That’s the headline over an extraordinary Editorial in today’s Irish Times as the paper contemplates the wreckage and humiliation that a corrupt and incompetent Fianna Fail administration has brought on my homeland.
IT MAY seem strange to some that The Irish Times would ask whether this is what the men of 1916 died for: a bailout from the German chancellor with a few shillings of sympathy from the British chancellor on the side. There is the shame of it all. Having obtained our political independence from Britain to be the masters of our own affairs, we have now surrendered our sovereignty to the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. Their representatives ride into Merrion Street today.
Fianna Fáil has sometimes served Ireland very well, sometimes very badly. Even in its worst times, however, it retained some respect for its underlying commitment that the Irish should control their own destinies. It lists among its primary aims the commitment “to maintain the status of Ireland as a sovereign State”. Its founder, Eamon de Valera, in his inaugural address to his new party in 1926, spoke of “the inalienability of national sovereignty” as being fundamental to its beliefs. The Republican Party’s ideals are in tatters now.
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Irish history makes the loss of that sense of choice all the more shameful. The desire to be a sovereign people runs like a seam through all the struggles of the last 200 years. “Self-determination” is a phrase that echoes from the United Irishmen to the Belfast Agreement. It continues to have a genuine resonance for most Irish people today.
The true ignominy of our current situation is not that our sovereignty has been taken away from us, it is that we ourselves have squandered it. Let us not seek to assuage our sense of shame in the comforting illusion that powerful nations in Europe are conspiring to become our masters. We are, after all, no great prize for any would-be overlord now. No rational European would willingly take on the task of cleaning up the mess we have made. It is the incompetence of the governments we ourselves elected that has so deeply compromised our capacity to make our own decisions.
They did so, let us recall, from a period when Irish sovereignty had never been stronger. Our national debt was negligible. The mass emigration that had mocked our claims to be a people in control of our own destiny was reversed. A genuine act of national self-determination had occurred in 1998 when both parts of the island voted to accept the Belfast Agreement. The sense of failure and inferiority had been banished, we thought, for good.
To drag this State down from those heights and make it again subject to the decisions of others is an achievement that will not soon be forgiven. It must mark, surely, the ignominious end of a failed administration.
Well, yes. But the problem is that there is no knowing what kind of electoral result will follow from this catastrophe. With a bit of luck, Fianna Fail’s run as a serious political party has finally ended, just as — in the end — Italy’s Christian Democrats imploded. But what then? Most of the Irish political establishment is implicated in the disaster that was the Celtic Tiger. One option is that public fury will erupt at the next election in a Tea Party-type explosion of incoherent activism, and Ireland will wind up with an administration rather like that of the Netherlands, in which a party of enraged, contradictory, xenophobic weirdos hold the balance of power.
And then there is the sinister news that Gerry Adams, sensing an opportunity, has decided to resign his seat in the Northern Ireland Assembly to stand for the Dublin parliament.
LATER: In a discussion on RTE Radio this evening, the former Taoiseach, Garret Fitzgerald, made an ironic point — reminding listeners that the revolutionaries whose insurrection in 1916 eventually led to the founding of the Republic were also hoping for German aid!