21 Desmond O’Malley

In July 1989, following the successful coalition negotiations between the Progressive Democrats and Fianna Fáil, Desmond O’Malley got to his feet in Dáil Éireann and said: ‘I want to acknowledge the courage and skill exhibited, particularly by Deputy Haughey in recent weeks, courage and skill which I know he possesses in abundance, and which has been utilized in the national interest during this time.’ Once again, in adhering to the national interest, Mr O’Malley had managed to emerge with the outcome most congenial to himself. This man, who had once characterized Mr Haughey as unfit to hold power, was now suggesting that it was in accordance with the public interest that Mr Haughey hold the second highest office in the land.

A number of people with long memories had the bad manners to remind Mr O’Malley of his previous emphatic position concerning Mr Haughey, articulated most memorably in the wake of his own expulsion from Fianna Fáil in 1985, when he said that Haughey’s role in the Arms Crisis of 1970 had rendered him unfit for positions of public power. Now, the Irish people could only gasp in admiration at how O’Malley and his Progressive Democrat colleagues were prepared to grub around the place in their ministerial cars, their bottoms shifting uneasily on the compromising upholstery, because the national interest required them to humble themselves in this disagreeable way.

Back in 1985, when O’Malley founded the PDs, there had been much talk about the imminent realignment of Irish politics into a more orderly, ‘European’, configuration. It would be only a matter of a short time, we were assured, before the tribal divisions of Irish politics began to divide coherently into left- and right-wing elements, as had happened everywhere else.

This was the PD pretext, or part of it. Another significant element was ethical, or at least nominally so. The PDs were to be the ‘party of integrity’, in contradistinction to Fianna Fáil, the party led by the great PD nemesis. Only when Charles Haughey was buried at a crossroads with a stake through his heart, it was said, could the PDs be wound up. And so, eventually, it would come to pass, with the PDs surviving Haughey by just a couple of years.

No matter how they tried to dress it up, Haughey was the sole reason for the existence of the PDs. Haughey attracted a deep-set loathing among the emerging elites of the new Ireland who mistrusted the swash of his buckle and despised the hair on his nouveau riche head. Haughey’s arrogance, pride, pretensions, rudeness, sulphuric aura and, above all, formidable political ability, created tremors across a whole swathe of the modern Irish mind. The PDs eventually became the personification of this resentment, which has retrospectively claimed justification on the basis of what the McCracken and Moriarty tribunals managed to dig out – but they had nothing to go on in the beginning except envy and spite.

Everything else was pretext, elaborate self-justification to camouflage the banding together of individuals and cultural interests with no grander purpose than the defeat and destruction of a pretender so exceptional that his existence assured all mediocrities with pretensions and ambitions that they had been born at the wrong time. In a sense, the PDs began not in 1985, but at the moment, some two decades before, when certain members of an aspirant political generation took one look at the swarthily preposterous figure of Charles J. Haughey and realized they were going nowhere while this guy remained on the pitch. The unfolding story of Irish politics in the coming half-century was defined by this encounter, which shaped the evolution of Haughey’s own personality as much as it shaped the reaction to him.

When Desmond O’Malley first entered the Dáil in 1968, on the sudden death of his legendary uncle, Donogh, Charles Haughey had already presided, as Minister for Finance, over one economic boom. Two decades later, he was as Taoiseach to pave the way for a second. In between, he spent most of his time and energy fighting for his political life, as the pygmies around sought to dispatch him to the political locker room. When you filter out the moralistic soundtrack, these are the important features of the Irish political topography of the past half-century.

There are two kinds of iconoclast: the kind who wants to tear down the establishment because of pure idealism and the kind who threatens to pull down the establishment so the establishment will move over and invite him to join it. Des O’Malley, as evidenced by his subsequent willingness to get into bed with his nemesis (in ‘the national interest’ or otherwise), was the latter kind.

He was, to begin with, an unlikely politician, and especially an unlikely Fianna Fáil politician. At college he had been a bit of a leftie, and, despite his later nodding towards the right, this seems to have fitted his personality better than anything he subsequently tried. At one time he was a traditionalist fulminating against fornication and Anglo-American culture, and then was reborn as the defender of authentic republican values. He was comfortable in the role of minister, of apparatchik, of ideologue, but never as politician. He was dogged but uncharismatic. He was unprepossessing of appearance and brittle of manner. His voice grated on your nerves. The terrible truth, however, was that, no matter what he claimed to stand for, Dessie just looked plain wrong. Once, in an effort at a makeover, he emerged with a new haircut. Everyone gasped. Some observers laughed out loud. But in no time at all, everything came to naught. All the king’s hairdressers were unable to stop that demon tuft of hair on the back of his head from sticking up like Liberty Hall no matter what they did.

Similar conditions of philosophical incoherence and flawed aesthetic seemed to dog the party he founded. No matter what the PDs tried, it all came to very little, because really there was nothing much behind the party but ambition and resentment. Of the twenty-three-year history of the PDs, nearly fifteen were spent in government with Fianna Fáil, the party they set out to destroy. This relationship both enabled the PDs to exist long after they might otherwise have become irrelevant and also, paradoxically, killed them off with the kind of kindness that Fianna Fáil and man-eating cobras do well.

The type of voter who voted PD was fickle and self-interested, the antithesis of the FF mujahideen. By getting into bed with the enemy, the PDs cut off their own lifeline, believing that their achievements while in office would speak for themselves. They were too arrogant to anticipate that Fianna Fáil would steal their clothes and suck their veins dry, adapting anything remotely usable among their ideas to the culture that FF understands as no PD could ever do.

Although Desmond O’Malley struck many poses on different issues in his long career at the top of Irish politics, he seemed always to be more concerned about sounding principled than in actually achieving anything that might genuinely be for the good of the country. Even his principled image was mainly for effect.

In 1986, shortly after he founded the PDs, he and his party colleague, Bobby Molloy, announced that they were giving up their ministerial pensions because there was ‘no moral justification’ for still-serving politicians receiving such payments. Less than a decade later, both men began accepting their pensions again, and Dessie explained that it was because they had got ‘no thanks’ for their earlier gesture. Gone was the question of moral justification. Gone were the values. Gone was the national interest. All that remained was the pragmatism of a man whose view of morality related purely to the behaviour of others.

The lesson of the final demise of the PDs was that Irish politics has never been, and never will be, ideological. There has not emerged, and will never emerge, a left–right divide. Fianna Fáil has always known this, and in the end the PDs came to know it too. Their sole enduring contribution to Irish politics was the imposition of a form of priggishness in the public arena that causes principle to read instantly as hypocrisy. They were the Pharisees to the tax-collectors of Fianna Fáil, the stern federal marshal riding shotgun on the James Gang.