Address by John Bruton TD, leader of Fine Gael, to the Fine Gael Ardfheis in the RDS, Dublin last Saturday.
Lord Mayor, colleagues, fellow delegates, ladies and gentlemen:
You know, we thought it had gone away. But sadly, it hasn't. It is grotesque to discover that a former Taoiseach was in hock to a small number of wealthy benefactors. It is unbelievable, surely, to think that the most cunning and devious of the said former Taoiseach's colleagues could remain all that time blissfully unaware of anything that went on.
It is absolutely bizarre to see a former Minister, and our most important ambassador in Europe, talk loosely and freely on The Late Late Show, and then thereafter refuse to answer even the simplest of questions. But sadly, friends, it may be all of those things but it's certainly not unprecedented.
When we last gathered at an ardfheis we had 47 seats. Now we have 54. We have a younger parliamentary party than we have had for many years, and our party continues to grow. This year our party membership is up by 30 per cent on what it was 12 months ago, reaching its highest level for nearly a decade.
The challenges for Europe in the new century will be:
to preserve peace
to remain dynamic, despite having a gradually ageing population, and to ensure that every person counts when it comes to distributing the benefits of prosperity
We can preserve peace, if Europe looks on the world with eyes of tolerance. But Europe must also be able to defend itself too. We cannot expect others to do that for us.
Europe can stay dynamic if we face up to the intense speed of economic change. The combined effect, of a single price in a single currency, with immediate communication of information over the Internet, means that there is no hiding place for inefficiency left anywhere in the world. That is why, in economics, we put the emphasis on freedom, opportunity and education, not on controls, quotas or unrealistic rights.
But, equally, we can make sure that every person counts by putting people at the centre of our political action. That is why for Europe, and for Ireland, Fine Gael sets the objective of realising the full potential of each person, whether it be through family life, through voluntary work for others, or through paid work.
That is the distinctive contribution of Fine Gael and the European People's Party. Our focus is on the whole person, not just on economic man or economic woman.
Let me come closer to home. For the last few weeks in the Dail we have been facing a Government that is in tatters. A coalition Government where trust has evaporated. Mary Harney must realise by now that every time a new query blows up about Fianna Fail and money, she is going to find out something new about the Taoiseach, something that he hasn't told her, something new about the Taoiseach that he's been hiding from her.
The Tanaiste may dither on the future of this Government. But she had the courage once before to say enough is enough, when she and Des O'Malley walked away from Charles Haughey and Fianna Fail. I have no doubt that when the time comes she will do it again. Bertie Ahern never took that sort of courageous stand. He always stayed on the Haughey team - close to the Boss. Now he is paying the price. If the Taoiseach ever publishes his memoirs, I think the title should be "Changing Recollections", because he changes his memory so often. And I suppose we can all see that the present Taoiseach does not handle a crisis very well. He is literally all over the place. This present Government can never give us genuinely accountable politics in Ireland. This Government can never give us the sort of leadership on common values that this society needs as it enters the next millennium. Accountable politics is not just about having politicians talking all the time on television, or giving soundbite answers to soundbite questions. Accountability means having an identifiable individual who is willing to take the blame if things go wrong, and entitled to the credit if things go right. In this Government, nobody is willing to take the blame, ever, for anything.
No one is even willing to ask the hard questions. Unlike Jim Mitchell, our chairman of the Dail Public Accounts Committee. Let me give you a few examples.
Minister Mary O'Rourke: she sacks the members of the board of one of our biggest companies, Telecom Eireann, and then, the following morning, in all innocence, goes on radio to explain that of course she didn't really want to get rid of the members of the board at all but consultants had told her that was what she should do! Consultants! I ask you. Who is running the country - Ministers or consultants?
Let me turn to another Minister, Brian Cowen - the Tyrannosaurus Rex of Tullamore - all sound and fury but soon to be extinct. Well this gentleman is having trouble, or thinks he is having trouble, with the financing of a newly merged hospital in Tallaght.
Does he sit down and discuss the problem with the board and management and see if they can work out a solution to the problem? No, he too uses consultants, and a selectively leaked version of the consultants' report, to undermine the hospital, to undermine its management and board, and to poison relations between the hospital and the Department of Health. That is not accountable Government. It's not fair government and it's not good government.
