Micheál Martin’s hard track through the harsh and unforgiving Alps of Irish politics…

So last Thursday Micheál Martin (a day later than scheduled because of some stormy weather in the Dáil) the man who many pundits once predicted would be the first Fianna Fáil leader never to become Taoiseach became Taoiseach for a second time.

Indeed nothing was inevitable about Fianna Fáil’s return. When it happened in 2020 few believed it would last more than a few months. Leo Varadkar looked downright miserable at the very thought of coalescing with Fine Gael’s bete noir for generations.

What held it together was that both parties, with different emphases, shared an understanding of the realities facing the Republic, its economy, its electorate and primarily the external threats to the national interest from a wider, often hostile world.

Both had their roots not in the civil war (as is often misleadingly said), but in the fragile peace which followed that traumatic episode. Fianna Fáil was founded in 1926 and Fine Gael in 1932 after the first defeat of its predecessor Cumann na nGaedheal.

Both had a determination to make what was a small independent democracy work at a time when, particularly in Catholic Europe, dictatorship was on the rise. This fierce two party rivalry enabled Ireland to escape fascism, communism and the war.

What grew in place of conflict was a primacy of compromise, consensus and above all a determination to create the sort of stability that enabled a post WWII economic miracle which turned a small agricultural rock in the ocean into a modern state.

Other parties did play a role (Clann na Poblachta’s Noel Browne comes to mind) but the 100 year long journey from political sovereignty to economic freedom was primarily a product of these two centrist, post ideological forces bouncing off each other.

1 Back to the future

It’s hard to exaggerate just how closely tied the south’s economic fate remained to the UK economy after independence. Irish agriculture, that even as late as 1951 still employed 40 per cent of the workforce, while 90% of all exports went to the UK.

During the war (or The Emergency as it was also known), in addition to an estimated 70,000 men who enlisted in Allied Forces to fight Nazi Germany, there was a huge outflow of men and women to the factories of wartime Britain and Northern Ireland.

Afterwards first Fianna Fáil and then the first inter party coalition (Fine Gael, Clann na Poblachta, Clann na Talmhan and two Labour Parties [plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose! – Ed]) governments braced themselves for a huge return.

It never happened. Efforts by De Valera in the 1930s to grow Ireland’s industrial base were hampered by the fact that most of its foreign capital was tied up in reserves held in London, leaving little for investment either in infrastructure or in new jobs.

The exodus, begun wartime, would continue all through the ’50s. By 1970 half of all those born in the Republic in 1935 were by age 35 either living in the north or overseas. Economic survival depended on emigration as it had done since the famine.

Those of us with long family memories (my Great Grandfather was a man in his 20s when the famine hit rural Donegal in 1845) can count the cycles of emigration in generational waves (1850s, 1880s, 1900s, 1930s) as well as smaller ones in ’80s and ’10s.

Through participation in the Marshall Plan and repatriation of sterling assets the coalition began to invest in land reclamation, afforestation, housing and health, triggering a consensus which, over the next 80 years, would slowly transform the Republic.

2 Rebuilding and renewal

The decisive shift came at the end of a dismal 1950s with what became known as the Lemass-Whitaker watershed. The white paper First Programme for Economic Expansion reset the course away from job creation towards major systemic change.

An analysis by British officials in 1960 didn’t give Lemass much chance of success “they are likely to continue to depend for as far ahead as can be seen, on selling their agricultural goods to the United Kingdom”. Freeing up trade was the first objective.

The Committee on Industrial Organisation was one of several tripartite institutions (government, employees and workers) Lemass used to build a national consensus on shifting Irish industry from dependency on tariffs to a more open economy.

The result was a phased decrease across the 1960s starting with 10% cuts in 1963 and 1964, creating huge disruption and unhappiness at the time, tempered only by substantial amounts of financial and technical assistance to enable change.

Of his actions Lemass would reflect “it should be no exaggeration to say that our survival as an independent state depended upon our success”. As Professor Henry Patterson has noted manufacturing output increased by 5.9% pa between 1959-1972.

Employment in manufacturing rose from 169,000 to 212,000 in the same period. Ireland benefited from the concurrent expansion of the UK, however as Patterson observes…

…it is difficult to deny the decisiveness and coherence that Lemass gave to the process of integrating the Republic into the international economy.

Interestingly this whole period seems to have gone missing from recent historical accounts, yet it is a key component of the 100 years of development of domestic Irish Politics that Sinn Féin tried to feature so prominently in November’s election.

The 70s and 80s were marked by further reforms, a brief period of immigration and a series of crises that led to regular changes of government. By the 1990s the Celtic Tiger arrived just as Northern Ireland, propitiously for the island, moved towards peace.

