the rebellion of 1803 was brilliant, but it failed because of poor communications and commitments that were not delivered upon. His speech from the dock has echoed down the ages."

The complete lack of a sense of irony is awesome. Poor Emmet must be glad that his grave remains undiscovered so that he can spin away quietly without interruption.

The Taoiseach's praise for "hard-headed and clear-sighted" leadership is like his mentor Charles Haughey's praise for thrift and frugality. This is the implacable leader who, in October 1997, scolded John Bruton in the Dáil with the immortal words: "I totally object to the way the Taoiseach very conveniently misrepresented everything that I said," allowing Dick Spring the equally immortal line: "You are the Taoiseach."

This is the clear-sighted champion of the people who told us this year that the Society of St Vincent de Paul was wrong to claim that the families of 300,000 children lived on less than €175 a week ("There's not those kind of figures. The official figures of what people actually get in money terms do not show that") even though his Government's own figures show that some 23.4 per cent of Irish children, or about 300,000, were living in families on less than €156 a week.

The praise for Emmet's commitment to secrecy over openness is certainly consistent with the Taoiseach, who this year gutted the Freedom of Information Act, but it's not entirely clear that that's what the revolutionary hero had in mind.

As for Emmet's great plans being bedevilled by "poor communications and commitments that were not delivered upon" , however, we can be reasonably sure that the Taoiseach's identification with the plight of his hero is complete and sincere.

Under the heading of "poor communications" must come such classics of Bertiespeak as "I don't think it helps people to start throwing white elephants and red herrings at each other", "Charles J. Haughey wanted to transform Temple Bar into Ireland's West Bank", "We haven't been able to do all that we can", "Let's put the dirty linen - the clean linen - on the table", "We shouldn't upset the apple tart" , "All that we're trying to do is clean up the past" and "If what I say leads to people ringing Mr Gilmartin and he says X, Y or Z, or if someone rings him and says A, B and C, I will be here for the rest of my life. And I will not do that."

As for "commitments that were not delivered upon", let's not even start. As Bertie himself told the Dáil this year; "If we are to discuss promises, I would have to work hard to keep up with the promises made last May. There were a billion a minute."

When all those promises are kept, then, and not till then, let his epigram be written.