The former Fine Gael leader, Alan Dukes, has challenged the view that Ireland's economic transformation began with Fianna Fáil's accession to power in 1987, suggesting the process in fact began in the early 1980s.
In a speech to the South Dublin Chamber in Tallaght yesterday, Mr Dukes suggested the "Tallaght Strategy", which he adopted as Fine Gael leader in 1987, played a crucial role in economic change. Under this strategy, opposed by some in his party at the time, Fine Gael agreed to support the then minority Fianna Fáil government so long as it implemented economic policies in line with those he had advocated in government from 1982 to 1987. Mr Dukes outlined this strategy in a 1987 speech in Tallaght, at the same venue where he made his speech yesterday.
He said today's conventional wisdom was informed by historical revisionists who painted the 1980s "as a period of unrelieved gloom and hardship . . . What revisionists forget is that the 1980s were also a decade of economic transformation."
Inflation came down from 20.4 per cent in 1981 to 3.1 per cent in 1987, he said. The external trade balance went from minus 16.5 per cent of GNP in 1981 to overall balance in 1984. The "risk differential" between Irish interest rates and those in other European currencies narrowed. The Exchequer Borrowing Requirement went from a high of 15.7 per cent of GNP in 1981 to 3.2 per cent in 1987.
He acknowledged it had been Charles Haughey who, as taoiseach in 1979, had first set out the need for the adjustment policies of the 1980s. "Unfortunately, the analysis was ignored by the government for the next 18 months, with the result that the underlying problems continued to accumulate."
Indeed, Mr Haughey then spent from 1981 to 1987 not just studiously ignoring this need for policy adjustment, "but speaking as if he had never had anything to do with it".
After 1987, when Mr Dukes found himself as Fine Gael leader in opposition, "the economic adjustment on which I had worked very hard was producing results, although it still had a long way to go. The new Fianna Fáil government in 1987 was sticking broadly to the essentials of the adjustment programme it had inherited."
The opposition could either have reversed engines and claimed that no further adjustment was needed, or found a way to see the adjustment programme through.
In making his "Tallaght Strategy" speech, he had opted for the latter, he said. The media reaction was immediately positive. "Reaction in Fine Gael was diverse, confused and nervous, but sufficiently positive and loyal . . . Reaction in the government was one of puzzlement and some suspicion."
He said the most important conclusion to be drawn now was that it had worked.
"It is sometimes said that a prophet in his own land is never listened to. Most artists get little recognition until they are dead. While I am neither a prophet nor an artist, I think I have some understanding of their plight."