Garret FitzGerald in Government

WATCHING GARRET FITZGERALD IN THE DAIL LATELY ONE GETS THE impression of a boy who has learned to ride a bicycle all by himself. He still wobbles -.the fumble factor will never be entirely under control - and he can't help glancing warily over his shoulder at the school bully on the opposition benches ready to send him sprawling. But he's piloted his government's first independent budget through and the New Ireland Forum, has the merit at least of keeping Fianna Fáil quiet and showing FitzGerald to be busy about the nation's unfinished business.

Now, when Haughey catcalls in parliament, FitzGerald has learned to blow him a raspberry and keep peddling. At the opening of the Dáil's New Year session, the opposition leader huffed and puffed about the meeting of the Justice Minister and the Northern Secretary on security. Would not this reduce Northern Ireland to a mere security problem in the world's eyes? Was it not a dangerous precedent and would the Taoiseach keep that in mind? "No I wouldn't" said FitzGerald impudently, peddling on by. "I don't accept what the deputy says, so I won't keep it in mind." Charlie subsided. Nuts to Charlie.

FitzGerald will never learn totally, however, to cloak his anxieties in the glossy mantle of power. Everything registers on that slightly dowagerish face. Under C.J. Haughey, the morning ministerial troop-in to the Dáil was done with military precision and gravitas. Garret trots in with his ragged troupe strolling behind him, grinning an embarrassed grin at the part he has to play in this piece of parliamentary pomposity.

At the Forum, he beams at what he would regard as useful contributors, like the two young unionist brothers who braved Northern indignation to come and tell the Forum that "British withdrawal" to them meant that they and other unionists were being asked to leave Northern Ireland. But when contributors drone on, particularly droning members of his own delegation, he immediately shows his irritation, diving into the back of the IPA yearbook to find an attractive statistic he can add and subtract to his heart's content.    .

The fact is that FitzGerald doesn't feel the need to hide his ordinariness. The red braces are constantly on display. It doesn't cost him a thought, on his way into an RTE studio to ring back down to his driver at reception and ask him to go and get rashers and sausages in Donnybrook for Sunday breakfast. At home, he does the hoovering, helps to get meals, gets down on the floor in shirt sleeves to play with his three granddaughters to whom he brings home presents from summit meetings abroad.

He's cheerfully forgetful. He's been known to put his suits into the drycleaners and then forget which drycleaners he went to. So as not to disturb his wife one morning he got dressed in the dark and put on two odd shoes. The newspaper photographers had a field day. FitzGerald didn't see what the fuss was all about. He doesn't much notice what he eats but he loves lots of butter. He likes a glass of wine but doesn't look too hard at the label.

Some of his backbenchers complain that he's not a man's man. "When Garret comes into the Dáil bar, it's hard to know who is more uneasy, the bar habitués, or Garret." He was told he should turn up more often in the bar, be a little more friendly with the boys. So diligently, he decided he would make an effort and visited the bar to buy a round of drinks. He chose to go on Ash Wednesday. Everybody was drinking orange juice.

So FitzGerald bought a round of tomato and orange juice and listened earnestly as a young TD told him a story. Deputy John Kelly had been speaking in the Dáil the week before and had finished his speech with a quote from the historian Macauley concluding "As Macauley once said." In the Dáil official record it appeared "As deputy Macauley once said.” Garret laughed and went on to speak at length about Macauley's life and times. As he left, one bewildered TD turned to another and asked "Hey, who is this deputy Macauley anyway?"

He's not one of the good old boys and he doesn't pre. tend to be. He admits happily that when he was a youngster one of his favourite books was a girl's school story called "Bashful Fifteen". He's never felt any compunction to pay slavish tribute to the nation's sacred cows.

During the 1982 February election campaign, the FitzGerald bus pulled up in a village in Co Cork. A large Teddy swathed in red and white was pushed through the bus door at Garret. It was a lovely Teddy, he exclaimed, and what did the red and white stand for? Was it a symbol of Polish Solidarity, he asked. The Cork faces looked up at him incredulously out of the wet night. Sean Power, the Corkman who was press officer for the campaign, put his head in his hands and groaned. "They're the Cork colours, boy" he wept "they're the Cork colours." "Really?" said FitzGerald happily. It didn't bother Garret that he didn't know the Cork colours. He doesn't measure his Irishness in terms of shamrocks or Guinness or even the bould Thady Quill.

As well as the accusation that he's not a man's man - a commodity this country needs like Donegal needs rain - there are even more serious charges laid against FitzGerald.

He is utterly faithful to his wife and pays her constant and loving attention. He enjoys the conversation and company of women, and he encourages them in politics. He loves his family, his home, his children and his grandchildren and he's not at all interested in sport. Men's men wince at these unwholesome tendencies.

