Garret Fitzgerald

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Criticism
James Dooge, ed., Ireland in the Contemporary World: Essays in Honour of Garret FitzGerald (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1986); James P. Mackey & Enda McDonagh, Religion and Politics in Ireland at the Turn of the Millenium: Essays in Honour of Garret Fitzgerald on [...] His Seventy-fifth Birthday (Dublin: Columba Press 2003), 304pp.

See references to Fitzgerald in Fintan O’Toole, We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Ireland since 1958 (Head of Zeus 2021)

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Conor Brady, review of Reflections on the Irish State (IAP), in The Irish Times (16 Nov. 2002), p.10: ‘[FitzGerald] opens his first essay “Irish independence: rationale and timing” with an anecdote concerning A. P. Ryan, a distinguished journalist with the Times. In 1962, Ryan was one of a number of correspondents who came to Dublin to report on Ireland’s application to join the EEC. When he met FitzGerald, he recalled that when he was previously in Ireland as a young journalist, in 1920, Garret’s father Desmond, then Director of Publicity for the underground Dáil government, had sought to convince him of the case for Ireland’s sovereign independence. Now, paradoxically, Ryan observed, Desmond’s son was seeking to persuade him that Ireland should give up at least a portion of that sovereignty in order to enter Europe. / “When I later reflected on the challenge that A. P. Ryan had thus posed to me”, FitzGerald writes, I eventually became convinced that far from there being any contradiction between our demand for independence from Britain and our later accession to the European Community, Irish membership of the Europe.” Brady summarises the argument: ‘Had the 1916 rising not taken place, Ireland would have remained tied to the coat-tails of Britain’s dwindling economy, albeit with some rebalancing of wealth between the two islands. Our participation in Europe would not have been on the advantageous terms accorded to a sovereign state but those handed down to a region of the UK.’. He also takes notice of Fitzgerals’s concern with ‘the unusual demographics of the Irish state over the decades, the complex interdependencies and tensions between the churches and the political establishment, the oddities of the Irish party system and the bugbear of localism and clientism.’ [quoting Fitzgerald]

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R. F. Foster, Luck and the Irish: A Brief History of Change 1970-2000 (London: Allen Lane: 2007), quotes Fitzgerald’s remarks that from the 1960s Irish Catholic intellectuals like himself were more and more inclined to ‘do their own theology.’ (Ireland In the World: Further Reflections, 2006, p.230; Foster, op. cit., p.40.)

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Quotations
The ’RA (1): ‘[I]t took time for outsider observers to see that without the provision which postponed the start of decommissioning the IRA would never have allowed the Sinn Féin leadership to sign the Agreement. To have expected them to give way later on the very point on which their participation had depended was unrealistic.’ (‘What Happened to Good Friday?’, in London Review of Books, 2 Sept. 1999, pp.9-10, p.10.

The ’RA (2): ‘The at this stage the Sinn Féin leadership faces the fact that the strategy that they initiated almost a decade ago is about to run into the ground unless they can, reasonably soon, commit Sinn Féin and the IRA “exclusively to a peaceful path and an end to the existence of “the IRA as a paramilitary organisation” - to quote Tony Blair’s exact words. / It is encouraging that as recently as 10 days ago, on the Vincent Browne programme, Gerry Adams felt able to repeat that he envisages such a disbandment of the IRA as the eventual logical outcome of the peace process. [...] Because Adams and McGuinness will not lightly allow their decade of very hard work to prove fruitless, I am encouraged to believe that we may in fact now be much nearer to a successful outcome than many at this moment of discouragement believe. And I feel confirmed in that view by both the manner and the choice of language by Gerry Adams when interviewed by Vincent Browne last week. / Although necessarily constrained in that interview by the need to deny the criminal offence of IRA membership, and by the further need to retain his authority vis-a-vis his colleagues by not repudiating the quarter-century-long campaign of violence, nevertheless in that interview Adams sounded more like an emerging democratic politician - and, as someone remarked to me, more human - than in any previous encounter with the media.’ (‘SF will not allow its efforts to prove fruitless’, in The Irish Times, 19 Oct. 2002 [weekly column].)

