Next week, RTE television will start a new series of its very enjoyable Reeling In the Years archive programme. It will deal with the 1990s and will begin, apparently, with the late Brian Lenihan's infamous "mature recollection and reflection" explanation for contradictions between his two accounts of whether or not he had attempted to lean on the former president, Patrick Hillery. That such moments are now becoming part of the nostalgia industry is particularly alarming for those of us who are attempting to fend off middle age. Yet, in a bleak way, we are right to feel nostalgic about those absurd times. Irish public life has now reached the point where even the Lenihan school of baroque evasion looks like searing honesty.
In 1990 the implosion of Brian Lenihan's presidential election campaign, when a statement he had made on television was contradicted by his own voice on tape, seemed like the end of certain forms of Irish political speech. Lenihan had always been, in Joe Lee's memorable phrase, "an amiable virtuoso of shadow language". He had prostituted his considerable intellectual gifts to become Fianna Fail's archwaffler, and learned to talk entirely in subjunctive clauses and conditional tenses. Interviewers found nothing but mist and vapour as they tried to grab hold of his fleeting meanings. His success was envied and, in times of crisis, copied by politicians of all parties.
So when Lenihan got inextricably trapped inside his own verbiage, it seemed that a deathblow had been dealt to all that hedging and prevarication and elusiveness. I wrote as much at the time. As it has turned out, I was right to think the shadow language would never be as powerful again, wrong to think it would be replaced by honesty. I should have known that truth is but one of the alternatives to evasion. The other one is barefaced mendacity.
Lenihan's mastery of fudge was built on a rather decent assumption - that you couldn't get away with telling straightforward lies. If the only way to answer was to admit something unpleasant or lie through your teeth, you used your well-honed skills to dodge. Now the assumption you can't be directly untruthful in public life seems unnecessary. If the shadow language has lost its usefulness, it's because the alternative of outright mendacity is no longer unacceptable.
The Hugh O'Flaherty saga throws up examples of downright untruths. It is possible that when they uttered them, the people involved did not realise what they were saying. But they have not apologised or issued retractions.
The first example is Charlie McCreevy speaking in the Dail on May 23rd on the Fine Gael motion condemning the nomination of the former Supreme Court judge to the European Investment Bank: "The position will also give Mr Hugh O'Flaherty the second chance which I believe every individual should afford his or her neighbour who has admitted they were wrong." Hugh O'Flaherty had not admitted he was wrong. On the contrary, though he accepted that his actions in the Sheedy affair were "inappropriate", he explicitly denied that they were "wrong".
Here he is speaking to Charlie Bird on the RTE News the night before his resignation:
Q: Are you contemplating resigning? A: No. Q: Definitely not? A: No. Q: Why not? A: Because I did nothing wrong.
Mary Harney on June 28th was asked by journalists about her earlier comments that the O'Flaherty affair would be forgotten in three or four months: "I never said that actually. I suppose if things could be accurately reported then one might have some chance of getting fair play." Mary Harney's precise words, recorded by RTE, were: "I would predict that three or four months from now, will anybody remember this?"
Then there is the Department of Finance, on August 13th, explicitly maintaining that there was "little danger" that the EIB board of directors would turn down Hugh O'Flaherty's nomination and denying that Charlie McCreevy had been approached by anyone from the EIB with a request to reconsider the nomination.
The first of these statements was blatantly untrue, since it was absolutely clear at that stage that nothing like a majority of the EIB's board was going to support O'Flaherty. The second may be technically true, but well over a month earlier, the EIB president, Philippe Maystadt, had written to Charlie McCreevy expressing concerns about the "publicity surrounding this candidacy" and "the possible implications for the bank". Only the niceties of diplomatic language stood between this and a direct request to nominate someone else.
Most extraordinary of all, however, is Charlie McCreevy's letter to his fellow EU finance ministers on July 26th. In it, he refers to Mr O'Flaherty as "Ireland's official candidate (who has been endorsed by the Irish Parliament)". It is scarcely credible that Charlie McCreevy did not know that this was a misleading statement. He himself had proposed (as an amendment) the motion passed by the Dail two months before.
Fine Gael had proposed a motion condemning the "appointment" of Hugh O'Flaherty. In reply, Charlie McCreevy could have put down an amendment "endorsing" the nomination. He did not do so. His amendment (subsequently passed) simply stated that Dail Eireann "notes the nomination of Mr Hugh O'Flaherty". No endorsement was sought or given. Contemporary reports, indeed, suggested that the Government had consciously decided not to seek an endorsement because the Progressive Democrats were too embarrassed to vote for it. Knowing all of this, Charlie McCreevy still went ahead and told all the other EU finance ministers in writing that the Oireachtas had "endorsed" O'Flaherty.
While there are some positive lessons from the O'Flaherty affair, one of the negative ones seems to be that senior politicians saying untrue things to the public is no big deal. These days, you don't even need mature reflection and recollection to get you out of trouble. You just carry on regardless.
fotoole@irish-times.ie