If a Minister is being snapped on a beach in January, it must be snowtime! writes GARRET FitzGERALD
THIS HAS been the fifth or sixth major snow event in my lifetime. During the first of these, in 1933, we were living just south of Bray and I recall going down town with my 13-year-old brother Fergus to bring supplies up to the house on two toboggans.
There was a brief cold snap in January 1940, when my 55-year-old mother broke her arm while skating incautiously on Brittas lake. But the next sustained snow crisis – the longest in recent history – came in the course of the first three months of 1947, as I started work in Aer Lingus in O’Connell Street.
In that first job I was able to keep my feet warm with the aid of an older brother’s ski boots and orange socks. Along with three other graduate recruits, Aer Lingus initially installed me in a room in which the the only furnishing was a telephone. Whatever work we did was undertaken sitting on the floor with our feet stretched out in front of a two-bar electric fire!
For some reason I have almost no recollection of the snow crisis in 1963, but will certainly never forget 1982. For, after my first gruelling six months in office in the latter part of 1981 (near bankrupt economy and an IRA hunger strike), Joan and I took a brief early-January break in Tenerife – as Noel Dempsey did in Malta this year! One day, after a swim – during which I had noticed a photographer with a long lens taking shots of, I presumed, girls on the beach – I heard from home that snow was expected next day.
So I rang tánaiste Michael O’Leary early next morning and he told me the country was shut down after a massive snowfall. I suggested that he go into Government Buildings, collect a team of civil servants, and try to get things moving again, both literally and metaphorically.
By circuitous routes we managed to get to Shannon the next day whence a helicopter would fly us to the helipad at St Vincent’s Hospital. Anxious to avoid publicity about my return, I asked that no one be told about our arrival, but when we reached the helipad I could see a battery of photographers. The best I could do was to disembark holding my portable typewriter, hoping this would convey the idea that I had been working on public affairs while away. (In fact I had been relaxing by revising a paper I had written previously on the geographical pattern of the decline in Irish-speaking between 1770 and 1870 – but who was to know that?)
Michael O’Leary had activated and was chairing the emergency committee – presumably the same one that the present Government took so long to revive, perhaps on misplaced PR advice that it would be wiser to avoid direct engagement with the crisis.
On my return, I attended one of its meetings – a gloomy affair at the end of which the secretary of the Department of Health asked if we would like to hear something that might amuse us. We responded with enthusiasm, and he told us that his department had received a message from an optimistic prostitute in the Liberties who asked if the department could helicopter in some contraceptives as she had run short!
I was less amused, however, at the appearance in one of our papers of a picture of me emerging from the sea in Tenerife: I had mistaken the precise mission of the photographer with the long-lens camera!
Two weeks later, following the discouraging episode of the snow crisis, we presented a budget that was defeated by the defection of two Independents, one of these being socialist Jim Kemmy. When I had met him with Noel Browne before the budget, his concern – which I think eventually decided his vote – had been principally about possible reductions in food subsidies, which we had accordingly limited but had not been able to avoid entirely. Kemmy did not appreciate that these limited subsidy cuts were part of our plan to find the money to increase social welfare by 25 per cent – so as to compensate the less well-off for the huge rise in the cost of living that had been the fruit of our predecessors’ irresponsibly inflationary policies.
The really tough measure in that budget had in fact been a decision to finance the April social welfare increases mainly by means of a simultaneous 3.5 percentage point increase in social insurance contributions – which had attracted remarkably little attention because of the furore over the imposition of VAT on children’s shoes
Now, I knew that if we had had to face an election after that imposition came into effect several months later, in April, we could have lost 20 seats – whereas in an immediate mid-February election when the PRSI increase had not yet attracted media attention, we could conceivably hold our own, or at worst lose only a couple of seats. So I went into that campaign in a cheerful and upbeat frame of mind – which greatly puzzled most of my party!
I turned out to be right for in that February election the Fine Gael vote actually rose slightly although, because Fianna Fáils rose slightly more, our party lost two seats. Fianna Fáil under Charles Haughey failed to secure a majority, with the result that we were back in office before the end of the year, after yet another election – the third in 18 months.
During the three-week interregnum after that February election we discovered that, for reasons that were never established, we had been misled about the financial resources available to us in the preparation of the budget. The Department of Energy had failed to disclose to the Department of Finance a sum of £23 million deriving from the sale of gas by Bord Gáis to the ESB. Had that sum been disclosed to us, the budget would have been modified, quite possibly in a way that could have avoided the loss of Kemmy’s vote.
In government again less than a year later, we were too busy to investigate this, but with the publication of the 1982 papers in three years’ time some historian may find how that extraordinary lapse occurred.
But you can see why that particular January has remained vivid in my mind!