Another example. Irish agriculture is facing its worst crisis in years. The Minister for Agriculture, Joe Walsh, is sleep-walking. He too takes refuge in consultants. He has asked advisory groups of vested interests to tell him what he should do. He is giving no leadership. He is just fighting a rearguard action, and has no agenda of his own at all, for the future of Irish agriculture. It's a shame.
But these Ministers are just following the example that they get from higher up. Because higher up from those Ministers there's an unwillingness to take the blame too, and if people at the top are not willing to take the blame you can hardly expect people lower down to start doing it.
Take the most notable example of passing the buck - the dealings between the leader of Fianna Fail, Bertie Ahern, and his party colleagues Charles Haughey, Ray Burke and Padraig Flynn.
Bertie Ahern has never, personally and face to face, asked any one of these three people to account for themselves, to account for what they did, or what they may have taken from the party that Mr Ahern now leads, and of which for a long time Mr Ahern was the party treasurer. He passed the buck each time.
Mr Ahern never in his life asked a hard question of Charlie Haughey, either as his subordinate or as his leader. Bertie Ahern never asked Ray Burke the direct question about whether he got a donation, before he appointed him Ireland's Minister for Foreign Affairs. All he did was send an ill-informed deputy off to London on a fool's errand. Now if you send a dog to bark up a chestnut tree, you shouldn't be too surprised if apples don't fall on his head!
When allegations about Mr Padraig Flynn arose, the Taoiseach again donned his familiar earmuffs, so he couldn't hear anything, his eye-mask so he couldn't see anything, and his muzzle so he couldn't say anything. He just doesn't have the courage to ask anyone a direct question, ever, and it's not good enough.
He just let the general secretary of Fianna Fail send a letter off to Mr Flynn, a letter which broke new ground, in the sugary, sweetly worded way in which it begged not to be answered. It was about as convincing, this letter to Mr Flynn from the general secretary, a demand for information, as a tax assessment sent in a Valentine's card.
Padraig Flynn was of course met by the same Bertie Ahern six times since this question of the £50,000 came to public notice and on not one of those occasions did Mr Ahern ever dream of asking him about the £50,000 which apparently belongs to the party which Mr Ahern now leads. He just couldn't bring himself to ask a straight question. That's not accountability and it's no wonder that other Ministers are passing the buck when that's the example they get.
This Government does not understand that accountability is hard because taking the blame is hard. Accountability is often embarrassing. Accountability is confrontational sometimes. Accountability can disrupt personal relationships. But without accountability, you do not have genuine democratic politics in Ireland at all.
And while this Government sinks slowly in a sea of denial and amnesia, the day-to-day problems in many people's lives are slowly getting worse.
Despite the vast resources at the Government's disposal, in four key areas of quality of life, traffic, housing, childcare and health, things are far worse now than they were eighteen months ago when this Government took office.
Fine Gael has published detailed plans to impose solutions to the traffic problem by an aggressive promotion of cheap, clean, efficient and well financed public transport, buses and trains. We have plans for more taxi licences and more buses, more and quicker trains, and more "park and ride" facilities at the outer edge of cities.
For Fine Gael, public transport comes first. It must be operated through full competition. No monopolies. But it also deserves to be subsidised.
In the next 12 years we will have to provide four additional houses in Ireland, for every 10 houses we have today to provide for population growth. We have never had to do anything so ambitious before. It will be costly. A national policy is needed if we are to provide these houses and at the same time not allow house prices to go so out of control as to choke off our economic growth.
And it is families we will have to house - not just adults. A child takes up as much space as its parents, and that space is expensive. Fine Gael believes that the limit on mortgage tax relief, granted to a borrower who takes out the loan, should be increased for each person - child or adult - who is being accommodated on the basis of that mortgage. That extra mortgage tax relief for children will help the families for whom mortgages and child care create a heavy burden.
House prices are a function of supply and demand. Demand is going to continue to rise. Supply of houses must therefore be increased. We need a national policy to service and develop new land for housing. We need more homes per acre, and we need to provide quick and reliable public transport to those new housing schemes.
We need to develop cities, outside Dublin, to relieve the pressure on Dublin, which is now becoming chronically overcrowded.
All our existing houses are not being occupied to the full. We should have incentives to release more second hand houses on to the market.
