In her 2014 memoir, Inside RTÉ, former producer Betty Purcell recalled her days on the pioneering radio programme Women Today, which began broadcasting in 1979. In October 1981, Purcell invited then taoiseach Garret FitzGerald to come into studio and face a panel of women “who wanted to quiz him about issues concerning their lives under his administration”. He immediately agreed. As recorded by Purcell, “he came in and faced an angry group of women, without any notes or civil servants, and with no idea of who the women were. He had the intellectual confidence that he would be able to answer any of the questions he was asked”.
The force of that assuredness appears in most assessments of FitzGerald, who was born a century ago this week. He articulated his ideas in public from the 1960s right to the end of his life in 2011. This earned him the description “an intellectual in politics,” but many who admired him also regarded him as someone whose essential humanity was never drowned out by the torrent of words, statistics and theories. What people appreciated was that he wanted to put his ideas into practice for genuinely patriotic reasons.
The year before he was elected a Fine Gael senator in 1965, he wrote what amounted to a personal manifesto, published in the Jesuit journal Studies. Its title was something of a novelty in Irish politics: “Seeking a National Purpose.” It was not a radical rallying cry. The historian William Murphy has argued that it revealed something that went to the core of his career: “the most interesting aspect of that piece is the impression that emerges of a man who, while enthusiastic about change, was concerned that this should be shaped by clear principles and that those principles should be rooted in tradition”.
Nor was he a feminist, argues Murphy; he gives an example of his occupation of a position between tradition and change by highlighting his attitude to women priests. He was in favour of such change because, he maintained, women were “more caring and spiritual than men.” As Murphy observes, it was “quite typical of FitzGerald to argue for progressive ends on the basis of a conservative analysis. Here women are ascribed characteristics which most liberals would regard as outmoded stereotypes, but these very characteristics are then offered as proofs that women are suitable for the priesthood.”
READ MORE
He described himself in 1974 as belonging to “the social-democratic end of the Christian democrat spectrum”. He also came, three years later, to lead a Fine Gael with competing conservative and more liberal wings and went on to lead coalition governments that had to take account of Labour sensibilities.
His ideas about national identity and unity were discussed in his 1972 book, Towards a New Ireland: “The concept of a monocultural nation-state simply does not fit the Irish state”. Writing privately that year to a Northern contact, he lamented the partitionist mindset of many self-proclaimed republicans south of the Border which he, as someone who had regularly made trips over the Border, did not share: “If only all our politicians were forced to spend some time in the North”. He was adamant that an understanding and respect for the different traditions on the island had to be respected and accommodated.
His difficulties as taoiseach have been well documented; as political scientist Eoin O’Malley sees it, he had an “obsession with detail” that could paralyse him, yet his “passion and self-belief would energise those around him.” Historian Patrick Maume writes spikily of his “managerialist confidence in his own expert correctness.” He badly mishandled the abortion referendum in 1983 and failed to oversee the legalisation of divorce in 1986. His record of economic management – reducing the national debt was a paramount challenge – generated much critical assessment, as did what many regarded as his indecisiveness.
What is clear, however, is that he had a vision; a strong sense of where he wanted to take the country. What he could not or did not shift during his time in power was the weight of inherited orthodoxy. He recalled that on being appointed taoiseach he sent letters to ministers about things he wanted done. There was little by way of response. The problem was not with the ministers or the obvious economic difficulties of the 1980s, he concluded, but with the “inertia of the system ... a very powerful force”.
The recent death of Joe Mulholland justly generated tributes to his organisation of the annual MacGill summer school in Donegal to discuss such problems. It was there that Mulholland last met FitzGerald, in 2010, when FitzGerald spoke about the need for political reform, identifying “moral defects” and the absence of a civic republicanism, but also the “deficiencies in the quality and effectiveness of our political system”.
Why are we still living with those deficiencies?
