While doubts have been expressed within Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael on the staying power of Independent TDs – “would you want to go on a lion hunt with some of them?” – the indications are that the powers that be believe there are enough among the non-aligned to keep a government in office for five years. In good times, or bad. Forty years ago, when Independents could be counted almost on one hand, and their odds of survival were less than they are now, they actually brought a government down.
In January 1982, as cutbacks and “facing reality” became the norm, two Independent TDs voted against Garret FitzGerald’s budget to precipitate a general election.
Jim Kemmy – the “burly stonemason from Garryowen” – was greeted enthusiastically when he went home to Limerick after collapsing the government. “Kemmy was perfectly right, we are proud of him. It was a disgrace to try and put VAT on [children’s] shoes and clothes and make the butter and milk dearer.” The other deputy who had his moment of government-felling glory, Joe Sherlock, retained his reputation for “fierce honesty” in his electoral base of Mallow. One constituent said he had “showed them all up”. Kemmy and Sherlock were both re-elected.
Seán “Dublin Bay” Loftus, who had voted with FitzGerald’s rival Charles Haughey, did not make it back to the Dáil in 1982. He had been elected in June the previous year, 20 years after his first attempt. But he enjoyed more success in local politics where the “Dublin Bay” addition to his name – one of several, including “Alderman” – was in keeping with his environmental concerns. Noël Browne, who supported FitzGerald’s budget, retired from politics at this point. During his long career he had been a member of more than a few parties, but never Fine Gael. As a Labour TD, in 1973 he refused to sign the party’s pre-election pledge to form a coalition with Fine Gael and consequently was deselected. He ran successfully as an Independent for the Seanad, before returning to the Dáil.
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Throughout the 1980s, when FitzGerald and Haughey vied to be taoiseach, Dáil divisions could be very narrow. On one occasion Labour’s Eileen Desmond was brought in on a stretcher to vote. There were two sides, and that was it. The veteran Independent Neil Blaney could be relied on to back Fianna Fáil, his old party. When Jack Lynch forced him out following the “Arms Trial”, Blaney set up his own impressive electoral machine in Donegal and won a seat in the European Parliament. He often flew back from Europe to vote in tight situations in Leinster House.
However, a new entrant in 1982, Tony Gregory, stood out among the small group of Independents when the new Dáil met.
The “slight, elfin-faced young man” had alternative offers to consider for his Dublin Central constituency, but negotiated the “Gregory Deal” with Haughey when the latter outbid FitzGerald to secure his support.
Critics denounced this special deal as “disgraceful” but, as Joe Lee describes it in his authoritative Ireland 1912-1985, “What was disgraceful in this case was less the deal than the fact that it needed a deal to win some attention for one of the most deprived areas of the country, an inner city constituency ravaged by poverty and neglect, and their concomitants, unemployment, bad housing and a vicious drugs problem.”
Haughey’s government survived for a few months thanks to the outgoing ceann comhairle, the Independent John O’Connell, continuing in the role, to the annoyance of the Opposition. Haughey’s fall, however, marked the end of this phase of Independents being the centre of attention. They now numbered less than a handful.
Following the third general election in 17 months, in November 1982, FitzGerald headed up a Fine Gael-Labour coalition government that lasted the distance, despite the grim mood.
Gemma Hussey recalled that the décor of the cabinet room matched the dreariness of the cost-cutting measures to be decided by the ministers around the mahogany table. At least twice a week she had to face the “dull” paintings on the walls in a large room that “needed a coat of paint”. Unlike her male colleagues, Hussey, the minister for education, had the habit of turning up on time.
Following her election as ceann comhairle, Verona Murphy posed for photographs in her office – in front of a portrait of Constance Markievicz. Murphy, unlike Hussey, had a choice when it came to what pictures to hang on the wall. Murphy chose the first minister of labour elected by Dáil Éireann, an appointment which reflected Markievicz’s life-long quest as a trade union activist and suffragette, among other things. WB Yeats, who knew Constance and her sister Eva well, later remembered the brave – not to say independent-minded – causes of the two idealists who had grown up in Lissadell, Co Sligo, in his poem In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz:
“Dear shadows, now you know it all,
All the folly of a fight
With a common wrong or right.”