Coping with Maggie: ‘[...] In initiating these negotiations with Margaret Thatcher in 1983-84 my objective was unambiguously to secure an outcome that would reverse the drift of nationalist support from the SDLP to Sinn Fein before it reached a level that might embolden the IRA to increase its violence to a scale that might precipitate a civil war in Northern Ireland . Such a reversal of political support might, I hoped, encourage Sinn Fein to realise the futility of their “Armalite and ballot box” strategy, and so to move towards the pursuit of their goals by exclusively democratic means. / We now know from Ed Moloney’s The Secret History of the IRA, and from Gerry Adams’s own statement shortly after the 1994 IRA ceasefire, that Adams had started to rethink his movement’s strategy just eight years earlier, in 1986; we also know, from an address by Sinn Féin spokesman Mitchell McLaughlin at University College Dublin several years ago, that the agreement was actually a precipitating factor in Sinn Féin’s initiation of the peace process. But this does not emerge from Jackson ’s reflections on its political impact.’ (The Guardian, 26 July 2003.)

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Slow Learners:The 4th John Hume Lecture was given by Garret FitzGerald [sic] at the MacGill Summer School, speaking on the theme: “Why did Irish history take so long, and where is it going?” In the course of his lecture, he said: ‘For 50 years, we had hugged our Southern grievance about the loss of “our” fourth green field, while showing remarkably little practical concern for the faith of those of our fellow nationalists who dwelt in that abandoned field. / Only the descent of the North into near-anarchy in the early 1970s forced us in the South, after several years of utter confusion, most belatedly to face reality. / In the North there were slow learners also. The unionist politicians and people sought to secure themselves against change by discriminatory and repressive policies that would eventually undermine completely their own moral position as a local, artificially contrived, majority. [... &c.]’ (The Irish Times, 19 July 2004.)

Unification?: ‘Need to reverse economic decline of North’ [in his column], The Irish Times (30 March 2005): ‘Even if political obstacles to Irish unification were at some time in the future to dissolve, the persistence of the present scale of financial dependence of Northern Ireland’s debilitated economy upon transfers from Britain would be likely to deter a majority of its people, whatever their political background, from abandoning the British connection. That is, of course, unless the people of the Republic were to agree to take over that burden. / And it seems to me certain that the Republic’s taxpayers would be unwilling to vote to accept responsibility for what would for them be a massive burden; one 15 times greater per head than that currently borne by the far larger number of taxpayers of Britain.’ [... &c.; see full text, infra.]

Political prisoners: review of Sean McConville, Irish Political Prisoners 1848-1922: Theatre of War (Routledge), in Guardian Weekly (10 April 2003), p.16, writes of Richard Hayes, med. Practitioner and later film censor, involved in battle of Ashbourne, 1916, who was transferred from Dartmoor to Maidstone with Desmond FitzGerald and Eamon de Valera, their feet chained together. Fitzgerald remarks that, while President, de Valera used ask him if his [Fitzgerald’s] father had been chained on his right or the left side, a ‘point on which, to his obvious distress, I could not enlighten him.’ Includes mention that George V, in an attempt to save the life of Terence McSwiney, wrote a follow-up telegram to Lloyd George departing from his usual third person and ending with the words ‘I still advocate clemency’.

Sheer gain: ‘Had it not been for the opening of the Eurpean market to Irish-made products as a result of EC membership, none of these advantages, natural or policy-created, could have produced the kind of economic growth that Ireland has experienced during most of hte period since the 1960s - running well ahead of that of the rest of Europe during most of this period. It was the availability of this European market that intially created the scale of demand for labour in Ireland that eventually became such an extraordinary feature of the 1990s ... has there been any economic downside to our membership? Whilst one can argue that the rapidity of transformation of the [20] Irish economy from by far the poorest in Northern Europe to one of the most prosperous in what is now the European Union has created some social stresses and strains, in purely economic terms it has been almost all sheer gain.’ (‘The Economics of EU Membership’, [quoted in] in Jim Hourihane, Ireland and the European Union, pp.79-80; quoted in R. F. Foster, Luck and the Irish: A Brief History of Change 1970-2000, London: Allen Lane: 2007, pp.19-20.)

1916 Rising: ‘Has the Rising of 1916 an enduring significance for Ireland [...]? [Is it] still relevant to the very different Ireland of today - and, if so, what is its relevance?’ (Quoted in call for papers for “Irish Society, History & Culture: 100 Years After 1916”, a conference to be held at the European University Institute (EUI] by the Scuola Normale Superiore - Università di Firenze/Dipartimento di Lingue, Lettere e Studi interculturali, Florence, Italy - 12-14 Oct. 2016. Keynote speakers are Prof. Kieran Allan (UCD); Dr. Seán Crosson (NUIG); Dr. Niall Ó Dochartaigh (NUIG); Prof. Peter Shirlow (Liverpool U), and Prof. Jennifer Todd (UCD),

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References
Princess Grace Irish Library Notice (2004): ‘Garret Fitzgerald has had careers in air transport, economic consultancy, university lecturing, journalism, politics and business. After graduating with a degree in history and modern languages and being called to the Irish Bar, the first twelve years of his working life were spent within the Irish national airline, Aer Lingus. At the age of 26 he became responsible for its economic planning, scheduling, and rates and fares.’ [See further, infra.]

