Politicians are not historians. When they revise the past, it is not to get closer to the truth, but to justify their own agendas for the future. Which is why we should pay close attention to Charlie McCreevy's latest attempt to rehabilitate the reputation of Charles Haughey.
In distorting the truth about the disgraced former Taoiseach, the Minister for Finance is setting out the terms for a return to the hypocritical myth of fiscal rectitude.
Over the weekend, Charlie McCreevy told the Sunday Independent that "When Charlie Haughey and Ray MacSharry came back to power in 1987, they adopted a strategy of being fiscally prudent and it worked. It saved the country from bankruptcy. And to Mr Haughey's eternal credit, and this is not politically popular to say so (sic), he will always be remembered as the man who turned the country around . . . There may be lots of things that Mr Haughey did that people could not approve of but he turned this country around."
This is an astonishing exercise in denial. It suggests that McCreevy has paid no attention whatsoever to the raft of reports that have been published in the last few years. He has decided not to look through the window they provide into the obscene reality of those years. The Hamilton, McCracken and Flood tribunals, the Ansbacher and DIRT reports, and the continuing hearings at the Moriarty and planning tribunals have exposed fiscal rectitude for the phoney pose that it was. They have shown that, far from solving the fiscal crisis of the 1980s and early 1990s Haughey was a big part of the problem.
The official Fianna Fáil line on Haughey, which McCreevy was echoing on Sunday, is "Nice fiscal policies, shame about the corruption". It is a useful equivocation, especially for those like the Taoiseach who were once favoured minions of The Boss. But it is a deliberate evasion of a truth that has become ever more obvious: the corruption and the fiscal policies are inextricable.
Haughey's sleazy relationship with big business shaped both the onset of fiscal calamity in the late 1980s and the way in which order was eventually restored to the public finances. It is conveniently forgotten that the public finances have two elements: the spending of money and the raising of taxes. It is arguable that one of the reasons the Exchequer got into such a mess was that the State was spending too much. It is unarguable, however, that it was taking in far too little.
Tax evasion by the well-to-do was massive and systematic. More importantly, it was engaged in with utter impunity. The State knew all about it but did nothing. In 1986, for example, the Central Bank was told by Allied Irish Banks that "up to £600 million of non-resident deposit accounts may be misclassified i.e. they were deposits from Irish residents". References in an internal Central Bank report as early as 1976 to Ansbacher's "tax evasion", an illegal activity, were doctored to refer to "tax avoidance", which is legal. The extraordinary reluctance of the authorities to collect taxes from the rich has never been properly explained. But it was obvious both publicly and privately that diligent officials trying to do so would get no thanks from the State. The 1988 tax amnesty, which rewarded evaders by allowing them to pay just 15 per cent of what they owed sent a very clear message. At a higher level, it was not hard for officials who knew that Des Traynor was the central figure in the Ansbacher scam to suspect that the Taoiseach himself was one of its primary beneficiaries.
At the time, our betters told us that only fantasists believed that there was substantial untaxed income. In 1990, the minister for finance Albert Reynolds told the Dáil that the belief that "there is a huge pot of gold out there" was "a myth". In 1988, McCreevy, then a practising chartered accountant, complained in the Dáil that no one had congratulated the self-employed tax evaders for their generosity in availing of the amnesty and coughing-up so much money.
All of this matters now for two reasons. One is that the more vulnerable elements of Irish society who paid for fiscal rectitude are still doing so. The classic false economy of closing 3,000 public hospital beds in the late 1980s, for example, is the key factor in the current health crisis, the brunt of which is borne by the less well-off. The other is that by denying the appalling hypocrisy of the way the last fiscal crisis was handled and by talking up the way Haughey "turned the country around" McCreevy seems to be preparing the ground for a repeat performance.
Instead of whitewashing that revolting era, he might listen to the words in October 1988 of a politician who still deserved some of his reputation for telling the truth: "We should realise that the people who have suffered most from the economic measures we have taken over the past couple of years are the poor. The services that have been cut back have impinged on them although it is not the poor who have caused the problem."
The speaker was, of course, Charlie McCreevy.