He's friendly with the press corps - friendlier than he is with some members of the parliamentary party, his backbenchers would complain. He first-names the press and is unduly worried if they don't first-name him in return. He never uses his position to give an importunate journalist a brush-off or a put down. Corner him with a sticky question and he'll spew irrelevant statistics at you or blind you with science. An intellectual bully he may be, but he never hides behind the grandeur of his office.

This attitude may spring from having been a journalist of sorts himself. In the sixties he did financial journalism and was a correspondent for the Financial Times. When some major economic story broke in Ireland in the mid-seventies, the Financial Times' night-desk couldn't contact their regular man and going down the list of Irish staff came across a G. FitzGerald. They rang him in the small hours and demanded he file a story. Garret demurred. He had a new job now, he explained, he was Minister for Foreign Affairs. That was all very well, retorted the caller, the Financial Times still needed a story. Garret did the story.

Garret FitzGerald has a clean sense of fun. Indeed, his sense of humour wouldn't be out of place in a nun's recreation room. He was enormously tickled on one occasion when a telephoned report to the Irish Times announced that "the Taoiseach was embarrassed" when it should have read "the Taoiseach was in Paris".

"Who, me embarrassed?" he burbled. "Look at me, I'm not embarrassed!"

When Michael O'Leary told a somewhat blue story to Joan FitzGerald, FitzGerald ticked him off later. Not that the redoubtable Mrs FitzGerald needs much protection in any discussion. Despite the chronic ill-health which makes it difficult for her to travel or move about easily, she is forthright and intellectually independent of her husband, while so shamelessly loyal to him that she has no compunction about ticking off TDs or journalists who have been in her eyes less than fair.

On the crest of the UCD Gentle Revolution of 1969, FitzGerald, who sympathised with the students, spoke at the student sit-ins and tried to curb the more politically radical elements of the mutiny, helped plan a liberal onslaught on the governing body.

Then an economics lecturer, he joined with Paddy O'Flynn, then prominent in the Irish Federation of University Teachers, Gus Martin, Paddy Masterson, Brian Alton and Sr Bencvenuta to run a liberal panel for election to the governing body. They all got elected except O'Flynn.

Despite differing political views on Northern Ireland, John Mulcahy, the former editor of Hibemia, and his wife Nuala are friends, as is Labour's former Minister Justin Keating, a close cabinet buddy of FitzGeralds in the 1973. 1977 coalition, and lovely Fine Gael convert Michael O'Leary - all have spent holidays with the FitzGeralds in Provence or in Schull.

The usual New Year's Eve Party in FitzGerald's house would involve a mix of these people, friends of FitzGerald's children, former students like Brendan Dowling, Davy's stockbroker, UCD historian Ronan Fanning, European Commission Office Director in Washington, Denis Corboy, Scan Donlon and Michael Ullis of FitzGerald's beloved Foreign Affairs.

As often as not the three grandchildren. Doireann, Iseult and the baby, daughters of John FitzGerald, who works in the Department of Finance and Labour Councillor Eithne FitzGerald, are the centre of a social gathering at the FitzGerald's and this New Year's Eve they sang carols at the foot of a Christmas tree lit with real candles.

When Fitzgerald finishes a long day in Cabinet he likes to go home and talk to his wife, to read to her – at the moment she's in the middle of a Michael Innes trilogy. He himself enjoys novels and detective stories. Trollope and Graham Greene are favourite authors but his tastes are heterogeneous.

He doesn't like rereading books, except for cherished children's books or books about children. "Alice in Wonderland", and American children's books like "Helen's Babies" and "Other People's Children", books by Rumer Godden and L.P. Hartley. Staying overnight once in former Liberal Leader Jo Grimond's house, he was delighted to find a book-case of children's books belonging to the Grimonds and the Bonham-Carters, and the Asquiths and to find he had read eighty per cent of them.
He loves children, and everything about them, and when as a student he organised a party outside in Iveagh Gardens it was specially for children.

He reads a lot of history and biographies, books on theology, moral theology, dogmatic theology and Christology, and on cosmology. He is enthusiastic about a book he read recently on the first three minutes of the universe and the arguments as to whether the universe is going to expand and die or contract and implode.

He enjoys music as an untutored listener. He enjoys Mozart, Beethoven and a favourite piece of easy listening is Bizet's "Carmen".

He's never been sport-oriented. As a schoolboy he played football only twice until he discovered that the ball didn't stop where he was, he had to chase it, so he gave it up.
He prefers a glass of wine, or cider or a gin and tonic to beer and he's never taken naturally to pubs. He has pointed out that since he decided to get married at the age of nineteen, he didn't really have a bachelor period and missed out on going to pubs, so he never got used to it. In any case, it may be true that pubs in the past were all male domains and FitzGerald has never seen the attraction of all-male company.

