Maurice Earls writes: Eoghan Murphy, former housing minister and once the most unpopular man in Ireland, has recently published a political memoir. The purpose is to give his side of the story and let the world know that he is a decent human being who did his best in an impossible situation and that after four years he became politically and emotionally dehydrated and, as in the title of the book, Ran from Office. Not his fault!
Murphy, however, is an unreliable narrator. Not entirely his fault!
He had, and probably still has, a healthy ego and a great deal of self-belief. This is all fine. If young people were not convinced of their own significance, very little would happen in the world. There is also in his make-up, as he is at pains to communicate, an underlying decency. This is a quality which can be an overrated in politics, as if decency somehow excused error. After all, most people are reasonably decent but being in charge of the public good requires something more.
In Eoghan Murphy’s case, decency co-existed with political innocence, a dangerous cocktail.
His political naivety and ambition obscured any suspicion that becoming a Fine Gael housing minister (Fine Gael, you know, the privilege and property people) at a time when ever growing numbers of economically vulnerable men, women and children were homeless, was likely to be a hospital pass.
By the end he knew he had been through a meat grinder but he doesn’t seem to know just how or why that happened.
The historical background, in which he has absolutely no interest, is the key. Eoghan Murphy was born in 1982. He grew up and became an adult in one of the most confusing periods of Irish history. During that time anything remotely resembling a social, cultural or moral anchor became a helium balloon and floated away. We have a fascinating literature to show for it, but politics is a different matter. Politics without compass or anchor is a recipe for social disintegration.
Still wet behind the ears, Murphy emerged into the world of radical free market fanaticism, a phenomenon loosed on humanity by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. There followed decades when any politicians who were not completely onside with their own and the state’s irrelevance, were regarded as pathetic. Murphy and countless other young people absorbed the zeitgeist. Capital P political idealism was ridiculous. Those who might be useful in politics were people with good management and communication skills. It was no harm, given the way PR transfers work, if they happened to be decent people too.
Enter Eoghan Murphy from Sandymount carrying his packed lunch and a new pencil case.
Part of his motivation lay with the financial crash of 2008. It was clear to Eoghan and his pals that the dismal poltroons and assorted crumblies who were running things totally lacked essential management skills, as well as being badly dressed and deficient in ‘modern thinking’. Eoghan and his peers who had inhaled the Celtic Tiger fumes had assumed, and been led to believe by the poltroon-in-chief that this was forever and that history, if it had ever existed, was over.
The crash was a big big surprise.
What had all the wonderful education and the other perks been for if they were not going to move effortlessly into comfortable lives, they asked in outrage. Something had to be done to repair the damage caused by those ‘parochial’ Fianna Fáilers and the church and, and everything else that was totally out of touch.
Phone calls were made to old school chums who were keen to help Eoghan sort the mess.
Politics of course, doesn’t go away just because people who are at the cutting edge and wearing the right socks deem it unimportant. It merely sinks beneath the radar. The housing crisis that Eoghan was to solve was a direct consequence of radical market politics at work in Ireland. The state became inactive. It had once been very active, even under FG in a limited sort of way. The idea that the market had the power to solve all manner of problems was peddled 24/7. So, the state curtailed planning, it stopped building houses and sold off those built by an earlier deluded generation of politicians. And just as Mr Piketty described, assets began to move in the direction of the already privileged. And it wasn’t just assets. As the Central Statistics Office has just informed us, inequality levels in salaries and wages have galloped over the past decade of anti-society government.
Those who drew attention to such things since the 1980s were regarded as loonies. The left were ‘the left behind’ in a common jibe of the time.
One of the few books, perhaps the only one, mentioned by Murphy is Breaking the Mould, Stephen Collins’s celebration of the Progressive Democrats, Ireland’s effort at an ideologically self-conscious party of deregulation. Murphy doesn’t say quite what he liked about the book. Reflecting the mood of the times, he possibly thought of the PDs as ‘The Logical Party’. Thatcher had said there was no such thing as society. Although that pill was never fully digested here, it was in the feed. Why would you plan for something that didn’t exist?
Unburdened by conscious ideology, Eoghan Murphy did not ask how there could be a housing emergency in a free market economy. How could the hidden hand of the market permit such a thing? He was, after all, sincere and decent. The real marketeers knew it would take time, possibly a very long time, for the market to set things to rights. That was their portmanteau excuse. But Murphy just saw the misery and trauma of homelessness. He wanted to do something. He thought it was an emergency and thought an active state taking ownership of the crisis and using its resources to solve it would be the right course to follow. How weird is that?
As a problem-solver and a young man with a good quota of human empathy he suggested that the government should back a constitutional right to housing and that a national emergency should be declared. He trotted off to Leo and Paschal with his big idea. They patted him on the head and said ‘no, no, that won’t do at all’. ‘There were balance sheet and other issues to consider.’ The ‘nation’s financial stability’ was prized ‘above everything else’. ‘The public could not be exposed … and I eventually accepted their arguments.’ C’mon Murphs that’s going to cost a bundle! Get real.
At some level he began to understand that being in Fine Gael and being a Fine Gael minister was very far from a flag of convenience. It had political meaning. ‘I had lost my nerve to challenge the establishment. Because now we were the establishment.’ Or maybe it was all the fault of the deep state and his wonderful government had been ‘captured by the system’. He remained confused and felt he had failed to do his job. This is to his credit, but he was clearly still suffering from political innocence. He should have expanded his reading matter.
Somewhat dazed, Eoghan returned to his office and began a series of futile endeavours to ‘solve’ the housing crisis. Alas, to no avail. He became like King Canute ordering the waves to retreat. The homeless figures kept rising. He became more and more stressed and anxious and unpopular. He couldn’t go on and he didn’t go on.
Now Eoghan Murphy is in London. One hopes he is enjoying a level of calm and tranquillity. Is it even possible that in retrospect he may come to reject Paschal and Leo’s argument that the state should not take ownership of the housing crisis and use its full resources to effect a solution?
Arguably, with the recent election results, alongside the obvious voter caution (Thank you Mr Trump) we are also witnessing the beginnings of the gilt wearing off the growth-for-growth’s-sake gingerbread in Ireland. Now that would be something.
Garret FitzGerald, a social democrat of the milder sort, once suggested we should ask ourselves what sort of society we would like to have in a prosperous Ireland. Few have asked that question in recent decades. But today more muscular Labour and Social Democrat TDs are beginning to ask it. Perhaps next time out and with the help of the Greens they can actually break the mould. There is a lot to be done. Maybe even Eoghan Murphy, on mature reflection, might decide to join in and lend a hand … or maybe not.
Running from Office, by Eoghan Murphy, is published by Eriu at €22.95, ISBN: 978-1804189023
5/12/2024
