23 October 1999
Irish Times
The death of Jack Lynch has reminded Ireland of his basic honesty and decency - and of the basic corruptness of his successor, that outstanding hypocrite of our times, writes Fintan O'Toole
On the day Jack Lynch died, the man who took his place as Taoiseach and leader of Fianna Fail, Charles Haughey, paid a brief tribute to his memory on RTE radio. Such formal elegies are part of the accepted ritual on these occasions and they do not normally make for riveting listening. But even aside from all the emotive history of their turbulent relationship, Haughey's reminiscence of Lynch had an irresistible fascination.
People often praise the dead in the terms they themselves would like to be remembered. In Haughey's case, however, his words about Jack Lynch could be applicable to himself only with a liberal sprinkling of the word "not". Especially in that part of his tribute in which he referred to Jack Lynch's ability to create an atmosphere of trust: "I suppose one of his many gifts was his capacity to reassure the public and to sort of persuade them that everything was in good hands, no matter how difficult things were. He also had that same capacity to inspire those around him with a feeling of reassurance." Being lauded by Charles Haughey for your capacity to inspire trust must be like having your sobriety praised by the late Oliver Reed or your chastity admired by Michael Douglas, but Haughey's words were loaded with irony.
For most of his listeners, they may have indicated that, such was Jack Lynch's goodness, his memory could inspire a moment of sincere truthfulness even in the outstanding hypocrite of our times. That same day, as it happened, the Moriarty tribunal was being told of documents dealing with the Fianna Fail leader's account being taken away from Government Buildings in Arnotts bags. It was claimed these records were not going to be passed on to Charles Haughey's successor, Bertie Ahern, just as Jack Lynch's records had not been passed on to Charles Haughey.
But the analogy seemed a little odd. Few people would be inclined to see the records of Jack Lynch's financial dealings as being at all comparable to those of his successor. Indeed, the very oddness of the analogy served to highlight the stark contrast between the two men who preceded the present Taoiseach as leaders of Fianna Fail. "Unhappy," wrote Bertolt Brecht, "the land that needs heroes." Unhappy, too, the land in which the death in old age of a decent, honest former Fianna Fail leader like Jack Lynch seems like an irreplaceable loss.
Jack Lynch's posthumous reputation would probably have been high in a normal society. In spite of his mistakes and failures, his role in pulling the Republic back from the brink of civil war in the early 1970s would be by any standards a historic achievement. But in the climate of scandal that has enveloped his successors, Lynch's reputation has been boosted by a sense, not just of who he was, but of who he wasn't. The mourning is for a great sportsman and a good politician, but it is also for a time before public life was infected with naked corruption.
At one point in his distinguished career, Jack Lynch encountered one of those moments that can destroy the credibility of a politician. It emerged in 1973 that he had been told when he was Taoiseach of the activities of Kenneth and Keith Littlejohn, two bizarre English adventurers who had links with British intelligence and who were eventually convicted of the armed robbery of the Allied Irish Bank in Grafton Street, Dublin. The problem for Lynch was that he had publicly denied any such knowledge. When it emerged he had in fact been briefed on the matter by the Department of Foreign Affairs, it seemed, in effect, that he had told lies.
When the contradiction surfaced, Lynch came out with his hands up. He had, he explained, been told about the Littlejohns, but he had, quite simply, forgotten. This lapse of memory was, he said, unacceptable in a senior politician and he realised he would have to consider his position as Taoiseach. And then an extraordinary thing happened. Almost at once, Lynch's explanation was broadly accepted. As for resignation, the almost universal attitude was that the man had made a mistake and, sure, couldn't it happen to a bishop? The crisis melted away and was quickly forgotten.
There are two ways of reading Jack Lynch's actions in this affair. One is to say he was just incredibly shrewd. He had understood what senior politicians seldom do - that more trouble usually results from denials, evasions and cover-ups than from the original offence. Instead of allowing an accusation to gather steam, he stopped it in its tracks by being the first to raise the possibility that he might have to go. The other reading is that Lynch emerged from what ought to have been a nasty scrape for the extraordinary reason that people believed him. Everything about him suggested a basic honesty. Since he was not a suspicious character, the public was not inclined to suspect his motives. Since he rarely forced people to doubt his integrity, they were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt when he needed it.
The chances are that each of these readings is broadly correct. Shrewdness and integrity are not mutually exclusive qualities. But the point is that no amount of smart political calculation would have worked without the basic sense of trust that clung to Lynch's public persona. It is that innate credibility which makes those days seem so impossibly innocent. Since Lynch's time, forgetfulness has ceased to be a quality that might cause a Fianna Fail leader to contemplate resignation, and has become, apparently, almost a necessary qualification for the job. It is not that Jack Lynch was a saintly, unworldly figure. He gave little indication of a burning passion for social justice or a blinding vision of social equality. He was not completely beyond the reach of big business. He accepted, for example, a round-the-world tour from Gulf Oil after it had opened its oil terminal in Bantry Bay. He accepted too, after his retirement, directorships of major companies such as Smurfit, Irish Distillers and Hibernian Insurance.
But no one ever had reason to suspect these ties to the business world influenced his conduct of public policy or that he would have imagined a political career as a path to riches. Yet there is, perhaps, a lingering suspicion in some quarters that Lynch's decency was really a form of weakness and that, conversely, Haughey's iniquity made him a tougher, more decisive leader. Some support for this view might be gathered from Lynch's apparent loss of control over his cabinet in the period before the arms crisis of 1970, the passivity and indecisiveness that allowed the plot to import arms to get to the point it did.
Lynch's inability to reverse direction when it became clear that the expansionist 1977 manifesto on which he won an unprecedented majority was a disaster might also be cited. But, while there is substance to both of these charges, they don't amount to a clear link between integrity and weakness. For one thing, it was Lynch, not Haughey, who won the decisive power struggle for the soul of Fianna Fail in 1970. Though Haughey subsequently regained power within the party, it was, on the crucial issue of Northern Ireland, on Lynch's terms.
For all the nationalist rhetoric he indulged in from time to time, Haughey, even as Taoiseach, never again went beyond Lynch's policy of seeking unity by consent. Conversely, we now know that Haughey's supposed economic toughness was all smoke and mirrors. His deep personal indebtedness to members of the business elite meant he was unwilling or unable to make them bear a fair share of the burden of economic adjustment in the late 1980s. He chose, instead, to hit soft targets - primary school children, the old, the sick and the handicapped. His apparent decisiveness was in essence a decision not to upset those who bankrolled his extravagant lifestyle.
How bitterly Fianna Fail must now regret the wider shift in its culture that happened when Charles Haughey replaced Jack Lynch. That change was not merely a matter of style or personality, though the contrast between Lynch's genuine courtesy and charm and Haughey's abrasive self-aggrandisement could hardly be greater. It was also about what does or does not remain at the end of a public life. In Lynch's case, what remains is the legacy of a State that stepped back from civil war.
In Haughey's, it is a series of buried landmines and hidden time bombs. One man's life is an open book, the other's a heap of lapsed memories, missing files and shredded diaries. Fintan O'Toole is at fotoole(at)irish-times.ie.
Previous Article
Post a Comment