48 Brian Cowen

In May 2008, when Brian Cowen replaced Bertie Ahern as Taoiseach, the national mood was one of increasingly fragile denial. Within months, media commentators would come to describe the new Taoiseach as a disaster, the worst ever. But, for now, the talk was all about his unparalleled intelligence, his history of toughness on the football field, the fact that he could hold a pint or ten and sing a song in the snug of any public house in which the gauntlet was thrown down.

Deeper down, the implication of such commentary was that we were still on the hog’s back. What we needed was another affable actor to maintain the mood of the previous decade. To suggest otherwise might have been to acknowledge what was already known in the bones of the culture: that we were in deep trouble.

Cowen, as Minister for Finance over several years, and as a key member of the team that had been running the country since 1997, was unquestionably centrally responsible for the situation faced by the Irish economy in 2008, and in particular for the failure to anticipate the meltdown of the banking sector, which all but bankrupted Ireland back to the nineteenth century.

In good times, Brian Cowen had seemed an effective number two, but there was scant evidence that he had either the charisma or the vision for the top job. His much-vaunted intelligence had yet to be demonstrated in any significant context beyond the party rooms, but had become an off-the-peg cliché to be lobbed into articles about the new Taoiseach by journalists who would later turn on Cowen with a vengeance rarely encountered in Irish political commentary.

Despite the carnival atmosphere that greeted his election as Taoiseach, Cowen had no moral mandate and was never required to justify his claims as titular leader of the Irish people. Indeed, such was the sense of his entitlement within Fianna Fáil that he was never even called upon to set out his stall as would-be leader of his own party. This would reveal itself as the most debilitating factor of his leadership as it progressed. Had he subjected himself to a contest in that summer of 2008, he might have acquired a stronger sense of entitlement to the position of Taoiseach. Instead, he acquiesced in his inheritance of the Fianna Fáil leadership on the basis that he was an able party animal, a good number two to Bertie and, above all, because it was his turn.

Almost immediately upon Cowen’s coronation, the excrement started hitting the extractor. Within weeks, it began to look as if Bertie had timed his departure, almost to the minute, to coincide with the end of the good times. If his predecessor had stayed another three months, Cowen might have had a chance of being seen as the new broom come to clean up the mess. Then again, nobody really believed it was pure accident that Bertie, the jammy dodger to bury all jammy dodgers, got to leave in his blaze of martyred glory just before the pipe began to spew forth bad news, followed by worse.

Soon, as the awful reality began to roll out, the national mood came to resemble that extended instant just after you’ve had a prang at the traffic lights, when, as you get out of the car in slow motion to survey the damage, you think, ‘I don’t need this, therefore it can’t be happening.’ At such moments, there is a sensation of being lost in time, of feeling, against the apparent facts, that the past is still recoverable, though the future is already making itself clear.

The appalling suddenness of events seemed to insinuate that it was possible to go back in time and erase the whole thing, to wake up from the nightmare. The rhetoric of the previous decade had so convinced people that we had finally emerged from the mists of history and penury that this could only be a terrible nightmare. The utter unfairness of it all seemed to render the circumstances momentarily implausible, and therefore redeemable. But then reality reasserted itself. The facts began to sink in.

The Taoiseach and his ministers began to break the bad news – at first gently and then rather more forcefully. But their words were incapable of penetrating the public mindset. Cowen and his cabinet seemed to be banking on a residual public memory of the 1987 Ray MacSharry cutbacks, retrospectively credited with rescuing the Irish economy and laying the foundations for the subsequent boom. But, that had been two decades before, when half the 2008 electorate had yet to be born. And for those who remembered the 1980s, this new crisis seemed of an entirely different order.

Cowen just didn’t seem to know what to do about anything. In one speech he would try to upbraid the public for not grasping how serous things were; in another he would declare that everything was really okay. One moment he seemed to be blaming the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund for having validated mistaken decisions made in the good times; the next he was citing the approval of these same institutions for decisions being made about turning the economy around.

In as far as a strand of thought could be identified, the government’s thinking was clearly more focused on preserving the image of our political class on the world stage than with securing the future for Irish children yet unborn. Because of his personality and the way he came to lead, nobody had any confidence in anything Cowen proposed to do. Everybody struggled against the twisting of fate. Precious time was lost. The problems grew worse. But the time the Minister for Finance, Brian Lenihan, finally unveiled his package to save the banking system, there had been a slippage of €10 million from his original estimate of the damage. The decision of the two Brians to insist that the Irish taxpayer must bail out the entire failed Irish banking system was subsequently declared by all and sundry to be the single most disastrous political decision in the whole of Ireland’s independent history.

There were radical alternatives available from the outset, but it soon became clear that Brian Cowen was not the man to implement them. For example, there was nothing crazy about the idea, proposed by a number of eminent economists, of temporarily pulling out of the euro. There was something deeply sane about the idea of leaving the banks to sink or swim in the consequences of their own recklessness. This was not, after all, the first time a country had been in a situation like this, and many of the options being brushed aside by Cowen and his cabinet had already worked elsewhere. But not only did Cowen not consider such ideas – even as a way of opening up a potentially liberating public discussion – he treated them with a silent disdain that suggested they had no merit at all. There was a strange sense that all these unprecedented initiatives, which threatened the long-term future of Irish society, were being implemented because nobody in authority was prepared to think the unthinkable until it was too late.

The really frightening thing was the absence of dialogue. Cowen behaved like a morose parent on a rained-off picnic – refusing to explain or discuss events in their broader context. The commonsensical questions of either eminent economists or the man and woman in the street found no purchase in the corridors of power. Was it, for example, really axiomatic that, in the midst of global financial meltdown, when half the Irish population had acquired debts rooted in nothing but banking science fiction, a generation of Irish workers had to face lives of penury and pain? Why, if the crisis arose from a dysfunctional banking system, did the banks have to be accorded every assistance to escape from the mess they’d created for themselves, while the ordinary citizen was being hammered for his minor part in the same mess?

The final meltdown of Cowen’s period as Taoiseach, in the opening weeks of 2011, was almost too gruesome to behold. The Green Party, seared beyond healing by its period in power, had already indicated its desire to withdraw from the government to enable a general election take place. For a brief moment that January, Cowen seemed to be about to wind down his tenure as Taoiseach with a modicum of dignity. But then, having seen off one half-hearted attempt at a heave, and with the nation agape in disbelief, he tried to pull a fast one by reshuffling his cabinet and placing a new batch of dummies in the shop window. It was too much: within days, he had been replaced as Fianna Fáil leader by Micheál Martin, who would go on to lead the party into an election in which it would lose nearly three-quarters of its seats.

Had Brian Cowen been required to be leader of Fianna Fáil only, without the added responsibility of leading the country, he might well have become an unqualified success. Had he become Taoiseach a decade earlier, his weakness might similarly have gone unnoticed. He was unlucky, yes, but so, alas, were we.

For nearly three years, he refused to stand up and speak of the country’s difficulties in plain English, to offer reassurance, contrition or hope. This, more than any error or incompetence, was at the core of his failure. History will most likely decide that the greatest damage wrought by Brian Cowen resulted from his deficiencies of courage, imagination and radicalism, failings which in turn derived from a personality forged out of small-town values – cautious, deferential and driven by, above all, a desire for respectability and approval abroad.

The truth is that just as they were entering a time of national emergency, the citizens of the Republic had woken up one morning to find at their head, without being able to remember quite how or why it had happened, a Taoiseach elected on the basis that he was a helluva nice fella and it was his turn to wear the captain’s jersey.