Snakes and Ladders by Fergus Finlay, New Island Books, 340pp, £20/9.99
How quickly we forget. One of the services performed by this tour de force of a book by Dick Spring's former special adviser is to remind us, amid the current welter of tribunals and scandals, of the issues that inaugurated a new era in Irish public life: the PMPA, the Gas Company, the Beef Tribunal, Carysfort, the golden circle.
One extract from Finlay's account of the Beef Tribunal is instructive enough in this regard: "I gave the Tribunal a detailed account of cheques written to the benefit of a political party - who had written them, the dates and circumstances in which they were handed over, the amounts, the accounts on which they were drawn, and the people to whom the cheques were made out . . . As far as I know, the Tribunal accepted the information I gave them in good faith. What they did about it, I never found out."
Will we ever find out? Reminding us of the far-off days of 1992 is, of course, not this book's only purpose, and Finlay's aims are undisguised. He wants to set the record straight on Labour in government (and out of it). He wants, in particular, to defend Dick Spring's record, and that of his advisers, almost within the octave of a Labour leadership election in which the supposedly malign role of these advisers was a major issue. He wants to settle a few scores, which he does with good humour and piquancy rather than with dull resentment (it is both instructive and amusing to be told how trade union pressure was exerted on the Labour leadership to water down the property tax). And he wants to give readers whose only experience of politics is in the voting booth a worm's-eye view of the real pressures and dilemmas which politicians have to face, and which they so often successfully conceal from their electorates.
He does all of this in an easy, fluid style in a book that is peppered with the sort of telling detail - much of it revealed for the first time - that tells us how politicians work, think, and interact. He has a memory like a microchip and, as well as this, he opens up the even more shadowy world of the advisers and senior civil servants, so that the stage is suddenly richly peopled with characters, action and plots.
With Finlay, what you see is what you get. Unfazed by the rough antagonism of the party system, he can take relatively cool views of the protagonists. He has a good word or two for Charlie Haughey, whose initiative in starting off the peace process is often overlooked, as well as a few more pithy comments. He salutes Albert Reynolds as someone who led us to the IRA ceasefire, presided over the greatest economic recovery in Ireland's history, and over a government which introduced more legislative reform in a shorter period than any of his predecessors. At the same time, he analyses him as a man with an inferiority complex, whose "bottom line was respect, and he never felt he got enough".
In policy terms, the core of the book is the Northern question, and his accounts of the meetings between the Irish and British negotiating teams keep you on the edge of your seat, even though the broad outlines of what happened have been clear for some time. His defence of Dick Spring, on this and other issues, is informed by a kind of steely passion, and rings true. This is not to say that we now know everything: his account of the end of the Reynolds/Spring government still looks oddly like a jigsaw with a piece or two missing - pieces whose shape we cannot even now discern. Reading between the lines, it is at the very least evident that the divisions between the Labour members of the Cabinet on that occasion have been understated.
The appointments by Spring and Niamh Bhreatnach of close family members to temporary posts in their offices, which Finlay deals with in some detail, was, I believe, technically and administratively totally defensible. The problem was not that anything underhand was done, but that the political and journalistic brouhaha which ensued, and which was immensely damaging, might have been foreseen. It doesn't matter whether the fuss was a sort of back-handed compliment to Labour's ethical stance on these and other issues, or whether it was purely politically motivated. Maybe there are just some things you can't do when you're in power, however reasonable they may seem to you; some sacrifices you or your families have to make, for political reasons.
In a sense, as Finlay would probably be the first to admit, Spring has often been his own worst enemy, hiding his light (and his mordant sense of humour) under a bushel, when it was needed to illuminate a political landscape far beyond the closed doors of Iveagh House and the Northern Ireland Office.
His defence of the advisers is well done, too. He doesn't mind admitting, and giving details of, the times when he was wrong; but there were other times (e.g. the decision on the Orla Guerin Euro-nomination, driven by Dublin TDs who were even more out of touch with their own grass-roots than was the leadership) when at least some of them, Cassandra-like, warned in vain about the probable consequences of dangerous decisions. The fact that they aroused such ire at the time of the subsequent leadership election was probably due more to failures in internal party communication than to anything else.
One of the striking things about the book, given the party's capacity for internecine warfare, is that there are no Labour villains, apart from the Militants and (for a period) Emmet Stagg. The afterglow is suffused with a kind of benevolence, which is at the same time differentially distributed. There are encomia for some ministers and their advisers, notably Mervyn Taylor, Niamh Bhreathnach and Brendan Howlin (although I think the BTSB scandal is pencilled in all too lightly). On the other hand, Ruairi Quinn and Michael D. Higgins do not feature in quite the same light. And the McKenna judgment evokes a kind of petulance that is quite out of keeping with the rest of the book, and is probably an over-reaction to a situation that is more complex than any of the disputants in that debate care to admit.
While it may not be the full picture (how could everyone go into a cabinet meeting convinced that the tax amnesty was dead, only emerge a couple of hours later with it well on the way to the statute books?), it's as full a picture as we are likely to get for quite some time. For political junkies, it's a real page-turner. It is admirably succinct on the eternal dilemma about electoral strategy, which faced Spring and Finlay in its most acute form at the 1997 election. Then, they chose an honourable loyalty to the government rather than listen to the results of their own research, which showed them that they would be better off, in electoral terms, as an independent voice. The price they paid for that loyalty was a high one: democracy is sometimes a very blunt instrument.
In spite of that election, Spring and Finlay have left Ruairi Quinn a party in immeasurably better shape than the one Spring inherited in 1982, at once a challenge and an opportunity. In the end, as Finlay argues tellingly, it is character and judgment that make the difference between winners and losers, and this is where the battles of the future, like those of the past, will be fought.