ALL FÁIL DOWN

Observe how the Fianna Fáil ministers went marching to their doom. Never did generals so blindly cross the Rubicon. Never did politicians turn victory into such disastrous defeat.

The investigations into the misconduct of Albert Reynolds and his ministers may eventually discover whether they were fools, knaves or just confused and sleepless chess-players too tired to calculate even two moves ahead on the board. Even so, deeper questions of motive will still remain. Why did they do it and why were they so misguided and incompetent in their manoeuvering?

After the Labour ministers quit the Cabinet, Albert Reynolds and his closest advisors were improvising but they hadn’t even agreed on a common tune. Yet Fianna Fáil is meant to be the party of the cutest of them all, reputedly far superior to the competition in the getting, spending and holding of power. So, one casualty of the Fianna Fáil catastrophes: the party’s reputation for backroom competence and cunning.

They might never have been considered immaculate moral paragons but they were always deemed Ireland’s best political technicians. Till now, it could never be said of Fianna Fáil or Albert Reynolds that they couldn’t organise ham sandwiches and minerals in a ballroom.

Yet they blew it and the disgruntled Ray Burke was right to be furious. It wasn’t as if Reynolds and his ministers were under severe political strain, beset by a multitude of crises like John Major. The peace process was working to Fianna Fáil’s advantage with the three opposition parties outmanoeuvred and isolated. There would be good news in the budget and no reason for government-threatening financial disputes between Fianna Fáil and Labour. Albert Reynolds had only to be patient, wait for a final lap of honour as European Union President in ’96 and then hope to be rewarded by a grateful Irish people in the election that was sure to immediately follow.

It wasn’t as if Labour were desperate for an election. Their ministers were effective and enjoying government without the economic stresses of Labour’s last Coalition with Fine Gael. There were differences over divorce but they weren’t insurmountable and even the abortion issue need not have brought down the Government.

And yet Reynolds miscalculated. He over-estimated Labour’s weakness, thinking that the junior party’s fáilures in the Cork by-elections gave Fianna Fáil a winning hand. He forgot, too, that Dick Spring, if pressed, could always elope with Fine Gael. Labour and the trade union barons did find Fianna Fáil more compatible for policy reasons but Reynolds and his advisors apparently believed that the smaller party’s ministers would swallow anything in their hunger for office.

Many things – but never humiliation. Reynolds’ nomination of Harry Whelehan challenged Labour to a trial of strength in which Dick Spring and his deputies couldn’t back down.

Of course a showdown may have been almost inevitable after the Beef Tribunal report. Flying around the world, Reynolds and Spring were communicating from different sides of the international dateline and the Labour leader was already acting like a semi-detached member of the government when he first opposed the Whelehan appointment.

Mutual suspicions were mounting. The media were putting Labour under increasing pressure. From Reynolds’ point of view, it may have seemed like the time had come to assert his authority as Taoiseach and compel Spring to either put up or shut up.

But Albert Reynolds the gambler had let his lucky streak affect his judgement. Having won on the North, avoided disaster in the Beef Tribunal and saved his job as Taoiseach through the European billions, he refused to reinvest his winnings and went back to the tables for another wager, like a gambler who believed his luck was preordained.

As for Spring, he couldn’t challenge Reynolds till the peace process was established. Those pundits who urged Spring to unsaddle Reynolds earlier in the year misunderstood the play. Reynolds would have been handed the perfect election issue and blackguarded the Labour leader as the man who destroyed Ireland’s best hope of peace in 25 years. Spring could only choose to fight once, and never on ground advantageous to Fianna Fáil. By comparison, Reynolds and Co. were terrible tacticians; they never thought to survey the battleground on which they would fight. For a start, Reynolds forgot the first rules of successful generalship – know thine enemy. Obviously the Tanaiste had studied the Taoiseach far better than Reynolds had his opponent. As a result, Albert Reynolds was more than defeated; he was politically humiliated.

It can also surely be said that child abuse was hardly an ideal backdrop to Albert's death or glory tactics. Fianna Fáil needed an issue that divided Labour and weakened and isolated Dick Spring from his other ministers and the rest of his party. At the outset, when Spring first obstructed Harry Whelehan’s nomination, this was definitely so, as Labour ministers and backbenchers funked a showdown.

