POLITICAL HISTORY: Fianna Fáil: A Biography of the PartyBy Noel Whelan Gill and Macmillan, 373pp. €24.99
IS NOEL WHELAN writing this history of Fianna Fáil as an insider or an outsider? His experience as a canvasser, candidate and worker at party headquarters informs his judgments. Manifestly he understands the party. He writes that he has carved out a niche “as a relatively independent political analyst in the media”. In this he is unfair to himself. His party background in Fianna Fáil helps to inform his understanding of Irish politics, but his judgments are offered here with all the clarity and independence that have earned him such respect as a political analyst.
His book is the best comprehensive history of a party whose provenance was remarkable: essentially it was the political vehicle to enable Éamon de Valera to revisit the Treaty negotiations and to incrementally fashion the sort of settlement that he believed he could have wrought from Lloyd George had he been at the negotiating table in the autumn of 1921.
As early as September 1922, in the midst of the Civil War, Éamon de Valera sketched out his blueprint for his future political path. In a letter to Joseph McGarrity he wrote that he could see “no programme” that would enable those who rejected the Treaty to secure independence except through “a revival of the Sinn Féin idea in a new form. Ignoring England. Acting in Ireland as if there was no such person as the English King, no Governor-General, no Treaty, no Oath of Allegiance.”
Within a decade, having been on the losing side in that Civil War, de Valera had created Fianna Fáil and had been democratically elected on just such a platform as he had outlined to McGarrity. It was a remarkable achievement in the history of democratic elections to witness power passing from victors to vanquished a mere nine years after the end of a civil war; it is a tribute to de Valera and also to WT Cosgrave and to both their parties.
De Valera was soon bewildering the British by perfecting what might be termed diplomacy by unilateral initiative. He set out on the path as outlined to McGarrity of rewriting the Treaty: he abolished the oath, ignored the king and so insulted the governor-general as to force his resignation.
Fianna Fáil knew how to play the green card. It prospered by becoming the effective custodian of Irish nationalism. It perfected a form of aspirational politics that caused no discomfort to an electorate that could easily embrace a number of agreed hypocrisies: the aspiration and expectation to unite Ireland despite the adoption of so many policies that were inimical to such an outcome; and the claim that one of the party’s fundamental aims was to replace English with Irish while many of the party’s most senior figures could not even speak the first official language.
Having morphed from Seán Lemass’s “slightly constitutional” party into a party of government in 1932, Fianna Fáil became so dominant for the next eight decades that it proved to be one of the most extraordinary political parties in western Europe; more than a party, it was a political movement that perplexed political scientists.
Perhaps one clue was in Lemass’s answer when asked why the Labour Party was so relatively weak in the Irish party system. Lemass replied: “Because Fianna Fáil is the labour party.” It was never replaced in government except by a coalition of other parties whose greatest bond was their antipathy to Fianna Fáil.
Noel Whelan covers the sweep of all of this Fianna Fáil history in a comprehensive narrative that quotes tellingly from the increasing number of memoirs, biographies and other books on Irish politics. These he exploits brilliantly, but readers may regret that he does not offer more of his own analysis and conclusions. When he does, his insights are original.
He is the first commentator, I believe, to refer, however obliquely, to a possible motive for the very surprising call by Charles Haughey for what many reckoned an unnecessary snap election in 1989. To expand the point, was it not the case that election campaigns provided significant opportunities for unorthodox fundraising and, as has been revealed in the tribunals, some senior figures in the party collected large sums during that 1989 campaign?
Whelan is also good on the emergence of individual fiefdoms and personalised machines by Fianna Fáil TDs, many of them regarded as little more than local franchises from party HQ.
It could be that such is the toxicity of Fianna Fáil that there may even be an aversion to reading about its history. This would be an error. The Fianna Fáil story is an extraordinary one and central to any understanding of Irish politics. The party established itself as the anchor tenant of the Irish party system, which it transformed into Fianna Fáil versus the Rest. This turned on the party’s core principle of never accepting coalition. Indeed the leader who broke with this tradition, Charles Haughey, was excoriated by some of the party faithful for embracing the heresy.
But once it had abandoned its virginity with the Progressive Democrats, Fianna Fáil became a promiscuous coalition partner, hopping into bed with Labour before renewing acquaintance with the PDs and then having its latest fling as a threesome when it invited the Greens to share power in the 2007-11 government.
This government proved so unpopular that the Greens lost all their seats and Fianna Fáil suffered the heaviest defeat for a major party since the eclipse of the Irish Parliamentary Party in 1918. Indeed Fianna Fáil proved such a toxic brand in the 2011 election that a third of those who voted for them in Dublin could not even come to admit it to RTÉ’s exit pollsters.
And the Fianna Fáil faithful – those of them who are left – can take little solace from Whelan’s concluding sentences. “It remains to be seen whether Fianna Fáil will be around to commemorate any more significant anniversaries. The omens are not good for its recovery.”
Micheál Martin may be in Lazarus territory. But he has one advantage: he knows the roots of the party and he understands its history. He could do worse than give his parliamentary party a Christmas present of Whelan’s book.
John Bowman is author of
De Valera and the Ulster Question 1917-1973
. His latest book is
Window and Mirror – RTÉ Television: 1961-2011
, published by the Collins Press
