It amazes Macdara that our Tánaiste is only 63, since he seems to have been hanging around the Cabinet since the middle of the last century, and in all honesty could pass for 83; put him next to Biden and you have to wonder which is which. What must a man of such lengthy service think when he reflects on his total lack of accomplishments? Unusually for someone of his party, Macdara gets the sense that Martin might actually be embarrassed by the paucity of achievement in this career for which he has been so handsomely remunerated. The present writer recalls being told by a colleague many years ago that she would vote for Fianna Fáil to get a Cork taoiseach. This was thirteen years before Martin actually became taoiseach, which speaks to the strength of the nasty localism that always drags Irish politics into the nearest pothole.

Let us be clear that Martin shares in one singular achievement of historic scale: the Partionist Party crashed the economy to an extent that is barely credible. Then decided to take on the greatest debt per capita in history in order to pay off bondholders, that is, those entities that had taken on the risk of Irish debt, risk for which they had been awarded higher yields. This extraordinary act of theft, of vandalism, of improvised redistribution, by our Government gave rise to a fraction of the Anger that it should have generated. A cowed population witnessed a Cabinet turn to drink while lying about the IMF being in the country, even as the IMF made statements about having arrived, and its employees were pictured walking into Government buildings. 

Martin was a member of that Government. He took part in every appalling decision. People like him might imagine that those of us on the Left are Idealists, but our dream of redistribution is so much more worldly than the flighty and extreme act that Martin took part in, and yet so much less likely to happen. This violence against the Irish people was committed from a grotesque desire to appease the adults of the world: the representatives of Imperialism. Martin sat at the Cabinet table when they decided, in the face of all available facts, that they should hand over our money—generations’ worth of our money—to strangers who have no regard for us and who were not even expecting to be paid. All so these distant and obscure figures would not be disappointed in us. 

Martin studied history at a time when revisionism—that is, hostility to anti-imperialism—dominated Irish historiography, which is why Macdara only did one year of History in his undergrad degree: seeing one of the chief revisionists bounding into the departmental office to order some champagne was enough to cement the decision. These people decry all attempts to end Imperialism, preferring to dote upon the benefits lavished upon us by the English Empire, notwithstanding the fact that certain benefits, like an education system, were provided when the English realised that they could be instrumentalised for imperialist purposes, and that others, such as the eventual excision of the vampire landlord class (for which they were compensated), were won through anti-imperialist activity and not by virtue of some miraculous change in the mindless vacuum of Westminster. Martin has therefore managed to be leader of a State of which he is ashamed; for people like him, the State can never rid itself of the stain of its Inception: the fact that violence was required in order to rid (some of) the country of Imperialism. 

This shared shame binds the various factions of the Partionist Party together, and it must therefore have been easy for Martin to enter into a confidence and supply arrangement with Fine Gael after a two month pantomime. Easy from there to go into a coalition with his best enemies for life, dragging in the gormless Green Party as well, leaving only the remnants of the Labour Party as the sole friendly faction of the Partionist Establishment not officially in Government, though we must not forget the dolly-mixture bag of independents that have been kicked out of each branch of the Partionist Party but have cultivated enough connections locally to remain in Teach Laighean forever, selling their support to their old friends.

In his brief period as taoiseach before handing over to Varadkar, Martin notably lost two Ministers for Agriculture in the space of two months; so weak was the selection of people available to him that he replaced a drunk-driver with a lockdown-breaking golfer. Both of these trash men were sons of former TDs who had floated up to drift in lower-ranking Cabinet positions; one was also the brother of a former taoiseach. It occurs to Macdara that we might celebrate Martin for at least not having inherited his Seat.

Let us carry on in this spirit of faint praise: Martin supported adopting extremely restrictive abortion provision in time for the referendum, never having previously supported reproductive rights at all. Some may feel that this shows a minimum level of personal courage or integrity; Macdara’s view is that this was a move made in the knowledge that the Yes side would win. In fact Martin presided over a party that, as always, acted as its own opposition, as party members were permitted to choose a side. The fact that the majority of the parliamentary party supported No would allow Martin to say, in certain contexts, that Fianna Fáil was a party of No, while at other times he could boast that he was a Yes man, although he was proud to say that he was “pro-life” as well as pro-choice. 

Oh yes the smoking ban, he introduced that. Macdara at first thought it was the plastic bag tax, but no it was the other one of the two good but very basic ideas that the Partionist Party had in the early years of this century, and for which it expects constant admiration and praise. One tiny thing to put on the scales in Martin’s favour, against the weight of a lifetime’s inutility.