The Fianna Fáil catch-cry, when the party looks back to the economic crash, is: “We all partied.” Looking back, however, it is much more honest to say: “We all suffered.”
No matter how much rewriting of the past is attempted, the last Fianna Fáil-led government was the worst government in Irish history. It brought the country to the brink of disaster and bankruptcy, unemployment reached record levels, forced emigration resumed, we were forced into a humiliating bailout and we lost our economic sovereignty.
Former Fianna Fáil minister Conor Lenihan, writing last week in the The Irish Times, gives the best insight into why Fianna Fáil has been responsible for two ‘lost decades’ in my lifetime. He says that every single Fianna Fáil leader, from its foundation in 1926 to 2011, openly adopted populist politics. That is true, and in each generation Irish people have had to deal with the consequences. Thanks to Fianna Fáil policies every boom was inevitably followed by a bust. It was left to others to pick up the pieces, and the only things that we had in plentiful supply were unemployment, emigration and despair.
The question voters will have to answer between now and Saturday, February 8th is whether, under Micheál Martin, the party has transformed itself into something new and unrecognisable. Has it shed its opportunistic populism and should it be forgiven for the sins of the past? Already over the past week we have seen a plethora of spending promises that remind me and many others of the 1977 election.
Global economic collapse
Given all of that, I have my doubts about Fianna Fáil’s rehabilitation. When I hear Micheál Martin blaming a global economic collapse for what went wrong in Ireland, I recoil at the attempt to portray Fianna Fáil as the most innocent bystanders in history.
The reality is that the Fianna Fáil-led governments of the first decade of this century were guilty of making the most egregious errors when it came to protecting our economy, preventing overheating and preserving our economic sovereignty.
Unforgiveable errors were made, and these had a catastrophic effect on healthcare in our country, because thousands of beds were taken out of our hospitals; in housing, because the building of new homes stopped; and on law and order, because Templemore was closed and the recruitment of gardaí was halted.
Thanks to the hard work and sacrifices of the Irish people we came through the greatest economic crisis in our history
The blight of the banking guarantee inflicted a massive debt on the head of every single person in our country, imposing years of austerity and forcing everyone to make huge sacrifices. It is only in the last few years that we have been able to begin investing in the areas that so badly need it, and this sadly is the legacy of the populist politics of Fianna Fáil. When, in government, the party had money it squandered it. And when the crash came, we were all punished.
When I became minister for finance in 2011 I learned the extent of the mismanagement of our finances and I slowly came to terms with the sacrifices that would be required to pull our country through.
Reckless
Fianna Fáil insults the intelligence of everyone who suffered during those years by pretending that it was an innocent bystander, swept up in a global catastrophe. Reckless in overheating the economy, it bet the house and lost, and it took years before our economy was strong enough to start reinvesting in housing, in healthcare, in education, in new roads, in families and in all the things that mean so much for all of us.
Prospects of a better future should not be taken for granted and the wrong policy choices could stop this recovery in its tracks. When people come to vote next month they will remember the lost decade. They will remember the ghost estates, the mass emigration, the despair people felt about our future.
Thanks to the hard work and sacrifices of the Irish people we came through the greatest economic and financial crisis in our history. Let’s not go through that again.
Michael Noonan was minister for finance between 2011 and 2017 and served as a TD for 39 years