Our politicians have done well on the international stage only to fail dismally on the home front, writes GARRET FitzGERALD.
READERS OF this column will not be in doubt about the poor opinion I have of this Government’s domestic economic policies between 2000 and 2008. Nor will I disguise my disgust at the fact that this is the second time within 30 years that the same political party has wrecked our economy by creating or seriously aggravating an economic crisis.
Last time that cost us eight years of growth and this time it is likely to add years of additional misery to the setback that we, like so many other developed countries, are currently suffering as a result of the global credit crunch.
(I do not wish to imply that the governments I led in the 1980s were without fault in their handling of the problems they had inherited. Of course we should have done better. But rightly or wrongly, I see a difference between wrecking an economy (twice) and cleaning up the consequent mess imperfectly.) The purpose of this article is not to rake over that unhappy past, but rather to draw attention to what seems to be a striking, and I believe largely unnoticed contrast between past failures in Irish domestic policy making and a contrasting success in the handling of most of our external relations (Northern Ireland to 1969 excepted) throughout most of the life of this State – despite the fact that in most cases the same people have been in charge of both aspects of policy-making.
Back in the 1920s our first government’s diplomatic skills played a leading role in the transformation of the British empire into what by 1931 had as a result become the commonwealth of completely independent sovereign states. By contrast, even allowing for the problems that government faced in reconstructing the State’s physical infrastructure after a most destructive Civil War, domestic economic policies were less impressive.
Next, whatever one may think de Valera’s Economic War of the 1930s, one cannot but admire his extraordinarily skilful handling both of the 1938 Anglo-Irish negotiation, and of our wartime non-belligerence. (Neutrality is really too strong a word to use, given the wide-ranging secret support he gave to Britain throughout that conflict.)
It should be recognised – but rarely is – that our non-belligerence was much more than an assertion of Irish sovereignty, for it may well have saved us from what could otherwise have been a renewal, in a new and sinister form, of the earlier Civil War – this time pitting our three democratic parties against an IRA probably bolstered with breakaway Fianna Fáil support, and externally supported by Nazi Germany.
We can contrast that record with de Valera’s futile and destructive attempt to make our part of this small island economically self-sufficient – until at the very start of his last government he and his colleagues caved in to Ken Whitaker’s blunt warning that if that policy were not promptly reversed, we would become such a basket case that we would end up having to reapply for membership of the United Kingdom.
From the late 1950s onwards, Frank Aiken went on to establish Ireland as an independent voice at the UN – a course sustained by succeeding governments, including my government’s Central American policy and Brian Cowen’s stance on Security Council Resolution 141 on Iraq – which the US and Britain deliberately misinterpreted as authorising an invasion of Iraq – although those particular wars were subsequently seriously muddied by Bertie Ahern’s desire to cosy up retrospectively to the US.
Ahern proved himself a most skilful external negotiator, both in relation to Northern Ireland and in securing – as Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, had notably failed to do – European agreement on the terms of the Lisbon Treaty.
Finally, 10 days ago we saw another most successful negotiation with our 26 European partners, yielding all the Lisbon Treaty guarantees we need, together with a reversal of an earlier unanimous EU decision to reduce the size of the European Commission. More generally, there have been six Irish presidencies of the EU under six different Irish governments – all of which were judged by informed European opinion to have been successes. I doubt if any other EU state can match that record.
Contrast that remarkable recent foreign policy record with the domestic economic situation in which we now find ourselves, after four years during which Cowen was minister for finance and 10 years during which Ahern was taoiseach – all too often negotiating weakly and caving in to domestic interest groups.
How can these remarkable foreign/domestic performance contrasts be explained? Certainly the exceptional skills deployed by our Department of Foreign Affairs has been a consistent factor. But in foreign policy matters, (including negotiations in relation to technical issues such as finance, agriculture and fisheries, as well as the purely political aspects of foreign policy), the judgment, courage and technical command of our Ministers in these issues, as well as their human relations skills have often loomed very large indeed. Qualities of these kinds are certainly to be found within our political class.
By contrast, it seems to me that Irish politics has been largely devoid of the kinds of economic skills so desperately needed in modern politics. But apart from Richard Bruton and George Lee are there any other members of the Dáil who have an economic training?
Another factor that may differentiate foreign and domestic policymaking is, of course, the extent to which domestic policy-making tends to be dominated by short-termism and populism. There is an ever present temptation to seek to win the next election by spending money regardless of the economic climate and the whole country then has to pay the price.