Feckers (9 page)

The then government Press Secretary, Seán ‘Diggy’ Duignan, later recalled in his book
One Spin on the Merry-Go-Round
that this episode genuinely damaged Reynolds. It probably did, but only because a couple of people in the media just wouldn’t let it go. It was an issue of taste, we were told, of how the Taoiseach was expected to comport himself, of the coarsening of public life, the dragging down of high office and the end of life as we knew it.

If you tell people often enough that something is important, they start to believe you. But really this was the seizing by opportunistic actors of a chance to put flesh on an existing prejudice. Albert had never been popular outside his own party supporters, and was deeply loathed by many media people.

Reynolds, unlike Bertie Ahern, had a proven record as a businessman, having made his fortune in the dancehall boom of the 1960s, later moving on to the dog food business. He had started out as a lowly clerical officer with CIE, the state transport company and, when working as a clerk in Dromod railway station in the late 1960s, was noted for the way he would get all his work done in the morning and spend the rest of the day looking after his growing dancehall business. With his brother Jim, he built and operated more than a dozen dancehalls, using the profits from one hall to build another, borrowing judiciously and expanding exponentially, always dealing in cash. One time, when Albert was involved in a car smash on the way home from a dance, the road was littered with the night’s takings, which he had casually stowed in the boot. This back-story in the dancehall business was the source of much ignorant commentary by journalists who, by sheer force of repetition, created the impression that the showband boom had been some kind of reactionary ideological movement rather than an opportunity for people to make money by enabling other people to have fun. But, having laid their groundwork of prejudice by associating the Taoiseach with the ‘Country ’n’ Western Alliance’, the new ‘evidence’ was easy to work into the thesis that Reynolds was an uncouth redneck unsuited to high office.

Although the story of Albert’s ultimate demise is complex, there is no doubt that the ‘crap’ episode contributed to the drip-drip of prejudice which, in the end, rendered him a pushover for the Salomés who came looking for his head.

When Albert was elected Fianna Fáil leader and Taoiseach, he set himself to cleaning up the party after CJH, or at least seemed keen about being seen to do this. The appointment of his cabinet amounted to an outright purge of Haughey loyalists, which resulted in deep resentments being carried into the long grass. When you are at the mercy of the delicate arithmetic of a coalition arrangement, it is not a good idea to open cracks in your own parliamentary party.

Albert was eventually undone as the result of a trumped-up crisis about an alleged attempt to suppress an extradition warrant for the paedophile priest, Father Brendan Smyth. From the instant when the political crisis began to unravel in mid-November 1994, the media seemed resolved to prosecute the issue to the death. The allegation was made that, owing to outside interference, a warrant from Northern Ireland for the extradition of Smyth had been inordinately delayed at the Attorney General’s office. The Democratic Left TD Pat Rabbitte stood up in Dáil Éireann and announced that he was aware of a document that would rock the State to its foundations. There was a letter in existence, he insisted, from a senior cleric, requesting the Attorney General not to proceed with the Smyth warrant. The Labour Party, Fianna Fáil’s junior partner in coalition, demanded a head – Reynolds’s or his AG’s – or they would pull out of government. The controversy was further muddied by allegations that Reynolds had misled the Dáil in relation to another case involving a paedophile priest, which became infamous as ‘the Duggan case’.

A Dáil committee, set up in the wake of the affair in an attempt to establish whether there had been any wrongdoing associated with the delayed warrant, found no evidence of outside interference with the AG’s office. There had been no involvement by the Catholic Church. The matter of Reynolds’s alleged misleading of the Dáil emerged as being the consequence of nothing more sinister than chaos. No letter had been sent by any cleric to any politician. The foundations of the State remained unrocked. It was all crap, pure crap. But by then it was too late: Reynolds had resigned and, in the shemozzle that followed, a change of government had occurred, with the Labour Party shifting beds to join a rainbow coalition with Fine Gael and Democratic Left.

In due course it became clear that the Reynolds government had been brought down by a series of misunderstandings arising from an opportunistic campaign by a nest of unelected advisers, and that this campaign was driven by a media vendetta in pursuit less of facts than of the scalps of various people associated with Fianna Fáil.

Reynolds was a smart businessman and an exceptional politician. He played a key role in establishing the groundwork for the settlement of the Northern conflict and presided over a key period in the stabilization of the Irish economy following the disastrous 1980s. But he provoked in a new breed of commentator and politician an almost visceral dislike, based on snobbery and ignorance of the reality of the Irish personality and the complex nature of the journey we had made from poverty to prosperity.

Had he not thrown in the towel, he might well have led the country for another decade, applying his usual horse sense to national affairs. It is inconceivable that a man of such commonsensical outlook on reality would have presided, as his successor Bertie Ahern did, over the descent into madness that supplanted Irish economic policy in the early years of the third millennium.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy of the past two decades has been the fact that, beset by pseudo-bohemian snobbery and small-town prejudice, Albert Reynolds threw in the towel and walked away.

The long and the short of it, as Albert himself might put it, is that he was forced out on the basis of allegations that subsequently failed to stack up. Had he stood his ground and allowed the Labour Party to walk, he might have saved his leadership and his government – and ultimately, perhaps, saved his country from the ruin that would begin to engulf it about a decade later.

16
Shane MacGowan

P
erhaps nobody, in all the history of traffic between the two islands controversially known as ‘the British Isles’, has done as much to make the native Irish feel inadequate as a shambling songster called Shane MacGowan. With his band, The Pogues, MacGowan, a young London-Irishman claiming connections to County Tipperary, did something with Irish music that was unforgivable.

