Maurice O’Connell No Complaints: A Memoir of Life in Rural Ireland and in the Irish Public Service
by Maurice O’Connell; edited by J. Anthony Gaughan (Kingdom Books, €15.00)
Ciaran Casey
Former ministers for finance have demonstrated a welcome readiness to publish memoirs in recent years. We now have offerings from five of the seven office-holders from the period at the mid-1980s to the turn of the millennium.
Contrast
By contrast, former officials from the department have become much more reticent, with Kevin Cardiff as the only notable exception. This can be partially explained by the role of the civil servant, and the core values of discretion, loyalty, and never upstaging the minister.
For the historian, however, it leaves a frustrating gap in the literature. While ministerial careers are generally relatively brief, civil servants are often witness to key events for decades. Former officials tend to be guarded in print, since any harsh criticisms of erstwhile colleagues or ministers can be considered a bet qrayal. Nonetheless, any new insights are invaluable, and such memoirs should be carefully parsed.
Maurice O’Connell’s memoir opens with refreshing self-effacement, suggesting that he led an unremarkable life and could make no claim to literary talent. He sets low expectations for a book he describes as “no more than a jumble of reflections on the world around me”, wryly predicting that it “will not generate queues at the booksellers”.
Brevity
One of the immediately striking things about the book is its brevity, at only 134 pages. This should be welcome to most readers: few books in any genre could be accused of being too succinct.
What is more questionable, however, is the allocation of space to the different periods of Mr O’Connell’s life. Over a third of the core text is devoted to his childhood in Moyvanne, Co. Kerry. This section of the book will be of interest to those who knew him, or are particularly interested in life in rural Ireland in the mid-20th Century. But, for many readers, the space here could have been better spent. A more unusual episode is his stint at Maynooth, training for the priesthood. His realisation that he was unsuited to the vocation was palpably a difficult one, but Mr O’Connell is characteristically understated.
His tenure at finance was punctuated by two stints in its 1970s departmental offshoots: The Department for the Public Service (1973-1987) and the Department for Economic Planning and Development (1977-1980). Mr O’Connell’s recollection that returning to finance from the latter was a bruising experience is significant, and adds colour and weight to what is heavily implied in the official files.
One of the most interesting parts of the book is his account of the collapse of the first Garrett FitzGerald government in 1982, and his testimony that John Bruton (who has written a foreward for this book) imposed a tax on children’s clothes and shoes on the back of ‘trenchant’ advice from Mr O’Connell and the Department of Finance, despite Mr Bruton’s own better political judgement.
Mr O’Connell’s suggestion that much of the tax evasion of the 1980s was enabled by the dearth of political will to support a crackdown is astute and of vital importance. The narrow tax base necessitated high rates, which in turn encouraged further evasion and lobbying for exemptions. Breaking this spiral was one of the key political requirements of the period, and the delay in doing so must have been a source of acute frustration to officials.
One of the most interesting parts of the book is his account of the collapse of the first Garrett FitzGerald government in 1982”
It is exactly this type of episode that leaves the reader wanting more, particularly of Mr O’Connell’s insights into the culture of the institutions in which he worked and how they interacted with each other and with government. Nonetheless, there is plenty of food for thought here, and the book makes a valuable contribution.
Crucial
Mr O’Connell’s tenure as Governor of the Central Bank at a crucial juncture in its history is allocated only 12 pages. Having presided over the introduction of the Euro, Mr O’Connell does recognise that its architectural defects were a fundamental cause of Ireland’s ‘great recession’. In essence, the common currency allowed the Irish banks to lend vast sums of money at low or even negative real interest rates. Again, the reader is left wanting more reflection and inside knowledge.
This is an important book, but one would hope that future memoirs from those who helped shape Ireland during a transformative period in its history will add more to our very incomplete collective knowledge.
Dr Ciaran Casey, an historian of Irish financial affairs at UCD, is working on a history of the Department of Finance, from 1959 to 1999.