From Haughey’s noisy (and unpopular) attacks on the Anglo Irish Agreement between Garrett FitzGerald and Margaret Thatcher, Bertie Ahern re-opened the ground Lemass had been working with O’Neill before it all was blown to the wind in ’69.

With prosperity came a lengthening of perspective. So it was Fianna Fáil (The Republican Party) who re-wrote Articles 2 and 3 of the Constitution from cold territorial claim to an unconditional duty of care for relationships across the island.

3 Fianna Fáil faces an abyss

With every boom comes a bust. To paraphrase Bertie Ahern, the Republic had never had it “boomier”. But the bust when it came was catastrophic, particularly for a younger generation who had assumed that the good times would be permanent.

The electoral bullet in the post had only one name on it: the party which had been the one most trusted by generations of post independence Ireland’s poor to ‘get the job done’. The electorate was out for blood, and it was Fianna Fáil’s they were after.

In November 2010, the Government had a majority of three, but with four vacancies. Early the following month his party was humiliated as Sinn Féin’s Pearse Doherty stormed to a rapturous by-election victory in what was then Donegal South West.

Then in January as Brian Cowan promised a general election once a crucial finance bill was passed, the party appointed Martin as leader of Fianna Fáil whilst his predecessor carried on effectively in a caretaker capacity as Taoiseach. It was chaos.

So chaotic, it is very unlikely that many listened to his acceptance speech (text here). The economic miracle of the Celtic Tiger was in free fall and most of the electorate at the time blamed just one party: Fianna Fáil. Yet, some of that speech is familiar:

…we have always been committed to a middle-way which believes that a commitment to both economic growth and social progress can and must go hand-in-hand. The empty slogans of the ideologues of left and right have never and will never deliver for the people of this modern democracy.

Familiar themes in the Martin agenda ever since, but in 2011 few were listening. The anger in the country was palpable. As in other European countries it struggled with huge levels government debt due to bailing out a banking system that had gone feral.

This hit the urban lower middle and working classes particularly hard: the very people who had supported Fianna Fáil for generations, turning up loyally at polling stations to underwrite its otherwise unlikely dominance as party of government.

The slip towards the edge of an electoral precipice for FF was marked by fractious press conferences of the type you only see when a government is weak after being in power too long, often focused on misspeaking rather than on the subject in hand.

The February election was a bloodbath. In five seat constituencies where FF had been dominant like Cavan Monaghan the party was left with just one seat. In two constituency Donegal where they’d had five out of six seats, just one TD survived.

In Dublin West Minister of Finance Brian Lenihan, the sole surviving TD in the Republic’s capital, only sat until June when he died of pancreatic cancer. The vacant seat was won by Labour leaving FF with just 19 seats, a drop of 58 seats since 2007.

It left the party in third place nationally for the first time since its foundation, and a mere five seats ahead of Sinn Féin who were on fourteen after gaining ten on their previous showing. It’s no exaggeration to suggest that oblivion was beckoning.

4 Recovering in (near) silence

As the 31st Dáil reconvened Martin became Leader of the Opposition, but since the government dominated 113 seats to 38  there was very little action to be had as the new coalition was left to get on with the business of dealing with the Troika.

Martin spent a year on the road reconnecting his shattered party in almost every part of the country hoping to make the most of its national infrastructure. But the message was their party was now tiny and recovery would be long, tough and slow.

At the first Ard Fheis in March the following year, Professor Tim Bale gave Martin and his party a number of salutary warnings, not least one about not taking Opposition too far that would prove critical. As the late Noel Whelan noted in The Irish Times…

…he warned the party to avoid falling into what he called “populist bandwagon negativity”. Fianna Fáil should be keeping the current government under pressure on the bread-and-butter issues but opposition for opposition’s sake delivers no long-term benefit.

Note also that Bale warned them that comebacks take two or three parliamentary terms…

In a point that Martin has reiterated, Bale argued that Fianna Fáil should prioritise strategy over tactics. It should be prepared to do the hard work and do the right thing rather than simply seeking short-term popularity and attention.

In fact Martin returned to Government Buildings just two elections after that event in 2012, far quicker than many in that audience perhaps believed was possible. Yet underneath the trauma of Ireland’s collapse, the economy soon started to turn.

That same year the sudden spike of emigration that followed the banking collapse of 2008 began to soften and collapse, and quietly the economy began to recover. As early as 2014 the Republic became a net recipient of overseas workers again.

Exports of goods to the UK had been dropping since 1960 (when it accounted for 74% of the total).  According Mark Henry’s In Fact the UK dropped from 22% of all destinations in 2000 to just 9% in 2020, a precipitous drop hastened by Brexit after 2016.