Despite his international reputation, and there is no doubt that in EEC circles FitzGerald is highly respected, he has never had any doubt that his political home is Ireland. His home, his friends, his interests are that of a Dublin 4 or 6 academic Irish gentleman. He points securely to his Southern politician father and his Ulster Scots nationalist mother as impeccable political forebears. He doesn't feel the need to search for rural origins, or hurley playing uncles, or to wear a badge declaring "Dublin 4 is Ireland, too".

His Catholicism is an essential part of his Irishness and his view of a New Ireland, "a non-sectarian pluralist Ireland" (he rarely uses the term 'secular') presupposes the development of Irish Catholicism along liberal post Vatican II lines. It. is this dual approach which makes FitzGerald suspect from the hierarchy's point of view. Reds and Prods can be dealt with. 

Miraculous meddlers within the Church are a much more dangerous proposition. FitzGerald has the dual impertinence to be an amateur theologian and to tangle with the bishops publicly on political issues. He has tackled Bishop Jeremiah Newman on the bishop's contention that laws reflecting Catholic mores should not be changed for a five per cent Protestant minority, but could be changed for a twenty-five per cent Protestant minority in a united Ireland. FitzGerald called it "specious and casuistical. I think it should be rejected by every honest Christian politician."

He has confronted Bishop Cathal Daly on Catholic Church ambiguity towards violence and, more indirectly, the Cardinal on ambiguity towards Sinn Fein. He has, in a Furrow article reminded the bishops that they are as human as politicians. "In a Church structure based on authority there may be more opportunities for the abuse of power than in a political system based on democracy."

As an urban liberal Catholic, he identified in "Towards a New Ireland" the two great orthodoxies which have dominated Irish life and whose monopoly he is determined to challenge: "The pre-Vatican II orthodoxy in the Catholic Church, exclusivist and triumphalist - and the neo-Gaelic cultural orthodoxy, which sought to impose on a very mixed Irish society the traditional cultural values of the rural Irish-speaking tradition." He has come slap up against both these orthodoxies, large as Irish life, in the New Ireland Forum - the first in the shape of the uncompromising Catholic bishops presentation to the Forum, and the other in the guise of Fianna Fáil whose leader has continued to argue for no deviation from the demand for a unitary Irish state.

The tensions which now exist between government and the hierarchy might have been less had the Forum secretariat been more thorough. A number of groups, including the Protestant Churches received a notice from the Forum in July advising them that there was a newspaper advertisement requesting submissions.

With extraordinary oversight, the Forum failed to send such a notice to the Roman Catholic Church who were unlikely, without prodding, to want to brave the political sensitivities of a Forum presentation. It was October before the Church was directly approached for a submission, a matter about which Cardinal O Fiaich has been heard to complain, since by then he was in Rome for a meeting and had to farm out the writing of the report to a sub-commission. The final document never went before a bishops meeting and the Cardinal is known to have misgivings about the crudity of some of its declarations i.e. "A Catholic country, or its government, where there is a very substantial Catholic ethos and consensus, should not feel it necessary to apologise that its legal system, constitution or statute, reflects Catholic values." A Northern Catholic bishop could hardly fail to wince at the echoes there of "A Protestant state for a Protestant people". The fact that the document was presented in that form says something about the strength of the Dermot Ryan wing within the Southern hierarchy.

Mr Haughey, whose unitary state idea is probably most damaged by the Church's statement, waved his delegation to silence in the chorus of condemnation that the report produced from Forum members, in a private session, but he made it clear later that he was angry and disappointed. Garret FitzGerald was also angry and disappointed but rebuked a government backbencher who came out publicly and had a go.

Was it a case, as John Wilson of the Fianna Fáil delegation droned ponderously, of "Roma locuta est; causa finita est ?"

Hardly. If FitzGerald believes what he says, which is that the orthodoxies, the conservative forces in this country determined to avoid change, are destroying the possibility of eventual unification, then he can't let the bishops statement go unchallenged in the final report of the Forum. The John Hume wing of the SDLP would be with him, and the Labour party.

But what of Charles J. Haughey, the guarder of the two great orthodoxies? Mr Haughey, being a practical Fianna Fáiler, never wanted the churches in on the Forum act in the first place, but now that the Catholic Church has been forced to declare its hand, can Mr Haughey be seen to disagree with it? No change, as Bishop Newman says, until we have a united Ireland? May not the twin orthodoxies of triumphalist Catholicism and not-an-inch republicanism bring the Forum to a messy end.