In fairness, MacGowan did his best to camouflage himself in a way that would undersell his arrival, and avoid provoking the congenital ire and resentment of the native. His gap-toothed grin and incoherent speech patterns seemed designed to counterbalance his capacity to hear Irish music as it had never been heard before and to render it anew for a generation of Irish people who immediately began to kick themselves in the realization that they should have been able to do this for themselves. Were it not for his unprepossessing appearance and self-effacing mode of nonmusical communication, MacGowan might well have provoked homicidal fits of jealousy among the indigenous population.

For when an intelligent and unprejudiced Irishman heard The Pogues, he was immediately struck by a sense of inadequacy that made him want to cry. (Strangely, women did not seem to feel the same thing, perhaps because they felt less of a responsibility to define, by Joyce’s stern injunction, the uncreated conscience of their race.)

The music of The Pogues was in one sense pure formula: traditional Irish ballads put through the punk mangler, a straightforward forced collision of incongruous elements. Perhaps an uninitiated ear might hear the music and not be moved by anything other than a deep existential laughter, an urge to dance, or just to jump up and down. But this was a luxury unavailable to the Irish, for we knew what this was. It was our culture as it might have been if it hadn’t been interrupted. It was something from the parallel zone of Irish possibility, something that seemed blissfully to be unaware of how history had actually happened and was proceeding on the basis of this glorious ignorance.

MacGowan, from a slight distance, had been able to hear and identify something in the music from which we had grown up trying to escape – a tradition that we, the insiders, could approach only with great caution, because it attracted and repelled us in almost equal measure. The preciousness and exaggerated reverence with which the native music of Ireland had come to be regarded by those seeking to effect a reconsecration of indigenous virtue had provoked in the young an uneasy scepticism that, by its very nature, made them feel both guilty and free. Surrounded by the mythic balladry of their fathers, the post-Emergency Irish had rushed headlong into the arms of David Bowie and Johnny Rotten, pausing only to barf discreetly on account of a rumbling distaste for what had been emerging as an ‘authentic’ musical version of the native soul. The mawkish, sickly-sweet balladry of the be-sweatered jolly Paddies and the puritanical purism of the custodians of the indigenous ‘tradition’ were the inevitable consequence of the execution of Pearse, the unavoidable pay-off from the insularism of Rev. R.S. Devane.

In a healthy society, any undue solemnity towards the artefacts and baggage of the past is, as appropriate, lightly or roundly mocked by the young. This challenge is what keeps a culture honest. But in a society in which the question of culture foreshadows matters of life and death, the necessary contempt of the young is suppressed out of a fear of causing undue offence. In Ireland, unable to square the circle, we of the liberated young of late twentieth-century Ireland found new outlets of self-exploration, shaking off the sentimental yoke of a culture that reduced everything to victimhood. But still we could not entirely walk away.

Our attitudes and policies towards the ballad revolution of the 1960s had been characterized by both an involuntary affection and a distaste born of the grim passion it invoked among our elders. It touched on something at once laughable and sacred. Our rebellion against its earnestness was countered by an involuntary awe at its indisputable if tattered dignity. This stuff, we knew, had been road-tested under conditions of great privation and desperation, and it still travelled with a lifted heart and a grin of something not too far off exultation.

But this also troubled us. The pain in the music could not help coming to the surface, sometimes in the form of a sentimentality that seemed to ooze like an inadequate self-understanding struggling to find the right key. It disturbed us, and yet we could not bring ourselves to mock it. There was something here that reminded us of something, even if we could not bear to listen long enough to work out what it might be. This music, perhaps more than anything else in the culture we had inherited, provoked in us a capacity for self-recognition that the culture we now inhabited, though ostensibly of our own creation, or at least of our co-option, did not enable us to approach. We possessed neither enough love nor enough hatred to do with the music what The Pogues did. But, the moment we heard it, we knew what it was. The last thing any of us had imagined was that the leaden, desperate ejaculations of our drunken uncles might be turned into gold.

For here was a music that simultaneously expressed both our attachment to a slightly false version of ourselves and an ironic repugnance of it. As though insisting on some undefined ethic of rigour and clarity, it reached into the heart of the music, wrenched the sentimentalist heart out of it and cast it away. It was at once a celebration and a refusal, a kick and a kiss. It was a soundtrack for the neurosis born of the post-independence failure of Irish culture to find a way of jump-starting itself – but also, for the same reasons, a living, leaping, soaring blurt of the spirit that had become suppressed. It was a deconstruction of something recognizable as having been put together in slightly the wrong way – the clue that much more than this was fundamentally wrong. The Pogues offered a rejection, but only of the superficial presentation, the sugar coating. The deeper qualities were subjected to a firm and passionate embrace, pulled together and kicked onstage. The music conveyed an unmistakable sense of nostalgia, but also a rage that seemed to announce itself as deriving from the overall tragedy of Irish history. There was mockery, too, but of a gentle kind that seemed to comprehend the extent of the pathos to be dealt with. It had both pride and the awareness of a received loathing. It celebrated and mocked at the same time. It did not choose between allegiance and disdain, but crammed them both into the same mix.

Shane MacGowan, by virtue of both his intimacy with and ‘outsiderness’ in Ireland, had access to the culture of his ancestors but was not hidebound by the characteristics which caused the natives to become struck down by cultural paralysis. Removed by a generation and a stretch of water, The Pogues had been enabled to achieve a degree of detachment which gave them a vantage point on Irish culture that the insiders could not achieve. This slight distance from the clammy embrace of the culture allowed them to understand something that baffled the indigenous population. On hearing the results, we were jerked into a new sense of ourselves, but also visited by new feelings of inadequacy. How had we missed this? What else were we missing? And who was this bastard MacGowan to be showing us up in this way?