15 Albert Reynolds

Albert Reynolds, who, when asked during the 1992 general election campaign about claims that he and the leader of Fianna Fáil’s coalition partners, Desmond O’Malley, never spoke outside the cabinet room, responded that this rumour was ‘crap, pure crap’. There followed a tsunami of sanctimony and high dudgeon, as opponents and journalists, supposedly offended by Albert’s language, spun into verbal tizzies at the offence and drama of it all.

The then government Press Secretary, Seán ‘Diggy’ Duignan, later recalled in his book One Spin on the Merry-Go-Round that this episode genuinely damaged Reynolds. It probably did, but only because a couple of people in the media just wouldn’t let it go. It was an issue of taste, we were told, of how the Taoiseach was expected to comport himself, of the coarsening of public life, the dragging down of high office and the end of life as we knew it.

If you tell people often enough that something is important, they start to believe you. But really this was the seizing by opportunistic actors of a chance to put flesh on an existing prejudice. Albert had never been popular outside his own party supporters, and was deeply loathed by many media people.

Reynolds, unlike Bertie Ahern, had a proven record as a businessman, having made his fortune in the dancehall boom of the 1960s, later moving on to the dog food business. He had started out as a lowly clerical officer with CIE, the state transport company and, when working as a clerk in Dromod railway station in the late 1960s, was noted for the way he would get all his work done in the morning and spend the rest of the day looking after his growing dancehall business. With his brother Jim, he built and operated more than a dozen dancehalls, using the profits from one hall to build another, borrowing judiciously and expanding exponentially, always dealing in cash. One time, when Albert was involved in a car smash on the way home from a dance, the road was littered with the night’s takings, which he had casually stowed in the boot. This back-story in the dancehall business was the source of much ignorant commentary by journalists who, by sheer force of repetition, created the impression that the showband boom had been some kind of reactionary ideological movement rather than an opportunity for people to make money by enabling other people to have fun. But, having laid their groundwork of prejudice by associating the Taoiseach with the ‘Country ’n’ Western Alliance’, the new ‘evidence’ was easy to work into the thesis that Reynolds was an uncouth redneck unsuited to high office.

Although the story of Albert’s ultimate demise is complex, there is no doubt that the ‘crap’ episode contributed to the drip-drip of prejudice which, in the end, rendered him a pushover for the Salomés who came looking for his head.

When Albert was elected Fianna Fáil leader and Taoiseach, he set himself to cleaning up the party after CJH, or at least seemed keen about being seen to do this. The appointment of his cabinet amounted to an outright purge of Haughey loyalists, which resulted in deep resentments being carried into the long grass. When you are at the mercy of the delicate arithmetic of a coalition arrangement, it is not a good idea to open cracks in your own parliamentary party.

Albert was eventually undone as the result of a trumped-up crisis about an alleged attempt to suppress an extradition warrant for the paedophile priest, Father Brendan Smyth. From the instant when the political crisis began to unravel in mid-November 1994, the media seemed resolved to prosecute the issue to the death. The allegation was made that, owing to outside interference, a warrant from Northern Ireland for the extradition of Smyth had been inordinately delayed at the Attorney General’s office. The Democratic Left TD Pat Rabbitte stood up in Dáil Éireann and announced that he was aware of a document that would rock the State to its foundations. There was a letter in existence, he insisted, from a senior cleric, requesting the Attorney General not to proceed with the Smyth warrant. The Labour Party, Fianna Fáil’s junior partner in coalition, demanded a head – Reynolds’s or his AG’s – or they would pull out of government. The controversy was further muddied by allegations that Reynolds had misled the Dáil in relation to another case involving a paedophile priest, which became infamous as ‘the Duggan case’.

A Dáil committee, set up in the wake of the affair in an attempt to establish whether there had been any wrongdoing associated with the delayed warrant, found no evidence of outside interference with the AG’s office. There had been no involvement by the Catholic Church. The matter of Reynolds’s alleged misleading of the Dáil emerged as being the consequence of nothing more sinister than chaos. No letter had been sent by any cleric to any politician. The foundations of the State remained unrocked. It was all crap, pure crap. But by then it was too late: Reynolds had resigned and, in the shemozzle that followed, a change of government had occurred, with the Labour Party shifting beds to join a rainbow coalition with Fine Gael and Democratic Left.

In due course it became clear that the Reynolds government had been brought down by a series of misunderstandings arising from an opportunistic campaign by a nest of unelected advisers, and that this campaign was driven by a media vendetta in pursuit less of facts than of the scalps of various people associated with Fianna Fáil.

Reynolds was a smart businessman and an exceptional politician. He played a key role in establishing the groundwork for the settlement of the Northern conflict and presided over a key period in the stabilization of the Irish economy following the disastrous 1980s. But he provoked in a new breed of commentator and politician an almost visceral dislike, based on snobbery and ignorance of the reality of the Irish personality and the complex nature of the journey we had made from poverty to prosperity.

Had he not thrown in the towel, he might well have led the country for another decade, applying his usual horse sense to national affairs. It is inconceivable that a man of such commonsensical outlook on reality would have presided, as his successor Bertie Ahern did, over the descent into madness that supplanted Irish economic policy in the early years of the third millennium.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy of the past two decades has been the fact that, beset by pseudo-bohemian snobbery and small-town prejudice, Albert Reynolds threw in the towel and walked away.

The long and the short of it, as Albert himself might put it, is that he was forced out on the basis of allegations that subsequently failed to stack up. Had he stood his ground and allowed the Labour Party to walk, he might have saved his leadership and his government – and ultimately, perhaps, saved his country from the ruin that would begin to engulf it about a decade later.