The delay in deciding planning applications is driving house prices further upwards. Under this Government, the time taken to decide a planning appeal has increased from four to five months and is lengthening rapidly. Planning appeals should be decided within two months.
HOW we get around, and where we live, are largely physical issues. Much more important is the emotional issue of how we care for our families - our children, our parents, our neighbours and friends - in health and in sickness.
I am not going to tell you that we can wave a wand, and produce limitless millions of pounds to throw at these issues. Every penny we will spend on children, or on health, has to be taken up in tax from someone.
We have to be focused, and we have to be fair. First, childcare. Two-thirds of our recent extra prosperity in Ireland has come from more women going out to work. The high cost of houses, and the high cost of mortgages, often require that both parents go out to work. As I said, we will have to build many more houses, and someone will have to pay for them.
Yet all children must be treated equally, whether they be in paid childcare, or being looked after at home by a parent, a grandparent or other relative. Paid childcare should not be privileged over unpaid childcare or vice-versa. The family should have the resources to pursue the choice they make.
In addition to our proposal to give direct help to the most hard-pressed families by increasing mortgage tax relief to take account of each child, the fairest thing to do is to increase Child Benefit dramatically. Child Benefit goes to all mothers equally - to mothers at home and to mothers at work. It can be used for paid childcare. Or it can be used for food and clothing. It can be used for whatever the child needs.
Fine Gael believes that Child Benefit for children under five should be increased by £12 a week, to £20 a week. That will cost £316 million in a full year. A huge commitment. But our children deserve it. And it is fair to all children. It does not distort the choice of parents. It recognises that all families are different. It focuses first on the needs of children, and second only on the economic needs of adults.
Second. There is a crisis in the health service. In the last six weeks of last year, poor management resulted in 16,000 bed days being lost in closed wards in hospitals. Last year, financial planning failed, the money ran out, so beds stayed empty, and doctors and nurses remained idle on a half-pay basis, while waiting lists got longer and longer.
Even now, operations are postponed all the time, because hospital beds are being taken up by people who need not be there.
We will manage money properly throughout the year, to end needless ward closures. We will provide step-down beds for elderly patients, to free up acute hospital beds for those in need of operations. We will implement a new Patients' Charter, which will ensure that patients are seen by a consultant within a minimum time frame.
In short, we will use resources properly, and we will put the patient first. Let me turn now to another problem. Irish agriculture is in crisis. A short-term crisis. And a long-term crisis. The short-term crisis is one of suddenly falling incomes, starving animals, and personal tragedy for some families. The long-term crisis is in the fact that young people are not willing any more to enter farming at all as a full-time occupation. Not willing to invest their lives and skills in an occupation that depends on cheques-in-the post dependent on the goodwill of fickle European taxpayers.
This Irish Government has no plan for agriculture. Neither a short-term plan, nor a long-term plan. Its sights are set too low. It is being driven by pressure groups and press deadlines. I believe we need a short-term plan that provides emergency aid for farmers, that develops rural jobs, and that provides a reasonable income for the present generation on the land. But we also need a long-term plan. We must attract young people into full-time farming.
I refuse to accept the prevailing orthodoxy that says that Irish farmers and land will never be capable of producing premium quality food, at costs or a price that can compete with anywhere in the world. I refuse to accept that.
A huge effort, of course, is needed. We must make that effort because farming is a profession, and there must be a place in Ireland for farming that is full-time, well remunerated, highly skilled and capable of beating the world. Ireland has been a spectacular economic success. Part of the credit for that must be shared by every party in Dail Eireann. But if our success is to continue, we must tackle long-term problems now.
FINE Gael's strength, as a party, is in its ability to look beyond today's problems. To see the trends that are coming up, the injustices that are emerging, the inefficiencies that are creeping up on us. As a parent of young children, I want to make Ireland a place where my children, and their children, will want to stay to live, and to bring up their children in turn.
To do this we must renew the contract between politicians and the Irish people. We must agree a new set of values for doing the nation's business. Politics is not just about administration. It is about beliefs. A state will only function well, when its citizens have shared beliefs. Shared beliefs are what constitute patriotism in any country. As we enter the new millennium, Ireland needs to build a new patriotism, for the new realities of life. That must be our mission now.
