The death of a former taoiseach becomes an opportunity for instant revisionism

I have waited a decent interval to write this and it is tempting not to bother. But there is a question that needs to be addressed. It is posed because, each time a former taoiseach dies, it becomes suddenly clear to us that we are the best governed country in the world.

It turns out that each and every one of our leaders was a giant among men, a selfless visionary, a patriot to his fingertips. We realise that we have been extraordinarily lucky to share this little island and our own little lifetimes with men who, if they were kings, would have “the Great” appended to their names.

It dawns on us that we have never been led by a mere politician – only by statesmen. I hope it will be a very long time before we experience it, but when, for example, Bertie Ahern’s time comes, he too will turn out to have been a much-maligned patriot, visionary and man of the people.

Hence the question – if we have been so spectacularly well led, why do we stumble from crisis to crisis? Surely all of this magnificent leadership ought to have led us somewhere better.

Death is one of the things we do well in Ireland. There is a decency, a kindness, a communal instinct to try to lessen a family’s grief by taking a little bit of it onto ourselves. When we’re dealing with political leaders, the smallness of the country and the intimacy of its politics means that vast numbers of people will feel a genuine personal connection to the dead man (how many people over 40 never once shook Albert Reynolds’s hand?) and thus a personal sense of loss.

Irish culture

As so often in Irish culture, however, good instincts have evil twins. The lovely intimacy of Irish life has its dark side in cronyism. The passionate sense of place has its less attractive obverse in parish pump politics. And the decency that surrounds death becomes, when that death is a public event, a sharp implication that everyone must join in compulsory acts of homage. Within that compulsion there is a typical narrative: the lost leader was supremely right and anyone who criticised him was somewhere on a spectrum from fool to snob, from pseudo-intellectual to traitor.

Death becomes an opportunity for instant revisionism. The general desire not to speak ill of a dead public figure is opportunistically parlayed into a suggestion that it was wrong to speak ill of the same figure when he was alive and in power. A soft authoritarianism creeps in under the veil of mourning.

The natural desire to emphasise the positive achievements of the dead man becomes an airbrushing of any and all negative aspects of his career. RTÉ, which does so much to set the tone in these matters, switches modes, ceasing all of a sudden to be a public broadcaster and becoming a State broadcaster, hailing the dead man as a Dear Leader of almost North Korean proportions.

What lies behind this impulse is the tribal instinct implied in the very word taoiseach. It means, of course, “chieftain”. This tribal meaning is generally buried in the mundane knockabout of political power, but it is never entirely absent. For the two arms of the Irish political machine, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, the leader is also the chief of the tribe. And since both parties have a tendency to identify their own tribe with the nation as a whole, there is an underlying feeling that the leader embodies the nation too. Unlike mere prime ministers, whose deeds and legacies are always contested, chieftains command loyalty in life and ritual apotheosis in death.

Public life

Irish public life has been moving away from this cult of the chieftain for some time (it could hardly survive Brian Cowen after all). But the death of a former taoiseach provides the opportunity for this undead impulse to come out into the light again. It comes in part with a reasonable desire to celebrate the dead leader. But it also comes with a rage against the leader’s enemies who are now seen, in the glow of the funeral pyre, for what they really are: enemies of the people.

The cry goes up: Santo subito! The French have a real Pantheon into which they place the bodies of national heroes. But they at least wait some decades for the judgment of history before they declare such memories sacred.

The instant Pantheon of Irish political memorialisation is a way of making the judgment of history redundant. It declares the result of the trial by instant acclamation. Qualifications or complications are redefined as carping – irrelevant, marginal, offensive.

Does any of this do actual harm? I think it does. It injects new blood every so often into the anti-democratic politics of chieftainship. And the irony is that this attempt to elevate real, messy, ambiguous figures to saintly greatness actually increases cynicism about public life. Most people know only too well that they’re not living in a society or under a system forged by moral, intellectual and political heroes. Orgies of praise just make it harder to equate everyday realities to official stories.