23 Ray MacSharry

Perhaps the most tragic circumstance of the modern era for Irish society was that Ray MacSharry declined to make himself available to become Taoiseach. Having, by general agreement, almost single-handedly rescued the Irish economy from perdition in the late 1980s, he disappeared off to Brussels, where he spent a term as Ireland’s EU Commissioner. Whenever speculation started up about the possibility of his returning to lead his party and his country, Ray slapped it down.

Back in 1987, following an election in which Fianna Fáil had issued mixed messages about its intentions, MacSharry became Minister for Finance in Charles Haughey’s minority government. Haughey himself clearly didn’t really know what to do about an economy with which several recent administrations, including two of his own, had achieved nothing but to make things worse. Haughey, in an attempt to differentiate Fianna Fáil from the outgoing lot with their talk of ‘fiscal rectitude’, had spoken vaguely during the campaign about ‘developmental policies’, giving the impression that there was a kinder, gentler way of snatching the country from the icy grip of death. But MacSharry was having none of it.

With his slightly stern air and what Olivia O’Leary called his ‘Transylvanian good looks’, MacSharry conveyed the right blend of reassurance and reserve. He didn’t mince his words and, though we whimpered a little in our hair shirts, Mac made us feel safe. Rolling up his sleeves as we looked on in apprehension, he gripped the economy by the scruff of the neck and, in a few short if painful years, shook it into a better shape than it had even been in before.

MacSharry came from a working stock family in Sligo town. In 1988, a year into the term as Minister for Finance in which his zero-tolerance of budgetary excess would pave the way for the Celtic Tiger, he gave an interview to Magill magazine in which he spoke eloquently of the values he’d grown up with. In one quote that reads like a Bruce Springsteen song, he recalled the MacSharry family’s first new car: ‘One of the most distinctive memories I have is the first new car bought by my father. I was ten or eleven at the time. It was a Ford Prefect, EI 5043, and we were trading in a Baby Ford, IZ 3534, at Gilbride’s Garage. The night before, I was with my father and my brother Louis when we counted out the money – three times – before going to bed. £230. And it was billions as far as we were concerned.’

When he took on the stewardship of the national finances in 1987, qualities of thrift, frugality and familiarity with life’s harsh realities, which had attached themselves to him in the tough years of his childhood in 1940s Sligo, stood also to the country. It was not easy, back then, to implement cuts in health, education and social welfare. But MacSharry pulled it off because he possessed a moral authority that exuded from personal connectedness to the reality of Irish life. He was not an ideologue seeking to impose an agenda. Nor, despite his ominous nickname – Mac the Knife – did he seek out easy targets. To the extent that human nature and reality will ever allow, the pain was evenly and fairly spread.

Even if you take the view that there has been a degree of exaggeration of MacSharry’s role in the rejuvenation of the Irish economy in the 1990s, it is inconceivable that the disaster that befell us in the Noughties could have happened had he been anywhere in the building.

MacSharry is still hale and hearty, a strong, handsome man, only twenty years or so older than the present generation of Irish leaders. In cultural and ideological terms, however, a millennium separates him from the pampered generation that inherited his efforts in the 1990s.

Back in ’88, the voiceless were the outrightly poor. But, although they suffered along with everyone else, they did not do so disproportionately – perhaps the greatest tribute that can be made to Ray MacSharry’s integrity as a leader and as a man. Today the truly poor have battalions of spokespersons, and the voiceless are those who have just a little to lose: those who own their own houses and perhaps an apartment in the centre of town in anticipation of their children going to college later on, the people who maybe bought their first brand-new car in the past decade. A generation ago, such people did not need spokespersons because the political leadership came from their ranks and therefore saw the world as they did. But now they are the truly voiceless people in a society responding largely to cant and humbug, in which it is no longer possible to observe without controversy the obvious fact that wealth should be generated by effort and creativity, rather than by stock-jobbery and sleight-of-hand.

It is well we may rant and rave and gnash our teeth on account of losing the greatest Taoiseach we never had.