But Reynolds just didn’t understand that the Fr. Smyth case had changed the equation. Labour prides itself as the party of enlightened social workers and Spring, his ministers, backbenchers and party activists could now unite on the side of the angels. Labour had already lost credibility apologising for Reynolds in the passports affair. But this wouldn’t have compared to the damage to the party’s reputation if Spring had waved Whelehan through before the Smyth case was resolved.

This was Fianna Fáil’s first crass mistake; pressured they really do seem to have initially proceeded from the politically incorrect belief that the issues ensnared in the Whelehan/Smyth connection were comparatively trivial. If it didn’t involve money, it didn’t matter.

Maire Geoghegan-Quinn has been chastised for her later conduct but where was she during the origins of the crisis? She might consider it a slur when, in They Are Of Ireland, Declan Lynch claimed there were three genders – women, men and Fianna Fáil women – but she really should have blown the whistle when the lads were bulling for a fight. Surely this mother and Minister of Justice should have warned them to reconsider. Were Fianna Fáil really to be seen associating with someone, or a system, that the public feared was sheltering a child abuser from justice?

What had happened to Fianna Fáil’s usually hypersensitive political antennae? Why did Reynold's not realise that he’d gifted Labour the perfect symbolic and politically correct issue that placed them with the heavenly angels and consigned Fianna Fáil to the company of devils?

So while the issue united Labour, it divided Fianna Fáil. Reynolds not Spring became isolated from his party. Continuing to show his obstinacy, Reynolds made two statements over that first fateful weekend that fáiled to acknowledge child abuse as a central issue in the affair. Only in his third statement on Sunday evening did he start to repair the damage. What role, if any, had his public relations advisors played?

Over that weekend, the public were being forced to choose between cock-up and conspiracy theories and for the lack of any other evidence, they were veering to the second model. Albert Reynolds had become the victim of his own publicity. Since he postured as the omnicompetent all-wise manipulator of the peace process, the public couldn’t conceive of Albert Reynolds as fool or victim in the Whelehan affair. Mistaken or not, a general belief took hold: Reynolds must have been following his own private agenda.

Another Reynolds weakness gradually emerged; he lacked the reservoir of support within Fianna Fáil that sustained Dick Spring in Labour. If Fianna Fáil respected Albert Reynolds for his achievements, the party had insufficient affection to preserve him. The party could never entirely forget that he’d led them into a disastrous ’92 election campaign after his earlier bust-up with Des O’Malley.

Besides, Albert Reynolds had his own flawed Fianna Fáil pedigree. It wasn’t just that his family lacked any Civil War credentials – Dick Spring actually had a far superior Republican background since his father had vainly pleaded with Dev to stop the ’40s execution of the Kerry IRA prisoner, Charlie Kerins – but Reynolds hadn’t even begun his political career in Fianna Fáil.

He actually served his apprenticeship working for a Longford independent deputy, Joe Sheridan and the Whelehan affair confirmed the suspicions in certain traditionalist Fianna Fáil quarters that Reynolds had used the party as a vehicle for his own and others’ ambitions. Without that reservoir of goodwill, he was speedily and brutally dumped. The party faithful did not rise up outside Fianna Fáil’s Mount Street headquarters to defend him against the Demon Dick.

His actions since his overthrow confirm he still doesn’t understand Fianna Fáil codes. He shows all the bitterness of a bewildered man still in political denial. Unlike Charles Haughey, he has not gone gently into that good night to later earn the renewed affection of his party.

His meddling in the later negotiations between Spring and Bertie Ahern; his still unexplained sacking of Ireland’s consul in Pakistan; his apparent request to Eoghan Fitzsimons to shred a later official report; and his entry into political showbiz on the U.S. speaking tour circuit will hardly endear him to the wider Fianna Fáil party. And all this from a man who didn’t seem to care or even appreciate that he was associating Fianna Fáil with child abuse.

