Why Albert should go and study his history

In a moment of acute paranoia this week, I was struck by the thought that the Dana for President campaign might be a cunning plot to make the Albert for President campaign look good. Then I realised how absurd such a delusion really is, for nothing on earth, not even the thought of Dana addressing the United Nations on our behalf, could make President Albert Reynolds look good.

Albert Reynolds has trouble with history - his own and the country's. Consider, for a moment, his speech in west Belfast last weekend when he told his audience that Fianna Fail could not ask the IRA to surrender weapons because Fianna Fail itself had not handed over its guns.

Mr Reynolds revealed that after the first IRA ceasefire of August 1994, "I said to John Major `how can I go to the republican leadership and ask them to give up guns when Fianna Fail never handed over any guns'?" He added that it was well-known that members of the first Dail had entered the chamber "with guns in their pockets".

We have often complained that the British don't understand Irish history, often accused them of bringing nothing more than vague misconceptions about the past to bear on the problems of the present but now, at last, we know why. For it would seem that if they rely on Irish leaders to explain it to them, they are bound to end up very confused indeed.

Let's take, for instance, the second part of what Mr Reynolds told Mr Major - the parable of parliamentarians with guns in their pockets. It is a colourful and dramatic image, calculated to impress itself on the mind of a British prime minister. It is also, alas, hopelessly muddled. At the time of the establishment of the first Dail after the general election of 1918, Fianna Fail did not exist, so not only did its putative members not have guns in their pockets but they could not even have been pleased to see each other.

The story of Fianna Fail politicians entering the Dail with revolvers in their pockets in fact relates to the events of March 1932 when de Valera and his followers, taking office for the first time, feared the democratic mandate they had been given might be overturned by an army coup. If they had guns at all, they intended to use them to uphold democracy rather than to overthrow the State.

Does it matter that the would-be President has such difficulty with history, even the history of his own party? It does - if he is using the past to explain the present and to set the agenda for the immediate future. The statement that "Fianna Fail never handed over any guns" is meaningless in itself, since Fianna Fail did not have an armed wing or an arsenal. The supposed parallel between Fianna Fail being democratically elected to government in 1932 after five years of being a peaceful opposition political party and Sinn Fein taking its place in peace talks in September as part of a movement which also includes the IRA, simply does not exist.

However, Mr Reynolds in west Belfast was giving "history" a very specific meaning for the peace process in Northern Ireland. He was using a version of the past to make a very immediate political point - that the decommissioning of weapons is not a part of Irish nationalist psychology. He was telling us, moreover, that he used his historical parable as the basis of his advice to John Major at another key moment in the peace process. In that context, at this most delicate time, it is very important indeed that this version of the past was garbled, vague and incapable of withstanding a moment's scrutiny.

This misunderstanding and misuse of history is all the more significant when the prospect of President Reynolds comes into view, for one of the things a President does is to connect the past with the present, to use history as a way of enabling us to understand who and where we are now.

As President, Albert Reynolds could not come out and say directly what he felt about decommissioning in relation to the Northern talks. He would have to speak obliquely, to use metaphors, to tell stories.

There is, besides, a more recent and personal history to worry about. Mr Reynolds may believe that the events sur rounding the fall of his government in 1994 are a closed book, but his appeal in his libel action against the Sunday Times, in which those events are central, is pending. He may believe that controversy surrounding his role in the beef scandals of the late 1980s and early 1990s is a thing of the past, but those scandals are likely to come under renewed scrutiny in the new tribunal of inquiry which is due to be established as soon as the McCracken report has been published.

There is, moreover, the Masri passports affair, when Irish passports were issued in 1992 in return for a £1.1 million investment in Mr Reynolds's family firm, C & D Foods. There is no suggestion of any wrongdoing on Mr Reynolds's part in relation to this, but there are apparent contradictions between statements he made at the time and facts which have emerged elsewhere.

In May 1994, when the Masri affair was in the news, Mr Reynolds said that he "had not been involved in any way in the running of the company for up to 14 years". In his evidence to the beef tribunal, however, Mr Reynolds said that in 1987 when he became Minister for Industry and Commerce, he had just "spent four years developing my own business", suggesting that it was seven, not 14 years, since he had been involved in the running of the company. Tim Ryan, in his book, Albert Reynolds: The Longford Leader, gives details of C & D business conducted by Mr Reynolds in 1982, 1983 and 1984, and reproduced in facsimile company correspondence signed by him while he was a minister.

If anyone in Fianna Fail imagines that for a presidential candidate, the recent past is irrelevant, a mature recollection of Brian Lenihan's presidential campaign in 1990 might be in order.

Running for the Presidency exposes a candidate to a level of personal scrutiny well beyond even that applied to the leader of a major party in a general election campaign. Every loose thread is pulled and if the garment has any flaw, it will begin to unravel. Neither Albert Reynolds's record in public office nor his ability to articulate any profound understanding of the legacy of Irish history is likely to withstand such scrutiny. Vague as he is about aspects of the collective past and his own past, the best thing he could do might well be to retire gracefully to the history books.