INSIDE POLITICS:With luck Cowen's US experience will boost his confidence and instil the determination to rescue the country, writes STEPHEN COLLINS
IT WILL be hard for Brian Cowen to come down to earth after St Patrick’s Day in the White House and the warm welcome he received from the most charismatic and powerful politician on the planet. Considering the run of political misfortune he has endured over the past six months nobody could begrudge the Taoiseach his day in the sun.
It was not simply that Cowen benefited from being in the presence of greatness. He gave an assured performance at his public engagements in Washington and, by all accounts, acquitted himself well in his bilateral meeting with Barack Obama.
Both US and Irish sources compared the Taoiseach’s impact on the new president favourably with the shambles that attended Gordon Brown’s meeting at the White House a few weeks ago. Maybe they were wearing green-tinted spectacles, given the day that was in it, but there is no taking from the fact that the Taoiseach did himself and the country proud on an important occasion.
Cowen’s relaxed body language throughout his US trip was a contrast with the tense and moody aura that often surrounds him in the Dáil. Despite the importance of the occasion he gave the impression of being comfortable dealing with Obama and was able to relax and enjoy the various social events of the day.
He was back to more mundane politics at the EU summit in Brussels over the past two days while tomorrow he begins the really hard grind of drafting the toughest budget in living memory. With a bit of luck Cowen’s US experience will boost his confidence and instil the determination to do whatever is necessary in the budget to rescue the country.
Huge decisions that will have an impact on the country for a generation will be made over the next few weeks. The Taoiseach and his Government have to put everyday political considerations aside. The greater the short-term pain and the louder the howls of protest, the brighter the country’s future will be. While it goes against every Fianna Fáil instinct to antagonise the entire electorate in one fell swoop that is what the crisis demands.
Obama is trying to spend his way out of the recession but that is a luxury we don’t have, given the state of the public finances. The appropriate response from the richest country in the world and a small open economy like Ireland were always bound to be different.
Speaking at the various events that marked St Patrick’s Day in Washington Obama gave no sign that the weight of the world economy is now resting on his shoulders. Close up the magnetism of personality and fluency of language that won him office were manifest.
The only surprise was the enthusiasm with which he threw himself into the occasion, given that he had not gone out of his way during the election to court the Irish lobby.
The president made a number of jokes about learning for the first time during last year’s election that his third great-grandfather on his mother’s side hailed from a small village in Co Offaly.
“Now, when I was a relatively unknown candidate for office,” said Obama, “I didn’t know about this part of [my] heritage, which would have been very helpful in Chicago. So I thought I was bluffing when I put the apostrophe after the O. I tried to explain that ‘Barack’ was an ancient Celtic name. Taoiseach, I hope our efforts today put me on the path of earning that apostrophe.”
Speaking at the lunch on Capitol Hill given in the Taoiseach’s honour by the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, the president referred to a time when Ronald Reagan was president and Tip O’Neill was speaker of the House. Reagan’s genuine interest in Ireland, attested to in Garret FitzGerald’s memoirs, is not often acknowledged but the modern St Patrick’s Day ceremonies in Washington are not a very old tradition; they began at Reagan’s instigation in the 1980s.
Much to the amusement of the politicians at the lunch, Obama cited a greeting Reagan once offered guests at the same gathering on Capitol Hill. “On St Patrick’s Day you should spend time with saints and scholars. So I have two more stops to make.”
In his speech at the same lunch the Taoiseach drew Obama’s attention to two figures from the past who, he suggested, were relevant to the shared history of Ireland and United States. One was Daniel O’Connell and the other was Frederick Douglass, the former slave who devoted his life to campaigning to end that abominable practice. Douglass visited Ireland in 1845 and, while he was a little cynical about O’Connell before he arrived, he was entranced when he heard the Irish politician speaking at the Conciliation Hall in Dublin in 1845.
“Mr O’Connell rose and delivered a speech of about an hour and a quarter long. It was a great speech, skilfully delivered, powerful in its logic, majestic in its rhetoric, biting in its sarcasm, melting in its pathos, and burning in its rebukes,” Douglass wrote from Dublin.
The Taoiseach drew a smile from Obama when he said that O’Connell was known for his successful organisation of mass rallies. He also made a point, rarely appreciated in Ireland, that O’Connell believed not just in Catholic emancipation but in universal liberty, quoting his remark that: “My sympathy with distress is not confined within the narrow bounds of my own green island . . . my heart walks abroad.”
The implicit parallel between the father of Irish democracy and the first black president of the United States was highly appropriate and was not lost on Obama. March 17th was a good day for both president and Taoiseach but both men are sure of many, many difficult days in the year ahead.