As immigration began rising again and the coalition government in austerity mode Fianna Fáil more than doubled its seats pulling within six seats of Fine Gael. Though it underperformed its polling Sinn Féin ate into much of Labour’s rise from 2011.

Having been all but written off and ignored Martin’s root and branch revival of Fianna Fáil had all but taken place in the dark. Success at 2014 local elections had provided the party with a new generation of candidates many of whom were to become TDs.

5 Martin squeezes through a ‘perilous gap’

If Martin had benefitted by being written off by rivals across the lifespan of the 31st Dail that would change dramatically in the 32nd. The massive decline in votes and seats for both Labour and Fine Gael left all parties well short of a working majority.

Threat of privatisation through a newly centralised Irish Water vehicle and the politics of austerity punched a huge hole  in Labour’s capacity to compete for a second term. It also created a split with what became the SocDems which persists to this day.

Martin moved in to sign a confidence and supply agreement with Fine Gael that opposition rivals would seek to exploit to the max. He argued that Ireland needed political stability more than anything else (the Brexit vote was still a few months away).

A period followed in which the Fianna Fáil would be blamed for everything that was (or more often wasn’t) in a largely a Fine Gael programme for government. It would enable Sinn Féin to use Tweedledum and Tweedledee to powerful effect in 2020.

Despite a strong performance in the 2019 local elections (and an equally disastrous one for Sinn Féin) just over six months later Sinn Fein pulled off a performance that shocked even them. Fianna Fáil had 38 seats, Sinn Fein 37 and Fine Gael 35.

With losses of six and fifteen seats for FF and FG what sunk both was the latter’s lack of attention to a severe housing shortage (ironically brought on by a highly successful economic recovery in its sixth year by then) and a distressing homeless issue.

Having learned from its mistake in 2016 Sinn Féin’s new female leader in the house Mary Lou McDonald made it available for talks around future government formation. But she was to be thwarted by two things. One was her Tweedledee jibe at FF.

The clear implication that FF’s history was synonymous with FG’s, or more importantly that the last 100 years amounted to nothing more than the recent economic crash went down badly with both Fianna Fáil TDs and members.

But more important was Martin’s insistence on no deal with Sinn Féin. Martin bore the scars of scurrilous attacks by prominent Sinn Féin front benchers for Martin’s trenchant criticism of their gross mishandling of the Mairia Cahill sex abuse case.

He was one of the few to see the effect on Northern Irish democracy of Sinn Féin’s bad faith in pulling down the Stormont institutions of the Belfast Agreement and then cynically resurrecting them in time to clear the decks for their Dáil campaign.

He also intuited (probably correctly) that no government that included Sinn Féin would last any longer than the leadership bunker in West Belfast wanted it to. Hard as it was to swallow, the only viable route out of the housing crisis was with FG.

In spite of pressure from the media, some internal party critics, and even Varadkar who had spent more of the campaign turning his fire on Fianna Fáil than Sinn Féin who clearly had little appetite for any further arrangements with Martin and Co.

This was a key moment for Martin. He had few of the critical cards in his own hands. Yet after a full five months he finally emerged with a Programme for Government majorly imprinted with the policies of his own party and that of the Greens.

6 Like Hannibal through the Alps

The crossing from tied opposition leader to Taoiseach was accomplished in the face of huge difficulties. Having made huge promises on housing, Martin assumed leadership in the context of lockdown, and a huge rise in the price of materials.

Like Hannibal he made it through with nearly half the force Bertie Ahern had won with in 2007. But he was where he and almost every member of his party wanted to be, back in Government with the means and a determination to create change.

It was not how many predicted it would happen. But Martin’s steadfastness in the face of FG’s insouciant handling of the housing issue won him respect from across the aisle. If Fine Gaelers still didn’t trust Fianna Fáil they did begin to trust Martin.

That trust was reinforced by an historically peaceful transition half way through the term as he handed the baton of Taoiseach over to Varadkar. Meanwhile a building programme of the kinds of houses needed began slowly at first, later picking up pace.

As the economy continued to boom, the second half of the government term saw huge surpluses emerge. With the longer term in mind, a national wealth fund was established and on Northern Ireland the Shared Island Initiative began seeding research.

More concrete achievements like the finalising of the Narrow Water Bridge and establishing of a hourly rail service connecting Dublin Connelly and Belfast’s new Grand Central station (something not seen or barely thought of for most of my adult life).

The return of Apple tax money which the coalition government, mindful of the role played by Foreign Direct Investment had played in last 80 years of economic rebirth in the Republic, had at first refused, provided a huge cache for a pre-election budget.