This new patriotism is needed at this time, because the context of Irish life has been changed by three things:
The Good Friday Agreement
Ireland's entry to the euro, and the aftermath of the current scandals.
The Good Friday Agreement calls for a new definition of patriotism, different from the patriotism of 1916, different from the patriotism of the 1960s. That agreement has been endorsed by a larger majority of people on the island of Ireland than any arrangement ever before. The majority in 1998 far exceeded the 47.5 per cent obtained by the old Sinn Fein in the historic 1918 election.
That vote on the Good Friday Agreement creates a new reality on the island of Ireland that must influence the way we think, and the way we look at one another on the island.
As a result, that Irishness and our sense of patriotism must now, for the first time, include all the people of this island, the people of Bangor and Ballymena, as much as the people of the Bogside, of Ballyshannon and of Ballinamore - include them all, as they see themselves, not as we wish them to see themselves.
I know that, two weeks ago, all Ireland was united in supporting the Ulster rugby team when they won the European Cup. That is the easy part of building a shared identity on the island. That's hard, but it has to be done.
The hard part is when we have to say that we regard unionists and nationalists as equal in our eyes, that we regard David Trimble as much "one of our own" as we do John Hume and Seamus Mallon.
Ireland's entry to the euro means that Irish politics and Irish finances are now an expression of European politics and European finances. Europe is not out there. We are now Europe. A new patriotism for Ireland must give us the commitment to make Europe work, to make it work for others, and to make it work for ourselves.
Politics, at the end of the day is about values. Albert Camus, the French philosopher, once wrote: "If you do not have principles, you must have rules." Each day now, the tribunals reveal that the financial and political scandals of the late 1980s happened because many people, highly paid professional people as well as businessmen and politicians, let them happen.
The values, the principles, that should have induced them to shout stop were absent. Absent among them all. People knew, but did nothing. It is not enough now to pass laws. It is not enough now to scapegoat individuals. Unless we replace the culture, the values, and the principles that allowed those people to turn a blind eye to what was going on from 1987 onwards, that sort of scandalous behaviour will happen all over again. It will happen all over again, no matter how many tribunals we have today.
When I say we want to create a new patriotism in Ireland, I mean that we must create a new set of values for our society, values that people will follow because that is what is expected of them socially, because they would not even think of doing business in another way, and not just because it is demanded by the law. In short, a new patriotism in Ireland is about the way each person treats every other person in Ireland. Obviously, a new patriotism means that those who go into politics should do it to serve the country, and not to serve themselves. A new patriotism also means being honest about problems - saying the hard thing, as well as the soft thing. A new patriotism means saying that our current domestic prosperity is fragile. If we price ourselves out of jobs the multinationals who arrive so quickly can leave equally quickly.
A new patriotism means being honest about the fact that our waste problems, our water quality problems and our environmental problems can only be solved if money is spent and everybody including householders may have to contribute some of that money.
A new patriotism means having the courage to say that you cannot really, in the long-term, have a political party sitting at a cabinet table here, or in Belfast, if that party is associated with an organisation that is holding illegal arms - arms like the one used to murder Garda Jerry McCabe.
How long could a coalition in the Dail last if one of the parties in the cabinet had a private army? We hardly expect different standards to apply in the long-term in Belfast.
It is only by first being honest about problems like this, that we can ever solve them. Pretence that there is a risk-free, pain-free solution to all these dilemmas, ensures that they will never be solved. Our party is willing to raise the hard questions.
A new patriotism also means having a society in which people are treated equally by the state. That must start with taxation. Are we really treating people equally, when we tax capital gains at just 20 per cent, and tax income from work at 45 per cent? When we have a different waiting list for people on health insurance? When we have a longer wait for people on a medical card for an operation to save their lives, when somebody who is paying for their health in a different way? Do we really treat people equally when we spend so much per student on professional education, and so little on primary education to ensure that people have a decent competence in the skills they need to live before they leave school?
A new patriotism will also require us to change the way in which we live our lives, as individuals, families and communities. Patriotism is not just about the state, or about what the state does, says or demands. A state can only exist, if there is a consensus of values underpinning it. A new patriotism requires us to look critically at how our values are changing as prosperity accelerates. Prosperity has brought much good in its wake. The grinding hardship of the 1950s is gone.