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Notes
Kith & Kin: Both of Garret Fitzgerald’s parents, Desmond and Mabel, were in the GPO at Easter 1916. The couple, who eloped together, were from Kerry; Mabel later worked in [Louise] Gavan Duffy’s school in Dublin. The memoirs now published as Desmond’s Rising (2006), written in the 1940s, were discovered by Garret Fitzgerald among his parents papers in 1966. (See Books Ireland, April 2006.)

A Close Shave: Shaw wrote to Mabel Fitgerald, the mother of Garret Fitzgerald, in 1914: ‘As to devoting myself to Ireland, I doubt whether Ireland would at all appreciate my services [...] The place is too small for me.’ (See Dan. H. Lawrence, ed., Bernard Shaw, Collected Letters 1911-1925, Max Rheinhardt [1985], quoted by Bernard Share, reviewing same, in Books Ireland, Oct. 1985, p.169.)

Pricks & Prigs: Prof. John A. Murphy writes (The Irish Times, Letters, 6 Sept. 2006): ‘Madam, - For a mad moment there, watching the RTÉ interview with Dr Garret FitzGerald last Sunday week, I understood him to say he was “a good deal of a prick” in his younger days. And I thought, delightedly: what an endearing confession, what an admirable admission of human imperfection, and what an expression of the common touch.
 Alas, how disappointed I was to learn from your Corrections column (August 29th) that all he had said was “prig”. And how priggish and humourless it was of him to insist on the correction, and to remind us so huffily that “he would never use such language”. - Yours, &c., John A. Murphy, Douglas Road, Cork.’ (Posted on ir-d@jiscmail.ac.uk by Piaras MacEinri.)

Boston College, Mass.: Garret Fitzgerald (Chancellor/NUI) lectures on “Catholicism, the Gaelic Revival and the New State 1922-1949” at Boston College’s Connolly House on 3 March 2004.

New Ireland Forum: The Forum, inaugurated by Garret FitzGerald as Fine Gael Taoiseach, but latterly dominated by Charles Haughey (Fianna Fail) concluded on the basis of submissions that the most ‘desired option’ would be a 32-county state, followed by a federal arrangement and finally a joint-administration by Great Britain and the Republic of Ireland - the last-named having been proposed by Richard Kearney with Bernard Cullen. The response of Mrs Thatcher, as British Prime Minister, to the Report published in 1984 was her famous ‘out, out, out’ speech in which she successive ruled out the options presented by the Forum:

‘I have made it quite clear [...] that a unified Ireland was one solution that is out. A second solution was confederation of two states. That is out. A third solution was joint authority. That is out. That is a derogation from sovereignty. We made that quite clear when the Report was published. Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom. She is part of the United Kingdom because that is the wish of the majority of her citizens. The majority wish to stay part of the United Kingdom.’

In addition, several of those who submitted to the Forum deemed that their viewpoint had been overlooked - notably the McGimpsey brothers, Christopher and Michael. The Ulster Unionist Party responded to the Forum Report with a paper entitled The Way Forward (properly Devolution and the Northern Ireland Assembly: The Way Forward, 1984) which disparaged the Forum as a contradiction which lauded the principle of consent but denied it to the majority in Northern Ireland because there will was contrary to any of the proposed solutions mooted by the Forum or desired by the nationalists of Ireland. British politicians such as Jim Prior, the then Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, commended its appreciation of the principle of consent, its condemnation of violence, and its “attempt to understand Unionist identity” - but damned its proposed solutions. [See Wikipedia > New Ireland Forum - online; and not that Richard Kearney (q.v.) and Bernard Cullen were among those who made submissions to the Forum.]

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Namesake: Dr. Garret A. Fitzgerald is the Irish-born clinical cardiologist and pharmacologist whose tests and publications revealed that the companies Merck and Pfizer had marketted Vioxx and other COX-2 inhibitors aimed at reducing arthritis inflammation which had counter-effects on cardio-vascular health with particular risks to bypass patients. (See Irish Edition [US] , “[...] Whistle Blower, Summa Cum Laude” July 2005, p.6.)

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