FROM THE ARCHIVES - May 10th 1989:PROF MARTIN O'Donoghue was Fianna Fáil's economic adviser and minister for economic planning and development in the late 1970s. He was one of the former politicians Deaglán de Breádún interviewed for a series of articles in 1989, from which this is an extract.
ON THE night Martin O’Donoghue was elected to the Dáil in 1977, as part of the Fianna Fáil tidal wave that swept aside the Cosgrave Coalition, a friend put his arm around him to say: “And of course, Martin, always remember, they cheer on Sunday and they nail ’em up on Friday.”
As he himself puts it today, sitting in his office at Trinity College Dublin: “It always helps, that sort of perspective.” He is courteous, urbane and lucid.
Although he has been out of the limelight for the last few years (the file gets thin around 1987) future historians will probably see him as an important social engineer in the Ireland of the ’60s and ’70s, whether as a backroom boy or an up-front Minister. They may also decide that he wasn’t “cute” enough to survive and thrive in the jungle of party politics.
He tells a story about the time Séamus Brennan, then FF party secretary, was sent to the US to study the presidential campaign of Jimmy Carter in 1976. “When we were doing the debriefing on it afterwards, we asked him, apart from practical things what other points struck you? He said the one thing he couldn’t make up his mind on was this: whether Carter had in political terms run a brilliant campaign in that he hadn’t made a specific commitment to anything.”
Brennan asked was this a good thing or a bad thing? O’Donoghue told him: “I think that’s disaster.” He feels now that the history of the Carter presidency proved him right. O’Donoghue is a great believer in specific commitments. Make a plan, get a mandate for it, then carry it out.
“The Americans have a very good phrase for it: ‘If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there’.” O’Donoghue’s outlook is an unusual one in Irish society, where everything is so haphazard and we have this post-colonial attitude of “it’ll be all right on the night”.
The methodical mind of Martin O’Donoghue had its date with history in 1977 when he was a principal architect of Fianna Fáil’s election manifesto, a document which has since become part of the demonology of Irish politics. O’Donoghue is aware that many people are under the impression the manifesto caused many of our ills, including the generation of a huge national debt.
“If you look at the amount of borrowing that was needed for the programme, it was trivial by comparison with the amounts of borrowing done by the later administrations, from 1979 to 1987,” he says. “The total borrowing in 2½ years would have been about a billion-and-a-half. Now contrast that with a total borrowing of 11 or 12 billion by the last Coalition in 4½ years.”
He says there was a good case for the 1977 borrowing, too, because it put 80,000 extra people to work both in the public and private sectors. He quotes the late Seán Lemass: “People pay other taxes in sorrow but they pay their rates in anger.”
I asked him did he feel he had been badly treated by some elements in Fianna Fáil? He pauses: “I wasn’t surprised, because don’t forget I’d seen enough of political behaviour over the years and what I call that almost primitive, tribal type of thing, that blind thing. You notice it more at local level, at different cumann meetings. They are either fiercely for something or fiercely against it and if it was a football match now they’d be trampling you to death – jump on him if he’s still breathing. So in that sense, yes, they treat you badly. But are you surprised? No, because that’s what you get.”
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