Prosperity has also brought a new tolerance and a new openness. The harsh uniformity, the moralistic strictures, the hidden sadnesses, of the 1950s are not so evident today. Things are out in the open.
Now there are no secrets, but is anyone really listening to anyone else? We may no longer condemn what other people do, but is that because we understand them better, or just because we no longer care? For 150 years, religion helped people to tolerate the intolerable in this country. It made them passive, when they should have been questioning. But it did remind them that there are more important things to life than money, power and status. Marx believed religion was the opium of the masses, and that the only things that mattered were material things. The neo-liberals of global capitalism believe much the same. Both are wrong. There is more to life.
Let me tell you why I think that it needs to be said from political platforms, just as much as it needs to be said in a church, or a mosque, or a synagogue in Ireland. The Alone organisation estimated that, last Christmas, 80,000 old people spent Christmas on their own, with nobody calling and nobody asking them how they were, nobody making them feel special. I visited Mountjoy recently. I was told the story of a young woman, a mother of a small child, released from Mountjoy in early December. On release she found herself to be homeless. On Christmas Day she arrived at the gates of Mountjoy, asking to be let in. It was the only place she could think of where she would get warm accommodation, warm food and a reasonable reception on Christmas Day. No one else was bothered with that young mother.
David Rose, an English journalist, also had a comment on values here, when he wrote about the Irish reception for tourists.
"Not quite rude, but almost," he wrote. "Brusque; businesslike; pressed for time; keen to get on to the next customer."
But that is one side of the story. A story we can change. Because a new patriotism already exists, in the lives of many of our people. Special Olympics Ireland, for example, is a massive voluntary army of people helping those with learning disabilities to achieve great excellence in athletics.
I saw new patriotism at work when I visited Dromcollogher, Co Limerick, where the community council has built an enterprise centre, social houses and a day care centre for the elderly in the village. Now, they're going to build a retirement home. Special Olympics Ireland and the Dromcollogher Community Council are examples of new patriotism already at work in Ireland. New patriotism that can replace the selfishness that may otherwise take over. A new patriotism is about how people treat other people. How they trust them, how they respect them. Where do we learn this? Is it from books? No. Is it from our parents? Yes.
Families pass on values to the next generation. Families are the cement of society. The trouble is that families are under increasing stress in modern Ireland, and there is a risk that the institution that teaches us how to respect other people is losing its force. Families need long-term cultivation and commitment. Long-term commitments are often undervalued by the relativism of modern social commentary. The State alone cannot take over all responsibility for children. It needs strong families to be able to do their share. The State alone cannot impart values of care and commitment to the next generation. It needs strong families to do their share.
The State alone cannot provide guidance, stability and identity for children. It needs strong families to do their share. It is because of my belief in the importance of families to this country that I set up with Proinsias De Rossa the Commission on the Family - to think of how best we can support families, based on long-term commitment, into the new millennium.
It was for the same reason that I supported a referendum giving separated persons the right to remarry, because I believe marriage, based on a real commitment, is a good environment in which to bring up children. I think it is wrong, in principle, that our social welfare code would ever penalise people for getting married, which is something that it frequently now does.
A new patriotism for Ireland requires us, above all, to do one thing - to think. We need to think about the long-term effects of the things that we are doing today. We need to ensure we are the masters of change and not the victims of change. We need also to think about the effect the current instability in Government is having on our future. This Government is unstable. It is sitting on the edge of its seat, tense and anxious, waiting for the next scandal to hit it. It is not in charge. And it is not in charge because trust has broken down between the two parties.
This is history repeating itself. Fianna Fail simply cannot work in a coalition. They do not really want to be in a coalition. They walked all over their coalition partners in 1992. They walked all over their coalition partners in 1994. And now, for the last six months, they are doing it all over again, not telling the Tanaiste the truth, keeping her in the dark.
That is not the way I worked when I was Taoiseach in the three-party government of 1994 to 1997. While I was Taoiseach, the three parties treated each other as equal. We shared our problems. As a result, we were the first coalition government in years to face the people united. We provided good government.
I want this party to be ready. Ready for a general election. Ready to help give this country a good, honest, stable government again. Ready to lead this nation to a new understanding of itself, to a new peace with itself, a new sense of its place in Europe. Ready for office. Ready for victory.