FitzGerald's political strife and family life

AUTOBIOGRAPHY: PATRICK HONOHANreviews Just GarretBy Garret FitzGerald Liberties Press, 474pp. €17.99

WHAT A PRIVILEGE it was to know Garret FitzGerald, statesman and political leader, activist of social change, and public intellectual par excellence, who commanded a position of pre-eminence in Irish public life for more than half a century.

So many people have the feeling of having known him well, even if they never met him, because of the vivid way he communicated the intensity of his opinions and the seemingly artless personal openness that was one of his trademarks. These characteristics fairly jump off the pages of his second autobiography, first published last year and now appearing in a second, revised edition with new material, including previously unpublished photographs, the eulogy spoken by Enda McDonagh at his funeral in May, and a personal piece by his daughter, Mary.

Here the reader has more time to keep up with him than was available to his listeners, given the speed at which he spoke. And there are not as many statistics in this book as normally peppered his conversation and his weekly column in this newspaper.

Actually, despite his formidable standing as a specialist in the economic statistics of Ireland, the volume's subtitle, Tales from the Political Frontline, displays what was an even more central source of his enthusiasm. It is a fascinating education to follow the often novel and sometimes intricate paths of his political reasoning as presented in the book, through episodes as different as the declaration of the Republic (he was dismayed and dropped out of active politics for more than a decade) to the initial, furtive 1981 contacts between the British government and the IRA (his reason for concealing his knowledge of these contacts from Thatcher's government is a classic).

Given the parallels with the present, I was keen to reread the passages dealing with the fiscal crisis that dominated economic policy in the 1980s. Strikingly, economic issues take up only a small fraction of the third of the book that is devoted to his two periods as taoiseach. This certainly underestimates the relative weight of effort devoted to the economic challenges of those years.

The ballooning budget deficit he faced in 1981, and the consequential soaring debt and threats to national solvency, coloured economic policy throughout those years. With unemployment soaring (and inflation close to 20 per cent), all possible remedies, whether spending cuts or tax increases, seemed to have drawbacks. As a committed social democrat, FitzGerald was particularly reluctant to unpick socially progressive government spending. Indeed the protracted and often inconclusive character of government meetings on budgetary matters surely reflected not so much the oft-alleged deficiency of chairmanship skills as FitzGerald’s struggle to find some way to square the circle of achieving budgetary balance without destroying the fabric of social protection that had been built up over the previous decades.

Generally speaking, any slack was taken up by tax measures (including the notorious 1982 proposal to charge VAT on children’s shoes – the underpinning of his reputation for unworldliness). And, after that first budget, the scale of retrenchment was somewhat moderated. It is interesting to recall that, in order to confirm that the government could “get away with” a deficit of 12 per cent of GNP in 1983, FitzGerald called Henry Kissinger, whose Wall Street contacts gave the green light and advised that Ireland did not at that stage need the assistance of the IMF.

It was not just the fiscal crisis. When FitzGerald was finally handing over his Merrion Street office to his long-term rival Charlie Haughey, the latter remarked how unlucky FitzGerald had been to have to cope with not one but half a dozen major Irish business collapses during his term of office, despite being almost wholly unrelated to the budget and wider national economic conditions.

There was, for example, the bankruptcy of Irish Shipping (which had got out of its depth in international ship chartering); the failure of PMPA (whose rapid growth in car insurance was down to underpricing); the collapse of ICI, the insurance subsidiary of AIB (which had speculated in the global insurance market for commercial risks) and so forth. It’s a pity that these (and other) cautionary tales of Irish business failures did not sufficiently sensitise policymakers and regulators of later decades.

No wonder FitzGerald regarded those years as taoiseach as the more difficult and less satisfying part of his working life. Yet, even if the fiscal crisis seemed far from resolution when his term of office ended, and he muses about whether tougher and earlier action would have been better, he surely undersells his government’s achievement in arresting the decline, defining a politically viable path of policy correction and making a good start along it. After all, it took just a short, strong additional push by his government’s successors (helped by improving external demand and competitiveness conditions) to get things securely back on track, as they undoubtedly were little more than a year later.

It is as a political and personal memoir that Just Garretexcels. Anecdotes and family reminiscences abound, with an unsurprisingly disproportionate number of them concerning travel and transport planning. Though I didn't see the one he used to tell about an ancestor who, reluctant to go without fresh milk on a trip to the Continent, shipped a cow to Marseilles. It's not something FitzGerald himself would have hesitated to do, had the need arisen.

Patrick Honohan is governor of the Central Bank of Ireland