Garrett FitzGerald

So long Garret: A bloggish round up…

Mick Fealty on May 20, 2011, 2:07 pm

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Kicking off with Bock, who rarely has a kind word for any politician… He was naive, he was fussy. He was occasionally pedantic to the point of idiocy. He wasn’t always right, but he was sincere and his principles derived from careful thought, not from slogans. In the 1980s, he articulated the almost unthinkable notion for the time that Ireland might abandon its sectarian structures and become a pluralist society, with room for all beliefs. – Ditto Anthony… – And …

Labour’s candidate problem (and the danger of Independent snipers)…

Mick Fealty on December 1, 2010, 5:32 pm

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Intelligent piece by former Fine Gael taoiseach Garrett FitzGerald in the Irish Times today. The data he’s handling is extrapolated from opinion polls and last year’s local elections (run at the same time as the Euro elections last June), shows two things. One Fine Gael’s growth stopped last summer, whilst that of Labour and Sinn Fein have continued to grow: An important way in which the figures in Table 2 may fail to reflect accurately the eventual outcome, in terms …

Irish bank guarantee is killing economic growth…

Mick Fealty on September 25, 2010, 11:49 am

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It goes without saying that no one in the Republic would want to start from where they are now. But Garrett FitzGerald returns to a favourite theme of his, that the tax settings were too low in the past and that, despite having a national debt of less than 25% of GDP, it is now lurching towards an open ended economic crisis as predicted economic growth rates fail to materialise. But Fianna Fail government is sticking with its steady as …

FitzGerald: How a single Dail debate lanced a bloody boil of war…

Mick Fealty on June 21, 2010, 1:52 pm

| Readers 21

I’ve no doubt we will hear more about the way we need to handle the past in the wake of the publication of last week’s publication of the Saville report. But I was struck by Garrett FitzGerald’s piece in Saturday’s Irish Times which subtly highlights the difference – at the time of the shootings – between having a functional democratic parliamentary assembly (ie the Oireachtas), and having a supremely dysfunctional one (ie, contemporary Stormont) in this personal anecdote, first on …