Book review: Rainbow coalition did much to shape modern Ireland

In the teeth of the current election campaign comes a book about a government that was formed in December 1994. The curious thing about that government was it came into being a full two years after the election of November 1992 which saw a hung Dáil. It was assumed by most commentators that a government of Fine Gael and Labour with either the Progressive Democrats or Democratic Left and a few independents would ultimately be formed out of the inconclusive result. But it was not to be.

When the Fine Gael leader John Bruton refused to agree to a revolving taoiseach agreement with Labour’s Dick Spring and then categorically ruled out going into government with Democratic Left, Spring unceremoniously dumped him and quickly negotiated a government with Albert Reynolds and Fianna Fáil. Bruton was left to wallow in opposition wondering how it all went wrong.

Two years later he was taoiseach when the Fianna Fáil-Labour government collapsed. Instead of another election, Bruton, Spring, and Proinsias De Rossa of Democratic Left quickly put together a government. Three by-election wins for the opposition in the first two years of the Dáil made the numbers stack up for a three-party coalition. Bruton realising this might be his only chance of becoming taoiseach got over his antipathy to Democratic Left and the Rainbow coalition was born.

That government’s press secretary, Shane Kenny, has produced an enthralling account of the intensity of being inside the rainbow. An abiding lesson of his time at the heart of the action is that no matter what promises are made in an election campaign it’s all chaos behind closed doors.

We feel the intensity throughout this compelling book as Kenny takes us inside the complexity and tension of the Northern Ireland peace talks, the drama of the divorce referendum, the tragedy of the Hepatitis C scandal, the murder of Veronica Guerin, and the establishment of the Criminal Assets Bureau, ethics in government, and the lost election of 1997.

John Bruton called that election early much to Kenny’s chagrin and a relatively successful government saw itself booted out of office by an electorate which had its head turned by Fianna Fáil’s Bertie Ahern. It would take 14 long years before Fine Gael and Labour found themselves back in power.

The rainbow coalition has never received much credit for its role in the Northern Ireland peace talks. For many its attitude is summed up by John Bruton’s comment to a reporter in April 1995 that he was “sick and tired of being asked about the fucking peace process”. But Kenny goes to great length, in fact too much length, to show how invested in Northern Ireland Bruton was.

Bruton was distrustful of Sinn Féin certainly but what is striking here is how frustrated he was with British intransigence. He toiled with an embattled and increasingly paralysed British government to get them to drop their insistence on a gesture of decommissioning as a precondition for entry into all-party talks but it was to no avail.

Many readers will feel frustrated that more space is not devoted to the rainbow’s most enduring achievement, the passing of the 1995 divorce referendum. The same could be said for the disaster that was its handling of the Hepatitis C / Anti D blood contamination scandal when Michael Noonan, as health minister, adopted a legalistic approach to those who were contaminated by infected blood administered by the state with disastrous results.

Ultimately, we get the rows, the leaks, the showdowns, and the deals of a coalition which did much to shape modern Ireland but has received little of the credit.