Garret FitzGerald is ill...

[BonnieShels]

I don't work on hyperbole. However through the FG grapevine I've heard things aren't great.

I don't want to turn this into some revisionist.mecca, however I feel as the the most influential taoiseach since le mass we nerd a thread...

[bennocelt]

I don't work on hyperbole. However through the FG grapevine I've heard things aren't great.

I don't want to turn this into some revisionist.mecca, however I feel as the the most influential taoiseach since le mass we nerd a thread...

Well try not to do it yourself then!

[shantykelly]

I think Haughey was a lot more influential, it's just that his influence was all bad and helped foster a culture of economic insanity, greed, and dishonesty that was brought to fruition by his lieutenants.

Edit: In saying that, and despite my personal dislike of Fitzgerald and all things FG, I wish him all the best.

[The Fly]

By strange coincidence, there are rumours circulating that Margaret Thatcher is also gravely ill.

[DannyInvincible]

Where have you been hearing this? I can't find anything on it.

[The Fly]

I read it on another site, which relayed the rumour from twitter earlier today.

After a great deal of searching I can't find anything further on it either, so I'd say it may be a hoax. Although I do recall that she was unable to attend the royal wedding because of ill-health.

[DannyInvincible]

I see the rumour has really taken off on Twitter this evening. Some saying she has already died with the story originating in "London media circles", apparently.

[BonnieShels]

www.isthatcherdeadyet.co.uk

[BonnieShels]

Well try not to do it yourself then!

Note the time. Nothing like a bit of Heineken to get the revisionist juices flowing.

[BonnieShels]

Dr FitzGerald died this morning after a short illness. We'll never see his like again. RIP

[Spudulika]

RIP Garrett, will be sanitised a la Haughey, but was never cut out for politics, at least in the Dail. Good man, clever and will be missed.

[brendy_éire]

Whilst not his biggest fan, he made a great contribution to the peace process. The New Ireland Forum didn't really work, but the signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement really kick-started the peace process. From then on the south was consultued on the north and forced Britain to realise that the problem of Ireland couldn't go away without some sort of dialogue and comprise with the south, and ultimately, northern nationalists.

I think we should all be grateful to him for that.

[BonnieShels]

RIP Garrett, will be sanitised a la Haughey, but was never cut out for politics, at least in the Dail. Good man, clever and will be missed.
never cut out for politics? Minister for Foreign Affairs, led us into the EEC, was Taoiseach on two occasions over 6 years, negotiated and signed the Anglo-Irish agreement ensuring the concept of consent and a role for the south in the affairs of the north were pillars of any subsequent peace process...

Yeah, he wasn't cut out for politics at all.

[dahamsta]

I agree with Spudulika. If Fitzgerald was cut out for anything, it was company directorships and lobbying.

[Eminence Grise]

I’m with brendy_éire and BonnieShels here, and I have to take issue with (what I perceive as – maybe wrongly) glibness.


Look at his family background: he was steeped in politics. His father was variously minister for Propaganda, External Affairs and Defence in the republican and Free State Dáil, and regarded as an international statesman of standing; his mother was a Shavian and regular correspondent with Shaw. He grew up living and breathing politics, and acknowledged the effect of this on his career.


He wasn’t one of those cute hoor, insular politicians rendered insecure by a heightened, but unspoken, sense of post-colonialism, giving them the God-given right to feel repressed, and dragging the rest of us down with them. He was a politician because to become Taoiseach he had to be; but he was a politician who understood policy and democracy first and foremost.


He was an intellectual; an auto-didactic doctor of economics, who had a political philosophy he distilled into his two “Reflections” books in the last decade. If he had skills that might have served him better in the boardroom, then I suggest that that is to measure his contribution to the country by the deficiencies of other Taoisigh, who most assuredly had not the wherewithal to run even the meanest of enterprises, and not by the rigorous and exacting standards that should apply in government.


He was a humanist; he sought to re-cast the constitution into something other than de Valera’s restricted view of a Gaelic, Catholic nation, and launched a moral crusade to effect this. Though it was slow and remained unachieved in his tenure, we now have divorce, limited abortion, decriminalised homosexuality, and are less constrained by Catholic doctrine than we used to be. Arguably he created the awareness of social policy failings that led to these. He failed to reach a settlement in Northern Ireland, but the Anglo-Irish Agreement paved the way for the Downing St Declaration and the Good Friday Agreement, and was the first successful attempt to persuade Britain that this state had a role to play in Northern Ireland.


Sandwiched between Lynch, the great borrower, and Haughey, the great self-aggrandiser, Fitzgerald stands out for his political probity and service to the state and the nation.


He had his flaws – pedantry; absentmindedness (remember when he appeared wearing odd shoes, because he had dressed in the dark, not wanting to wake his wife?); the academic’s inability to understand why everybody couldn’t understand what was, to him, crystal clear; defining Fine Gael as “not Fianna Fáil” which started the post-Haughey slow slide to near oblivion in 2002. And on, and on.



But for all his faults, he was a good Taoiseach and I can’t agree with such off-hand assessments of him.

[SkStu]

get out of here with your reasoned, insightful posting!!

Great posting as usual EG.

[BonnieShels]

I tried earlier with my mocking but as usual EG steals the show. Huzzah.

[bennocelt]

Revisionism is great, can you also do one for Bertie and Biffo while you are at it?

[Eminence Grise]

Revisionism is great, can you also do one for Bertie and Biffo while you are at it?

They're beneath my contempt.

As are all forms of snideness and sarcasm.

[Mr A]

Maybe Garret was not what we expect politicians to be- I suspect he was closer to what politicians should be. He always came across as a good man determined to do the right thing and to be rational and intelligent in looking at things. I didn't always agree with him, but his column in the Irish Times was always good reading.

If we had more of his ilk in politics the country would be far better off.

[dahamsta]

I quite liked him until he left politics officially. At that point he started spouting garbage that I wouldn't agree with in a hundred years. That leads me to believe that his behaviour while a public servant was not representative of the true man.