Scamdal 2

How we are played, in five easy lessons.

 

2. A LITTLE MORE PEE

It is 1990 and Ireland is in dire need of a makeover. The West Coast Americans are coming and we're can't stop singing 'ole ole' - for reasons nobody knows. Five things need to happen, and happen fast. 

A: the brazen brown envelope corruption has to be seen to be tackled, then replaced by a more restrained and universal corruption. 

B: the Troubles have to end. 

C: a corporate tax evasion scheme has to be put in place. 

D: the raw connection between priest and people has to be severed, without endangering the power and wealth of the corporate Vatican. 

E: a secular (neo)liberal priesthood has to be introduced to fill the void. 

 

All the above was done, with un-Irish efficiency, within a decade. For (A), see Scandal 1. (B) was a simple affair, directed from London. (C) was largely the brainchild of Athlone man Feargal O'Rourke, who invented the Double Irish, the largest tax evasion scheme in history. For (D), see Scandal 5. And (E) followed (D) when our new management class stepped into the priests' shoes, senior partners in financial services firms became alternative bishops and a select few senior counsel floated above it all in the gods, without even a plural to lower them to the level of popes.

This was the real Irish revolution, something that turned our society upside down like nothing since the famine. It could never have happened through our normal politics, which is grounded in the local. It could only happen through the emergence of a synthetic Cu Chulainn, or Boudicca. We would get our Boudicca, whether we liked it or not, following a normally insignificant election hyped beyond all logic. Her name was Mary Robinson. 

The great and the good came together in 1990 to get Robinson over the line for Dick Spring's Labour. Alan Dukes' Fine Gael ran the honourable co-founder of the SDLP Austin Currie, who would have had a poor chance of winning even if his party supported him - which it didn't. The party would agree a transfer pact with Labour, effectively making Robinson its candidate. Fine Gael, and later Fianna Fail, made a big to-do about the impeccably liberal Robinson's being a dangerous Red (she had defeated the properly dangerous Red Dr Noel Browne to win the Labour nomination). She would have struggled to defend an accusation of being a soft Unionist, as would her Fianna Fail rival Brian Lenihan (who had suggested that we rejoin the Commonwealth), but she never had to do it. 

Lenihan was a politician who'd been around a long time and appeared unassailable in the election thanks to the combination of instant recognisability and a recent liver transplant. The unravelling of that assumption began at a special tribute on The Late Late Show. His usual charm got lost amid a series of smug insider stories which raised more alarm than amusement. The public had a new set of doubts, but a scandal was needed.

The scandal came via the issue of whether or not it was the done thing for a Taoiseach and Ministers (including Lenihan) to put pressure on a President (Hillery) to not dissolve the Dail. The boys were most likely trolling a president who had famously taken a public stand against the Haughey mafia in 1971, but it became a serious and big deal when Lenihan insisted he hadn't done it when the evidence clearly showed that he had.

The set-up happened in October 1990, on RTE's political gabfest 'Questions and Answers'. The ex-Fine Gael leader Garret Fitzgerald, who had turned down the opportunity to run himself, came back from holidays in Italy to replace Currie's campaign manager Jim Mitchell on the programme. A plant in the audience, Young Fine Gael Chairman Brian Murphy (Leo Varadkar's future Chief of Staff), asked the question. Lenihan said he had ''no hand, act or part'' in pressuring Hillery. Fitzgerald did his exasperated honest guy thing, almost certainly knowing at the time that there was a smoking gun tape of Lenihan admitting the misdeed. It is hard to imagine that Lenihan didn't also know.

Lenihan had given an interview to a postgraduate student called Jim Duffy in May.  Duffy, a future adviser to Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny, had provided The Irish Times (which had declared early for Robinson) with the story and the paper ran it a couple of weeks before 'Questions and Answers' aired. Lenihan's campaign manager Bertie Ahern 'accidentally' namechecked Duffy and set off a great media kerfuffle, with everyone trying to be the first to collar the student. The lawyers stepped in, as they do, and advised Duffy to break journalistic etiquette in order to expose the breaking of political etiquette. 

After the tape was made public, Lenihan appeared with the soon-to-be government Press Secretary Sean Duignan on the Six One News, saying that ''on mature recollection'' he hadn't done it, honest. He looked into the camera and told the nation that ''I want to put my reputation on the line in that respect''. It was almost as if he wanted to be seen to be lying.

 Under claimed pressure from coalition partners the Progressive Democrats, the Taoiseach Charles Haughey drew up a statement of resignation for Lenihan from his job as Minister for Defence. He then sent a couple of loyal lieutenants down to darkest Athlone to persuade Lenihan to sign it. This did not go well. One of the lieutenants, Bertie Ahern, read the room at the Prince of Wales Hotel and scarpered. The other, Padraig Flynn, characteristically brazened it out, at least until Lenihan's sister and Minister for Education Mary O'Rourke told him to ''fuck off back across the Shannon''. Haughey then sacked Lenihan. 

It was at this point that Mary Robinson took off the Noddy mask [my uncle, who once threw our current President Michael D. Higgins out of a pub in Lisdoonvarna for disturbing the peace, always refers to Robinson as 'Noddy'] and bared her teeth. This would happen a few times more - when she tore into a reportedly terrified intruder for fishing inside the boundary of her new gaff, when she said 'feck that' and took an even posher job from the UN, and when she admonished a runaway princess for upsetting the patriarchy in Dubai. 

Sacked and humiliated, Lenihan's bid for the Big House was apparently in tatters. Then a wonderfully Irish thing happened ... nothing much at all. With a week to go, he had lost his big lead but still had a 50-50 chance of winning. 'Ah sure God love him' was holding its own with the righteous indignation.

But Pee Flynn wasn't finished yet. He might have followed Mary O'Rourke's direction and kept his head down for a bit in Castlebar. Instead he turned up in an RTE radio studio and attacked Robinson for ''her new look and her new hairdo and ... new interest in her family, being a mother, all that kind of thing''. The PD's non-TD party chairman Michael McDowell rounded on him and the rest is history. McDowell was officially in the Lenihan camp and his broadside inspired Robinson to quip: ''With enemies like McDowell, who needs friends?''

Enough of the conservative female vote switched to Robinson to get her elected. Riverdance - introduced to the world by a law graduate and a future barrister - was about to take a Tommy gun to Irish culture and it was all about to kick off. The Celtic Tiger was coming, Apple and Google and Pfizer, aircraft leasing and money laundering and bank bailouts, deregulation and legalisation and golf. It would be, and continues to be, a golden age for the common Irish parasite. 

For the record, the party leaders Haughey and Spring were barristers. The key players Fitzgerald and McDowell were barristers. The candidates Lenihan and Robinson were barristers. Bang Bang.