There has been too much guttersnipe sneering at the Taoiseach's claim in his interview with Mark Brennock on Saturday to be "one of the few socialists left in Irish politics" and to have a "very socialist view of life", writes Fintan O'Toole
It is all too easy to mock such declarations from the mouth of a man who has been in power for most of the last 20 years and who has presided, in that time, over one of the most unequal societies in the developed world.
Hurling cheap jibes about the contemptuous attitude to the rights of people with disabilities, the appalling level of educational disadvantage and the grotesque treatment of vulnerable people in the health service is facile. The fact is that the man is completely sincere.
He is speaking from experience.
The Taoiseach knows what life can be like in a warm, supportive community where wealth is shared and no one is left behind, where people look out for each other and a blessing to one is a blessing to all. He understands that such a society is not a utopia, but an actually existing reality. For the jeering cynics and the fancy- pants poseurs, mutual benevolence is either an unattainable goal or an abstract proposition.
The mockers don't know what it's like to swim in a stream of collective benevolence where a man will, without thinking of himself, scratch the back of a fellow man, knowing that somewhere, unseen and unbidden, a hand is reaching out behind him to ease away the itch in his own lumbar region.
Bertie is a "big-tent" socialist and, as he told Mark Brennock, that tent is the Fianna Fáil marquee at the Galway Races every year, where the nation's do-gooders rally to the national cause. "If there are not the guys at the Galway Races in the tent who are earning wealth, who are creating wealth, then I can't redistribute that." He is absolutely right about this.
The people who fill the Fianna Fáil tent are typically modest individuals. They don't like to talk about their money and they are embarrassed by any revelation of their generosity. But we know nevertheless that they spread it around.
Take one of the wealth-creators who is a regular in the tent at the Galway Races, the builder Mick Bailey. He and his brother paid themselves salaries in 2001 and 2002 of €17 mil- lion. The development land on their books in June 2002 was valued at €51 million. But Mick Bailey is a true socialist. We know, for example, of his moving gesture at the home of one underprivileged man less fortunate in life than himself. In keeping with the Gospel's injunction to visit the poor, Mick Bailey accompanied Joseph Murphy and James Gogarty to the pathetic hovel in which the indigent Raymond Burke lived in 1989. When the other two gave Burke an envelope with £30,000, Mick was so moved he spontaneously decided to do likewise.
In the emotional words of the Flood report: "Mr Bailey observed the handing over of the JMSE contribution to Mr Burke and made a similar gesture in handing over an envelope to Mr Burke in the presence of the JMSE representatives [ who] were given to understand that their payment was being matched by Mr Bailey. However, the actual contents of the envelope remain unknown."
Why do they remain unknown? Because, in his modesty, Mick Bailey didn't want to make a fuss and, in fact, couldn't even remember his compassionate gesture.
Mick Bailey is not alone among the denizens of the tent. Others, too, give without asking anything in return, receive without shame and are so instinctively benevolent that they find it hard even to remember their acts of spontaneous generosity or to keep track of the money they do have. Another regular, Oliver Barry, gave Ray Burke £35,000. P.J. Mara, who is usually to be seen in the tent, got interest-free loans of £48,000 from Oliver Barry and Dermot Desmond because his income as Government Press Secretary was "not sufficient to meet his immediate financial requirements".
P.J. himself was so uninterested in grubby matters like money that when the tribunal brought an offshore account to his attention he explained that "he had forgotten about it".
The redistribution of wealth is indeed a cause close to the heart of the "big tent" socialists.
According to the inspector's report on the purchase by the then State phone company Telecom Éireann of a site in Ballsbridge, J.P. McManus, who turns up in the tent from time to time, got half a million pounds as his share of the profits from that transaction. According to evidence at the then Flood tribunal, a company owned by another regular in the tent, the developer Seán Mulryan, gave former TD Liam Lawlor €63,500 between 1994 and 1998.
The poor are sometimes ungrateful, though.
Lawlor issued fabricated invoices for the payments, two in the name of Long Associates, a name he says he "chose at random".
It is, nevertheless, the experience of watching this community of selfless giving in action that has galvanised the Taoiseach's faith in socialism. Some day, if he is in office long enough, the Galway commune will be emulated all over the 32 counties and Ireland will be one "big tent". Keep the faith, comrades.