Even in the basic political crafts, Reynolds and his circle were bereft of the horse-sense once thought to be second-nature to Fianna Fáil. Some of the Fianna Fáil ministers weren’t impressed by Whelehan’s inadequate report on the Fr. Smyth case, yet they still rammed his nomination through and there is no evidence that they paused to review the situation after the Labour ministers walked out. And even if it’s true that Mary Robinson’s schedule meant that they couldn’t delay before sending Whelehan off to the President to have his papers stamped, they would have been far wiser to have slept on it.

Instead of a prudent stock-taking hesitation, they made a fetish of their decisiveness. And yet the Labour position allowed for compromise. Whelehan could have any judgeship in the High Court except its presidency. And if it’s true that Labour would have let Whelehan become Judge-Advocate of the European Court, his and Reynolds’ stubbornness makes even less sense. Besides, at the last, Spring had even suggested Whelehan could get his prize if only he waited till explanations about the Fr. Smyth case were made to the Dail.

Perhaps Fianna Fáil calculated that if explanations were made, Whelehan’s position might be compromised and his promotion barred. But they signally fáiled to follow that logic through; Whelehan’s nomination seemed far more controversial and sleazy in the lack of any explanation from him.

It’s still baffling why no Fianna Fáil minister called a halt to this charge to political self-destruction. One can only picture Reynolds as the Minister for Short Cuts with a closed mind immune to contrary advice and always prepared to discipline or demote those who opposed him. Perhaps Bertie Ahern foresaw the dangers but he had long been exiled from Reynolds’ inner circle.

Here again there were crucial differences between Fianna Fáil and Labour. Fianna Fáil accepted and deferred to the professional expertise of Whelehan and his senior advisors like Matt Russell. As barristers, Spring and his key advisor, John Rogers, the former A-G in Garret Fitzgerald’s Coalition, were far less disposed to accept the infallibility of Whelehan and Russell.

Furthermore, Fianna Fáil ministers should have been sufficiently sharp to ask if Whelehan’s self-interest was likely to colour his report and paint his own conduct in the best terms. After all, their fate was linked to his; it was even more essential for Fianna Fáil than Labour to ask the hardest questions of Harry Whelehan. But Harry Whelehan was their man and that was that. Sending Whelehan to the Park was essentially a declaration of war. Once his bags were packed, the crisis was out of control.

They obviously didn’t realise they’d handed Labour the murder weapon. Whelehan’s report to the Cabinet was always likely to be leaked to the media. Indeed since Reynolds had initially attempted and fáiled to prevent Spring showing it to his Labour colleagues, he should have been alert to the political dangers of its release. For once the Sunday Tribune published its lethal details, the game was up for Reynolds and Whelehan.

It was stiffly insensitive, officious and entirely dependent on legal jargon to obscure its inadequacies. Politically inept, it put Fianna Fáil, Ireland’s most populist party, on the side of the mandarins against the people. By its very tone, it led the public to believe that Whelehan and by extension Reynolds and Fianna Fáil, were hiding something. Albert Reynolds had bounced Labour but he didn’t realise he’d also bounced himself.

Meanwhile, his cabinet must be portrayed as a collection of ministers without either the wit or the courage to preserve Reynolds and his government from his own folly. It was all so frighteningly short-term. And so in the next few days, Fianna Fáil would emulate Jackson Pollock and invent a new art-form – action government, defacing their reputations with political squiggles!

Then Eoghan Fitzsimons discovered the Duggan case. On behalf of the government, Maire Geoghegan-Quinn was right to request the new Attorney-General to inspect the files to learn the worst but foolish not to have done so before Harry Whelehan had been nominated. Geoghegan-Quinn’s action highlights another theme in the crisis : Fianna Fáil often got it right, but always too late. They were always responding, never controlling events.

Both Albert Reynolds and Matthew Russell have disputed Eoghan Fitzsimons’ account of the Duggan case in their evidence to the Dail committee. Through the past few weeks of testimony, the significance of the Duggan case has waxed and waned like the moon according to the self-interested construction of the various witnesses. For some, it has been an insignificant sliver; for others, a baleful full moon, that caused a political tidal wave.

This may be irrelevant since the politicans’ questions have rarely been penetrating. With the exception of the PD representatives and Tony Gregory, all have an interest to protect since Fine Gael and DL aren’t disposed to embarass Labour. Many pertinent issues have hardly been investigated at all.

