Leinster House in the 1980s could be a sinister place; Garret FitzGerald was an antidote to that
IT IS sad to reflect that Garret FitzGerald’s 85 years of ceaseless activity and endeavour has ended. Most of that endeavour was extremely useful and productive and it remained so until the very end.
I constantly marvelled at Garret’s extraordinary energy and his numerous enthusiasms. His sheer output of work was amazing. Who else but Garret would write yet another book in his 85th year?
But all this activity and productivity was accompanied by an innocence that was somewhere between childlike and professorial. His open friendliness was most engaging. He had a political shrewdness but no personal guile or malice.
For much of the 1980s, Leinster House was quite a sinister place. There was a sense of fear in some quarters. Garret however was the antidote to that. He engendered a different atmosphere which was badly needed at the time. People might have reacted to Garret at times with admiration, amazement or even amusement, but certainly never with fear.
Of all his different qualities, it was probably his tenacity which brought about his greatest achievement – the Anglo Irish Agreement of 1985.
Most of the subsequent progress made in Anglo Irish and Northern Irish relations would not have happened without it. The British prime minister did not want it. Fianna Fáil did not want it. But Garret wanted it enough to make it happen against the odds.
One of the reasons for Garret’s enthusiasm for the EEC and European integration was because he felt it would make it easier to liberalise many of the social attitudes in Ireland. He was of course correct in this.
He saw the European Community as much more than just a source of cash, which unfortunately many still think it is in Ireland. He gave Ireland a credibility in the halls of Brussels which was valuable for so long and lost only recently.
Where he was less successful was in the economic field. His anxiety to spend had to be supported by high taxation.
It is now sometimes forgotten that personal tax rates for many in the mid-1980s exceeded 65 per cent. That killed enterprise. Gloom was the inevitable consequence. Emigration was the norm.
I always felt that Garret was happier as an academic and a commentator than as a practitioner. In 1987 he resigned his party leadership rather precipitately. Fine Gael had certainly lost seats, mostly to Progressive Democrats as it happens, but no great pressure or expectation for his departure existed. He obviously felt he had done enough at the often unpleasant political coalface.
What might in another person be regarded as retirement did not result in any decrease in Garret’s output. He remained as busy as ever, at home and abroad, in constant demand and much admired.
He boasted to me once that he thought he was the only private individual who had a full set of all the Irish national statistics since the 1920s. That he felt this to be a valuable possession was a measure of the man. His material needs were modest.
May he rest in a well-deserved place.
Desmond O’Malley is a former leader of the Progressive Democrats. Noel Whelan is on leave