38 Charlie McCreevy

If they made movies about things as interesting as Irish politics, the story of Charles McCreevy might be among the more emblematic of the age: the Young Turk who blew the whistle on the greybeards who were sabotaging the economy, who was banished to the backbenches, then returned triumphant to become Minister for Finance in what would become the most successful period in his country’s economic history.

In February 1982, Charlie McCreevy appeared on the cover of Magill, his face adorned by a headline which in its time did not read as overblown: ‘Charlie McCreevy is Right. The Politicians Have Vandalized the Country.’

‘Our politicians,’ began Vincent Browne’s article inside, ‘have propelled us towards economic and social calamity in the last decade. Wild, irresponsible election promises and commitments, reckless public expenditure schemes, uncontrolled deficit budgeting and an unprecedented falsification of budget figures have coalesced to create the worst economic crisis the State has ever known. One politician has spoken out against this drift in national politics, Charlie McCreevy, and because he has done so outside the cosy confines of his party rooms he is being chastised.’

McCreevy, then a tender thirty-two-year-old, had been making his views on the economy known for some time before the ousting of Jack Lynch by Charles Haughey in 1979. The 1977 Fianna Fáil election manifesto, on the crest of which McCreevy was himself swept into the Dáil, had all but bankrupted the economy, and McCreevy had been among those who had voted for Haughey, believing him capable of restoring sanity to the national finances. On 11 January 1980, just three days after Charles Haughey’s landmark ‘We-are-living-beyond-our-means’ TV address, McCreevy raged in public about the recent drift of Irish politics. ‘General elections seem to be developing into an auction in promises,’ he thundered in Newbridge. ‘We are so hell bent on assuming power that we are prepared to do anything for it.’

In April 1981 McCreevy warned: ‘If political parties continue to disgrace themselves, then democracy itself is at risk.’ This speech began a process that resulted in his temporary expulsion from the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party, his long-term political estrangement from Haughey and his exclusion from ministerial office for more than a decade. His banishment continued even as the very prescriptions he had been advocating were gradually adopted by the political establishment and media. When Haughey returned to power in February 1987, he had virtually universal support in pursuing the course McCreevy had been banished for promoting. But, although he remained on good personal terms with Haughey, McCreevy languished on the backbenches for another decade, until Albert Reyolds, on replacing Haughey, promoted him to the cabinet.

McCreevy was bright, charismatic and street-smart in a peculiarly Irish, small-town way. A highly skilled communicator, he employed language in a manner deceptively unpolished. Even when he became Minister for Finance, he continued to speak in the imprecise way people speak in shops and restaurants and bars and across garden fences. There was a characteristic about his delivery suggestive of an unaccountable breathlessness. When, as a reporter, you wrote down one of his sentences, you nearly always had to reinterpret it, ever so slightly, maybe by adding in words that he had left out, or because he had forgotten the construction he had embarked upon and ended up with two sentences stuck together like two odd socks at the bottom of the laundry basket. McCreevy’s sentences were a wonder of the world. In print, even when edited, they required careful study to decipher. And yet, as he delivered them, they conveyed precisely what he intended.

There is something in the Irish personality that resists pretension and what passes for cosmopolitanism, a resistance to the false. Sometimes this seems to manifest itself as a kind of anti-intellectualism, which causes clever people to conceal their intelligence behind a façade of come-all-ye simplicity. For a politician with intelligence to become and remain electable, it is necessary to sublimate any traits of personality likely to frighten the post-colonial horses. So it is with Charlie McCreevy. His public persona – the bluster, the waffle, the effortless familiarity, the backslapping good humour – were genuine. But they were also carefully – albeit perhaps unconsciously – constructed disguises that enabled him to limbo-dance his way from oblivion to the heights of political power, a kind of Trojan horse for the qualities of good sense and cop-on that McCreevy had in abundance.

McCreevy liked to break down his philosophy into lines that might be thrown across a bar or shouted over the roar of a threshing machine. ‘Don’t curse the darkness’, he would say. ‘Turn on the fucking light!’

‘I would like to think,’ he said near the end of his time as Finance Minster, ‘that the approach I’ve taken, and my economic philosophy, has been . . . that you’ll do better with the money in your arse pocket, and make better decisions and put it to better use, than to be feckin’ around and goin’ in circles and I funnellin’ it back out to you some other way. That’s a fundamental view of mine. Every other economy that tried any other way of doin’ it fell on top of its head. Whereas the economies that’ve had that particular approach have prospered. So therefore the philosophy of givin’ people back their own money has worked in my view, and has contributed to the growth of the Irish economy.’

He railed tautologically against ‘left-wing pinkos’, but never dreamt of himself as an ideologue. ‘But like,’ he would say, ‘like I’ve no problem with the socialist system at all, but I’ve decided over the years, is that people, the whole system works best when people have more freedom in everything. In EVERYTHING. In their own personal lives. Everything.

‘There’s a core group that . . . and it’s anathema to that core group of people that what they have espoused for forty years, since the ’60s, of a certain approach, that this other approach, from this bogman from County Kildare, seems to have worked somewhat better. Ninety-eight per cent of them never saw a fuckin’ poor day in their lives. They always came from the class that was well privileged, went to the best schools, ate in the best restaurants, and talked to the same people anyway. And people like you and me, and our people, wouldn’t be allowed in there. And we all . . . Like. Like. Like. They philosophize and hypothesize and theorize and drink the wine and talk all the night at all the dinner parties, and have these economic philosophies that we’ll all be equal and everything else. But they’re always more equal than the rest of us. And always could talk down to us about it. And it really kills them that that other type of philosophy has worked.’

In the flood of accusation and rage that followed the meltdown of the Irish economy in 2008, it seemed to go unremarked that the signs of imminent collapse had been there some six years before that. It was also unremarked that, back in 2002, when Charlie McCreevy announced that the boom was over, he got nothing for his trouble but abuse.

McCreevy had proposed a series of cutbacks in public expenditure he claimed were necessary to rebalance the economy, which he said was beginning to overheat. The press and public went crazy. For once, McCreevy’s populist instincts seemed to desert him. On The Late Late Show, he was booed by the audience when he tried to justify the measures being taken.

Back in 1982, it had suited the Irish public to have a hero to say sensible things in the nick of time to prevent national bankruptcy. Now, McCreevy, turned gamekeeper, was again demanding the postponement of short-term gratification for long-term benefit. But this time, cushioned by the tiger-fleece of the early Tiger boom, the Irish public wanted the candy to keep on coming. The media, which for many years had led the clamour for the implementation of fiscal rectitude, abandoned economic pieties in favour of a populist witch-hunt. McCreevy threw in the towel and fecked off, like Ray MacSharry before him, to Brussels.

Had he stuck around, would he have repeated his trick of the early 1980s and blown the whistle on a spiralling economy, a spendthrift government, a banking sector out of control? The very idea is almost too tragic to contemplate.