Even so, the legal differences over the Duggan case may be irrelevant. What mattered over those fateful November three days of Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday wasn’t which lawyer was right about the Duggan case but how Reynolds and his ministers acted on the new advice and information given them by Fitzsimons.

For after Fitzsimons’ discovery of Duggan, Fianna Fáil acted as if they feared they were trapped. If they defended the Whelehan nomination, the Duggan case could emerge to discredit them but if they withdrew their confidence in the new President of the High Court, they would be exposed as a crew of bunglers.

Harry Whelehan was in trouble, not necessarily because he was “a conservative” but because he wasn’t in charge of his office. In his testimony to the Dáil committee, Whelehan claimed he was attracted to the post because it involved new administrative responsibilities but it’s obvious from his and from Russell’s evidence that the latter was running the shop.

Still it’s obvious that at some point late on Monday afternoon, Reynolds and some of his floating cabal of advisors could see the horrors ahead. They could only be saved by Whelehan volunteering his resignation but he was now beyond their power. For what other reason did they send Fitzsimons to discuss the Duggan case with Whelehan and then suggest he “consider his position” – which is, as John Bruton rightly stated, an euphemism for resignation?

Furthermore, since Fitzsimons had mentioned his differences with Russell in his original presentation, it would have been entirely proper for Reynolds to consult with Russell. But instead, he was apparently moving to sideline Russell. So from sometime late on Monday, Reynolds was taking Fitzsimons’ line. In effect, he had withdrawn confidence from his nominee, Harry Whelehan.

Whelehan rejected Fitzsimons’ request to “consider his position”. As a judge, he was now neutered of political affiliations. He decided that the protection of the majesty of his judicial position took precedence over any past loyalties to the Fianna Fáil ministers who had promoted him.

His response was in character. Throughout the controversy, Whelehan was always finding legal doctrines by which his own self-interest happened to coincide with that of the public. He never appreciated that his brand of legal theology just didn’t inspire public confidence.

Effectively the game was now long lost but only Eoghan Fitzsimons had the foresight to realize that. He had been placed in an impossible position. Fitzsimons knew that Reynolds’ Tuesday speech to the Dail, defending Harry Whelehan, was contradicted by his own Monday night mission to the judge’s house. According to his committee evidence, Maire Geoghegan-Quinn was telling him, “we’re not using the Duggan case” on Tuesday – yet on Monday evening, it had been seen as the weapon to lever out Harry Whelehan.

One can easily see why he came clean with Dick Spring on the Wednesday morning. Fitzsimons was troubled that any reformed government would be based on false pretences and he, as Attorney-General at the centre of events, would have been totally compromised. Similarly Dick Spring’s fingerprints would now also be on the file. The 10:22 deal was now scuppered. Spring and Labour realized they still weren’t being told the full truth.

But what had been going on in the Attorney-General’s office? The procrastination over the Fr. Smyth case hasn’t been fully examined by the Dail committee.

Let us accept the testimony of Harry Whelehan that he is not, nor ever was a member of Opus Dei or the Knights of Columbanus. This merely indicates that no such conspiracy is necessary. The conditioning of a certain sort of Catholic education followed by further finishing in the rarefied realms of the Bar obviously can leave men deferential to the Church and oblivious to wider realities.

Neither Cardinal Daly nor any other cleric ever had to intervene. The Smyth case was delicate and so conveniently long-fingered even though as Official B James Hamilton suggested, the fact that Fr. Smyth had confessed to some of his offences, greatly simplified any knotty legal issues. So Russell sat on the case, neither delegating it to less burdened juniors nor consulting with Whelehan.

Yet if Russell’s arguments have any legal validity, they also contradict commonsense. Russell claims Smyth differed from Duggan because the Smyth file included cases that went back 10, 20 and 30 years. Logically, it should have been obvious that Fr. Smyth was probably a serial offender but Russell made no effort to ensure the priest wouldn’t reoffend.

