Fianna Fail Needs a Rest

Every so often a political party spends so long in office and accumulates so many mistakes that it crumples under their weight and is banished to political oblivion for a generation. The British Conservative party's grip on power for the duration of the 1980s and early 90s stretched political endurance to unprecedented levels, but its unpopularity at the end of its reign was followed by an equally long period when Conservative rule was just unthinkable. It took four attempts to find a leader that could rehabilitate the party and make it electable again, a process that took over a decade, and came to an end thanks to Labour's record-breaking stint in office in which they too ran out of steam.

After eight years of Ronald Reagan and a further four of George HW Bush, Americans were ready for change and to give the Democrats another shot. The term limits of American politics and its fragmented system of government seem to prevent such marathon stints in government that can happen in parliamentary systems, so American governments don't have much time to become unpopular.

Fianna Fail has now been in office nonstop since 1997. It has spanned the center as broadly as it can, an ambiguous position that reached absurdity in 2004 when Bertie Ahern seriously attempted to pass himself off as a "socialist".

It has become customary to lambast the party, but a balanced look would give credit where it is due. Fianna Fail has been a fairly competent party for much of its history. Under Sean Lemass, farsighted reforms were made in education and free trade which have implications to this day. Jack Lynch steered the country into the European Economic Community, the forerunner of the EU. Charles Haughey’s economic policies managed public finances without running deficits, education was continually improved, and successive governments kept corporation tax at competitively low levels to attract huge amounts of foreign investment.

It was this foundation that led to the early Celtic Tiger boom of the 1990s, something that has been unfairly described by some as an illusion and often confused with the property bubble of the 2000s.

The party has also boasted considerable political smarts. Charles Haughey wrapped himself in the tricolour dug his heels in on extradition of republican prisoners, kept the pressure on over the wrongful incarceration of the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four, and positioned himself as a thorn in the side of Margaret Thatcher. Such populist positions made his financial austerity measures easier to swallow. The Northern Ireland peace process came on in leaps and bounds during the brief tenure of Albert Reynolds as Taoiseach.

However, there has always been a fatal weakness in the party. To use an engineering analogy, a small flaw in a single blade in a jet engine can cause a cascading series of failures that can bring down the whole aircraft. Fianna Fail's weak turbine blade was its tolerance of corruption and shady deals.

It has long been common knowledge that any wealthy businessman who wanted a favor could bypass official channels and go direct to the politicians. Fianna Fail were renowned for their willingness to accept "donations" from friends in need, but the voters were willing to turn the Nelson's eye to that sort of thing and maintain old voting habits as long as the economy was on the right track.

Fianna Fail's tolerance of corruption, and the voters' complicit tolerance of it, has come home to roost. It was the bankers and property developers schmoozing with the movers and shakers of Fianna Fail in the now infamous tent at the Galway races that has come to epitomize the brown envelope culture so long enjoyed by special interests.

Nor has the party been helped by the once fashionable belief in market fundamentalism, the idea that the wishes of the unregulated free market always coincides with the public interest. Even while the debt was still piling up and ticking away like a bomb under the economy, the retired Mr Ahern was on a worldwide speaking tour espousing the wonders of light touch regulation, blissfully unaware of the impending catastrophe that such a lack of oversight was causing. The political stock of the anti-regulation crowd is not trading very high now.

Irish political parties have long been run almost like family businesses. Brand loyalty plays a large part, since there is so little of policy substance to choose between Fine Gael and Fianna Fail. Voters choose between the two based on either civil war loyalties or the competence or otherwise of individual politicians. Fianna Fail has by no means cornered the market on corruption, but its long tenure in office has allowed these bad habits to become so entrenched that a shellacking at the next general election would do it a world of good. If the voters were rational they would subject the old party to a demolition job and cast it into the wilderness for an indefinite period of badly needed soul searching and reconstruction.

Any realignment of Irish politics had better deliver some fresh thinking, a satisfactory solution to the banking crisis, and in the longer term it has to introduce measures to beat corruption and instill a culture of respecting the rules and understanding that they exist for a reason. It is up to the voters to deliver. It is by no means certain that they will.