O'Malley blessed in his enemies

Although he disagreed with him on most issues, W.B. Yeats had a soft spot for Henrik Ibsen. "We may not have the same friends," he said, "but we have the same enemies."

That about sums up my attitude to Des O'Malley. I don't much like his free-market ideology, and I don't think he's a political saint. But his taste in enemies is impeccable. He is despised by all the right people: the Provos and their allies; and by Charles Haughey, Albert Reynolds and Larry Goodman. Anyone who has managed to accumulate such a prize bunch of adversaries can't be all bad.

Gerry Gregg's RTE series on O'Malley, which ended on Sunday night, would have been far more effective if it had just lined up his enemies and let them talk.

For the laurels that will crown O'Malley's career will not be the fulsome tributes of his followers, but the brickbats of his detractors: Larry Goodman's statement in 1989 that he "wouldn't accept anything Mr O'Malley says. He has a lot to say about nothing. Mr O'Malley opened his mouth too loud before and during the election".

Albert Reynolds's description of him at the beef tribunal as "reckless, irresponsible and dishonest". Ray Burke's characterisation of his evidence at the same forum as "dishonest, dishonourable and disgraceful". The great accolade of being judged unfit to be a member of Fianna Fail under Charles Haughey.

With enemies like these, who needs friends?

And who needs hagiography? O'Malley's record in helping to pull the Republic back from involvement in civil war in the early 1970s, in trying to stop the financial scandals of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and in sacrificing his political career by doggedly pursuing the questions that the tribunals didn't answer deserves great praise.

By its reluctance to temper praise with acknowledgment of the complexity of any long political career, though, the RTE series missed much of the drama of O'Malley's public life.

Both absolute good and absolute evil are rare in politics. Most politicians walk a crooked path, and the good ones are those who have spent most time on the decent side of the road. Some of the most significant political figures are the most deeply compromised.

There is no great change without staunch, unflinching idealists. Yet there is seldom great change without shifty, ambivalent figures who have paid their dues to the old regime. Think of F.W. de Klerk, Mikhail Gorbachev, perhaps even Gerry Adams. None is a moral giant. None has clean hands. Yet momentous changes could not have happened without them.

ON THE smaller, less heroic scale of the recent history of the Republic, Des O'Malley is such a figure. He is a stalwart of the system who slowly turned against it. Had he been the plaster saint that the RTE series tended to portray, he would have been far less interesting and, perhaps, far less effective than he really is. By not exploring his ambivalence, the series missed a key element of his power.

O'Malley's key moments are characterised by the hesitant, tentative approach of a man who dips his toe in the dangerous waters before deciding not to immerse himself. He defends democracy in the Arms Crisis after privately meeting one of the defendants (Charles Haughey) in the run-up to the trial. He becomes a pluralist, but only after indulging, as late as 1974, in the old rhetoric of faith and fatherland: "Ireland is one island, one nation, one country because God made it so."

He becomes a liberal after trooping into the lobbies to vote against contraception and railing against fornication. His brave stand against Larry Goodman is preceded by a flirtation in which he promises the beef baron cosy chats in return for payments to the PDs.

It would be easy, on the basis of these contradictions, to paint O'Malley as an opportunist who was simply smart enough to know which way the wind was blowing and to change course in time. That, though, would be even more simplistic than the hagiographic image of a pure paragon of virtue.

Some of the changes of direction (on contraception and green nationalism, for example) did place O'Malley in line with the prevailing winds. Others brought him no end of trouble.

If standing up to Charles Haughey was so easy, why did so many able, strong-minded politicians knuckle under? If trying to break the golden circle was so politically advantageous, why did so many feel that discretion was the better part of valour? If trying to impose decent standards on Fianna Fail while serving in coalition with it is such a soft option, why has Mary Harney not bothered?

The truth is that Des O'Malley is a rare example of a politician who sacrificed his own considerable ambition to a basic sense of morality. By being a bit more discreet and clubbable, he would have been Taoiseach. By dropping the whole Goodman issue when the consensus was that it had become a bore, he could have remained as PD leader and become Tanaiste.

Warts and all, a realistic portrait of his public career would still be pretty striking. Like most portraits it would also be a lot more interesting with the warts than without them.

fotoole@irish-times.ie