The result wasn’t even close. Sinn Féin desperate to maintain a decent proportion of the ground it had lost over the previous year resorted to Tweedledee/Tweedledum insults again, and tried to outbid the coalition on housing with an untested scheme.

The new trust bridges built with FG voters, and a signal to voters that SF’s policies were incompatible with FF’s made it easier for Martin to say no this time. Given they stretched over Christmas, negotiations of the PfG were done in double quick time.

7 Civic Republicanism and the politics of progress

There was much speculation about realignment in the run up to the 2024 election. The popular narrative sees the necessity for a left right split when globally the line tension is often more easily be drawn between populists and technocrats.

In a recent translation to English from Welsh Richard Wyn Jones’s Putting Wales First contains a fascinating discussion of the differing natures of ethnic and civic nationalisms, one tribal, the other requiring volunteered support of inclusive institutions.

Of course the line between one and the other is often not clear other than where the emphasis lies. In the 2024 General election in Ireland dividing line might be more fruitfully divided between pre-existing forms civic and tribal Republicanism.

The key division between Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin can be seen in their all island policy. Proposed expenditures separate institutional commitment (€2 Billion from Fianna Fáil) and the “one more push” pretension (just €8 million from Sinn Féin).

In truth, Fianna Fáil’s republicanism has been a hundred years in the making. Seán Lemass was a 17 year old veteran of the East Rising but by the time he was established as Taoiseach in 1963 he was convinced that…

Irish freedom will not be finally secured until it rests on firm and unshakable economic foundations.

Yet Sinn Féin until just a generation ago believed that annexation and annihilation of “the enemy” was the only way to achieve the objective of a politically united Ireland. That precise belief may have gone, but the fantasy of tribal domination persists.

One of the most insightful books in recent years is a collaboration between and an Irishman, Eric Lonergan and a gifted Scot political economist called Mark Blyth called Angrynomics. The first chapter is titled “Public Anger and the Energy of Tribes”.

It opens with a folk singer in a popular music pub near the centre of Dublin which notes of the singer who was rendering a number of powerful rebel songs that “he had a great voice, but he was miserable”. Later in the piece they note:

Focusing on tribal anger, an alignment between the interests of the media (attention) the global political elite is using this energy to motivate voters and to win elections. This is extremely dangerous. The challenge for non-violent politics is to get the message loud and clear about legitimate grievance, and then to respond with alternative politics.

The challenge for the Republic is the same as it is elsewhere: a presently unanchored radical right which has found success signalling the distress of citizens (much as it did back in the Europe of the 1920s and 1930s).  Doing the right thing matters.

Yet you can see it in the record and actions of the parties, if you can find the time to do the research. The FourNorth project in the Programme for Government will reshape Connolly station, separating Dart and Belfast rail traffic and speeding up times.

This is small, targeted and tangible change on a N/S axis that many parties pay lip service to but rarely if ever commit time and resources to making happen, not least of which is Sinn Féin whose Ireland’s Future’s big picture approach is faltering badly.

It’s the same approach which over a long time frame wrought massive change to the Republic’s social and economic outlook. It’s not big, or dramatic, or impressive. But will change many lives and largely for the better regardless of their politics.

And finally…

Back in 2011 an Irish Labour friend wondered whether that election was the very end of Fianna Fáil, a party that had haunted her party for most of the existence of the state. I joked back that it until she saw a silver stake through its heart, it was poor bet.

It’s possible that had Labour chosen to stay on the opposition benches with its 37 seats rather than join Fine Gael in government then it might have stolen the wind from Martin and made it harder for him to get back on an even keel.

Counterfactuals are hard to prove, not least because of the vagaries of the STV PR system and its own ill distributed regional strengths even back then at the height of its popularity.  Power in most democracies requires consent across the middle.

The key to Fianna Fáil’s strength across its long history, even if Martin’s 2012 prediction that the Irish system would fragment just as it has across the proportional systems of western Europe, has been its culture of adaptation and focus on progress.

What it could not win in its own right it has co-opted by building consensus with other parties and individuals and developed trust through a consistency of approach has helped it to retain its capacity to shape Ireland’s future even when out of favour.

What I take from FF’s long march through history is that meaningful change doesn’t come in single terms or single decades, but from a consistent seriousness about the business of “doing”, even if it means suffering periods of unpopularity along the way.

Like them or loathe them as with the Church Fianna Fáil is integral to the Republic’s astounding progress of the last 60 years. Trying to peel them away from that history, or suggesting somehow that there’s been no progress only misery doesn’t wash.

Clearly to the opposition parties’ great frustration Micheál Martin (the longest serving of all the current party leaders) has succeeded in doing what Professor Bale advised him back in 2012 and that’s to “embody” the sort of change people want/need.

Mick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Twitter: @MickFealty