In their evidence to the Dáil Committee, Whelehan and Reynolds were both at pains to adopt the Catholic defence. It was suggested that Labour’s support of the liberal, saecular agenda drove its opposition to Whelehan. In truth the issue was competence not Catholicism. By letting Russell rule the roost, Whelehan was compromised as an administrator. Labour’s position was never that Catholics need not apply. Their support of the eventual appointment of Declan Costello surely proves that.

But the Reynolds defence also involves a counter-attack on Dick Spring’s own credibility. What did he know and when?

This pivots on the second key meeting on the Wednesday. After Spring talked with Eoghan Fitzsimons, the Labour leader, together with three other party ministers, Ruairi Quinn, Brendan Howlin and Mervyn Taylor sat down with Reynolds, Geoghegan-Quinn and Charlie McCreevy. At that desperate, last-ditch meeting, the FF trio told the Labour quartet of their efforts to force Whelehan to resign.

Here there is a raging conflict of evidence. Labour claim the Fianna Fáil representatives talked in general terms but Fianna Fáil state they emphatically linked Whelehan’s resignation to the Duggan case.

But if so, how detailed were they? Did the Fianna Fáil ministers tell Spring of Fitzsimons’ Monday visit to Harry Whelehan? If not, it’s a good reason why Spring could reject these accounts as “black propaganda”.

This matter of timing, the difference between Monday and Tuesday, is crucial to Spring’s decision to re-enter negotiations with an Albert-less Fianna Fáil and then abandon the talks after Geraldine Kennedy’s Irish Times story.

For if the Fianna Fáil trio were unclear about the timing of their pressure on Whelehan, Spring is partially in the clear. Actions to compel Whelehan to resign on the Tuesday didn’t further compromise Fianna Fáil or the ministers with whom Labour might later re-enter government.

But if the Fianna Fáil ministers explicitly linked the Duggan case and the Whelehan resignation with Monday, Spring and his three colleagues are compromised. They already privately knew what Geraldine Kennedy revealed. Not just Albert Reynolds’ but the whole Fianna Fáil position was untenable and Labour should never have restarted talks with the party. From then on, Labour would have been limited to two choices – the Rainbow Coalition or the bust of an early election.

So far, the evidence favours Labour. Spring wasn’t alone and it’s hard to see how his other three senior and experienced colleagues would have allowed the process to drag on.

Besides, this retrospective account from the Reynolds camp isn’t only self-serving, it also goes against the grain of Fianna Fáil’s own interest at the meeting. After all, the meeting was Reynolds’ last throw, his final ploy to seduce Labour back into government. Exposing the Monday night follies of the meeting with Whelehan would have further endangered his own position.

Nonetheless, a question is begged of Labour and Dick Spring. They must have suspected that Fianna Fáil had shipped further damage and that Bertie Ahern wasn’t fully in the clear. Why did they re-enter talks with Fianna Fáil after Albert Reynolds was toppled?

Spring may have believed he had no other choice. Rainbow Coalition with Fine Gael was still unpopular and Labour was also trapped by the political timetable. At any other time, a general election might have been the healthiest resolution to the crisis but nobody wanted one over the Christmas season. Certainly Labour didn’t wish to be seen as the party responsible for calling one.

So Spring re-entered talks and the negotiators consumed indigestible amounts of policy bumph as they tip-toed around the Ahern landmine. Perhaps they hoped time might heal all wounds and people wouldn’t raise the inconvenient issue of whether Bertie Ahern had participated in Albert Reynolds’ Monday night manoeuvres . If all else was agreed, it could be left to the last moment.

But it wasn’t just Geraldine Kennedy and the other three parties who wouldn’t let Labour forget. Albert Reynolds was hurting too and ready to metaphorically sprinkle broken glass under the tires of any new ministerial limousines. In the past few days, it’s even been ‘leaked’ that Reynolds supporters now suspect the whole affair was a Labour plot to replace him with the more amenable Ahern.

So the Fianna Fáil/Labour partnership government fell and the Dáil committee sits in examination of the whole affair. But when Albert Reynolds attended, nobody confronted him on the one key question of the whole catastrophe. Why, oh why did he risk all his political stock on Harry Whelehan? Till that one question is convincingly answered, we will never be rid of conspiracy theories.