A blast from the past with new relevance
LAST Sunday’s Drama On One on RTE Radio One was set in those long ago days, scarcely believable to younger listeners, when a “disappointing election result” for Fianna Fail meant getting 45pc of the vote and 81 seats.
It was February 1982, and Haughey/ Gregory dramatised the negotiations which went on as FF leader Charles Haughey sought the support of newly-elected independent TD Tony Gregory of Dublin Central to form a working Government.
The play was adapted for radio by Colin Murphy from his own acclaimed stage version, set to tour again this spring, and whilst the title gives Haughey top billing, the drama here is all about the choice faced by Gregory (played by Stephen Jones) in his role as kingmaker on his very first day in the Dail. Should he back the “gangster capitalist (Haughey) or reactionary imperialist (Garret FitzGerald)”? And how to justify either choice to socialist comrades who see an opportunity to “bring the whole thing down, expose it for the sham it is”?
There was a nostalgic undercurrent to the whole production, which made it feel at times like an episode of Reeling In The Years, or perhaps even Scrap Saturday, as a silky PJ Mara , urged the “Boss” to “seduce” the younger man to win him round; but it wasn’t hard to find contemporary parallels too. There was a desperate housing crisis in Dublin; new technologies were destroying working class jobs; then as now, as Brexit looms, Northern Ireland cast a shadow on what were essentially negotiations around economic and social need. “We’ll park the North, agreed?” was how Gregory’s team eventually solved the problem. Wise words.
Haughey did charm the class warriors, even as he put a metaphorical blue pencil through many of their original demands (“I can’t nationalise the f**king banks,” the FF leader said at one point. “What do you think this is — North Korea?”); and whilst a 45-minute running time meant the original play, like the country at the time, had to undergo some painful cuts, the compromises faced by Gregory’s inner circle of inner city activists to get some of what they wanted remains ever relevant.
“What happened to the revolution, Tony?” one asks in the midst of it all. Gregory’s world weary but realistic reply: “I don’t want to spend me life waiting for it.” No one here was a villain, unless it was the unnamed TDs who, on an ailing Gregory’s last day in the Dail, following the financial crash, wouldn’t share their speaking time. He left without saying anything and died of cancer two moths later at the age of 61. Within months, the banks had indeed been nationalised.
It was a fortuitous bit of scheduling that out on Haughey/Gregory in a week when Brexit talks were boiling down to the same ideological battle between purists and pragmatists — a dilemma neatly illustrated by last Tuesday’s Late Debate on RTE Radio One, where a comfy consensus between all parties against Britain soon erupted into an almighty row over whether Sinn Fein MPs should swear an oath of allegiance to the Queen in order to take their seats at Westminster. All politics is local.