Watching Irish politics over the past few weeks, a single question keeps coming into my mind: does Micheál Martin understand his own brand? Does he know that he is Taoiseach, not because of charisma or charm, but because people in general believe him to be straight and honest and innately decent?
It is deeply puzzling that he seems not to know this, that he has allowed himself to look so comfortable with grubby machinations and shady deals.
Fianna Fáil’s greatest asset is Martin’s aura of integrity. When the party was going under in the wake of the great crash of 2008, his personal reputation was its only lifeline. Its continued existence as a serious contender for power depended on there being a figure who had been there with Charles Haughey and Bertie Ahern and Ray Burke and Liam Lawlor yet somehow managed not to be subsumed within a culture of greed and graft.
If his air of aloofness is one of the drawbacks of Martin’s political persona, it also gave substance to the idea that he stood aloof from the world of backhanders and dig-outs.
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If this idea of Martin’s private character were not so potent, Fianna Fáil would probably have become a rump party and he himself would not now be Taoiseach. He was able to detoxify his party because no one really believes that the poison ever entered his bloodstream.
Yet, in allowing himself to appear as the creature of Michael Lowry he seems oblivious to the damage he is doing to his own character.
The only explanation I can come up with for this self-harm is a long habit of compartmentalisation. Much of Martin’s political life was spent in a great cloud of unknowing. In order to rise as far as he has done, he had to master the techniques of mental avoidance. He could not allow himself to see the corruption that was so flagrantly obvious to others.
A few years ago, a book came up for auction in Dublin. It was a copy of Haughey: Prince of Power by former Fianna Fáil TD Conor Lenihan. It was signed on the title page, not by the author, but by Micheál Martin. One might have thought that this joint appearance of two Fianna Fáil taoisigh would make this a collector’s item. But whoever got it signed was obviously happy to flog it off. And it fetched a miserable €15.
I think if I was Micheál Martin I’d have paid a lot more to buy the book myself and then burn it. It recorded, after all, the impressions of the author’s father, Brian Lenihan: “Haughey, he told me, had become ‘very venal’ in this his last period as Taoiseach. It was clear to him that Haughey was now cashing in on the success he had made of the economy. My father suspected that there was a considerable amount of money being pocketed by Haughey for his own ends.”
I would love to know what Martin thought when he read those words. Was he surprised to discover that Lenihan knew Haughey was cashing in? Did he reflect at all on his own apparent inability to see what was in front of his nose? Or did he blush at the memory of how, during all the years he served under Ahern, he managed to suppresses bad thoughts about all the venality around him?
It was not as though the question of ethical standards in Fianna Fáil never arose for Martin. Forty years ago this month, he sat in judgment on an alleged reprobate who was charged with “conduct unbecoming” a member of the party. Among the 90 members sitting on the national executive that night was the representative of the party’s youth wing, Ógra Fianna Fáil: Micheál Martin.
The accused was Desmond O’Malley. His unbecoming conduct was abstaining in a Dáil vote on an amendment to allow condoms to be sold without a prescription. Fianna Fáil was dead against what it characterised as “this liberalised, permissive, pluralist legislation ... for the promotion of advanced socialist thinking”.
It wished to uphold the existing regime, created by its then leader Haughey, that made Ireland the only country in the world where you had to get a doctor to give you written permission to buy a piece of rubber. That’s what morality meant to Fianna Fáil.
When the motion to expel O’Malley was put to the party executive, nine of its members had the courage to vote against it. But Micheál Martin was not one of them. He followed his leader and agreed, in effect, that condoms were more immoral than kleptocrats.
Asked in 2015 whether he regretted this, he replied: “Look, I’m not going there.” The furthest he would go was to concede that “I think historically and on reflection, all of those issues could have been handled better or differently but that’s for the history books and I’ll be writing my own memoirs and I’ll deal with all of that then”.
Those memoirs, if we ever get them, will be interesting. They will presumably tell us why he regarded O’Malley’s conduct as intolerably unbecoming but not Haughey’s or, later on, Bertie Ahern’s. They may even tell us how, in 2025, he managed to not find it personally unbecoming to be so beholden to Lowry.
But while we wait for the memoir, we are left to speculate. And in seeking to understand Martin’s apparent ignorance of the damage he is doing to his own reputation, we have to consider the effects of such a long immersion in the habits of evasion.
If you get so used to swallowing doubts about the shady stuff going on around you, perhaps they just become part of your staple diet, so familiar that you don’t bother to look at the list of ingredients.
It should be obvious that the Government needs Micheál Martin’s upright image much more than it needs Michael Lowry’s downright conceit. Unless, that is, you have made yourself very good at avoiding the obvious.
