Anglo, Lisbon and Ryan2009 CE

Gerard J. Hannan 6 hours ago
Anglo, Lisbon and Ryan

Dateline

A State Under Strain

In 2009 Ireland confronted the full force of the economic crisis that had followed the property boom. What had initially appeared to be a sharp recession became a transformation of public life: building sites lay idle, businesses retrenched, joblessness rose rapidly and the State assumed responsibilities in banking that would shape politics for years. The Government was led by Taoiseach Brian Cowen of Fianna Fáil, in coalition with the Green Party, while Brian Lenihan Jr, Minister for Finance, became the public face of emergency financial policy. The year’s defining events were not confined to balance sheets. Ireland reconsidered its place in Europe, faced devastating evidence about abuse in Church-run institutions, and saw both the vulnerability and resilience of the Northern Ireland peace settlement.

Banking was the most immediate concern. On 15 January the Government announced that Anglo Irish Bank would be nationalised; emergency legislation then passed through the Oireachtas on 20 January and received presidential assent the following day. The Anglo Irish Bank Corporation Act transferred the bank’s shares to the Minister for Finance in what its long title described as an action taken in the public interest to maintain financial-system stability. Anglo’s acute liquidity problems, its dependence on property lending and governance controversies had made it a symbol of the collapsing boom. Nationalisation did not resolve the wider crisis, but it marked an extraordinary extension of State intervention into private finance.

The social consequences were conspicuous. By the final quarter of 2009, employment was 1,887,700, down 166,900 in a year. Construction, once the engine of the Celtic Tiger, suffered the largest sectoral fall: 79,600 fewer people were employed in it than a year earlier. Unemployment reached 267,400 in the fourth quarter, with men particularly exposed because of the collapse in construction and associated trades. These figures represent more than a statistical reversal. For households accustomed to rising earnings, plentiful work and property-centred confidence, redundancy, emigration plans and anxiety about mortgages became ordinary subjects of conversation.

Emergency Economics

The State’s revenue base had been badly damaged by the contraction of property transactions, consumption and employment. The Government responded through a sequence of emergency measures rather than a single settled programme. The Financial Emergency Measures in the Public Interest Act introduced the public-service pension-related deduction from 1 March. Commonly called the pension levy, it reduced take-home pay on a progressive basis for public servants with pension entitlements. It was presented as a temporary contribution towards stabilising public finances, but it also made the crisis tangible in schools, hospitals, local authorities and the Civil Service.

The supplementary Budget of April combined tax changes, spending restraint and measures intended to assist people who had lost work. It also set out the proposed National Asset Management Agency, soon known everywhere as NAMA. The central idea was to remove certain property-related loans from systemically important banks, allowing those banks to be restructured while a State agency managed and realised the distressed assets. Debate was fierce: supporters regarded NAMA as a means of confronting an immobilised banking system, while critics feared that taxpayers would inherit the losses of developers and lenders. The National Asset Management Agency Act became law on 22 November. It created the statutory framework; the agency’s operational life and the transfer of loans belonged principally to the period after 2009.

The crisis changed political language as well as policy. Arguments about public pay, welfare, taxation, bank debt and national sovereignty became central to daily political debate. Economic hardship was unevenly felt, but the sharp contraction of construction employment gave the downturn a distinctly regional and gendered character. Places whose recent growth had depended on new estates, retail parks and commuting economies now encountered vacant premises and unfinished development. This was a year in which the material landscape of the boom—land banks, speculative loans and rapidly built housing—became inseparable from the State’s financial predicament.

Europe Reaffirmed

Amid domestic uncertainty, Ireland returned to the question of the Treaty of Lisbon. Voters had rejected the treaty in June 2008. During 2009 the Government sought a second referendum after securing political and legal reassurances from the other European Union member states. At the European Council meeting in Brussels on 18 and 19 June, the heads of state and government agreed a legally binding decision addressing concerns raised in Ireland about taxation, the constitutional provisions concerning life, family and education, and the State’s traditional policy of military neutrality. They also agreed that, if the treaty entered into force, every member state would continue to have a Commissioner.

The referendum took place on 2 October. This time the proposal passed, with 67.1 per cent voting Yes and 32.9 per cent voting No; turnout was about 58 per cent. The treaty text itself had not been rewritten since the previous vote, a point the Referendum Commission explicitly explained, but the guarantees and the altered political context mattered greatly to the campaign. The result permitted Ireland to ratify a treaty that was important to the institutional development of the European Union. It also showed that, even in recession, the electorate could distinguish between anger at domestic government and a wish to remain influential within Europe.

Violence and the Peace Settlement

In Northern Ireland, the political institutions established under the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement continued to operate, but March brought a grave reminder that the conflict had not vanished. On 7 March, a Real IRA gun attack outside Massereene Barracks in County Antrim killed Sappers Mark Quinsey and Patrick Azimkar and injured others. Two days later, Constable Stephen Carroll of the Police Service of Northern Ireland was shot dead in Craigavon; he was the first PSNI officer killed by paramilitaries since the force succeeded the Royal Ulster Constabulary in 2001. These attacks were carried out by dissident republican organisations opposed to the peace process, not by the parties administering devolved government.

The killings were met by broad political condemnation, including from Sinn Féin and unionist leaders. That response was historically significant: a shared denunciation of violence by parties once divided over the legitimacy of policing and constitutional arrangements demonstrated how far Northern Ireland’s public politics had moved. Yet the attacks also exposed continuing difficulties around policing, security and the memory of the Troubles. Earlier in the year the Consultative Group on the Past, chaired by Lord Eames and Denis Bradley, had presented proposals for dealing with legacy issues. Its suggested recognition payment for bereaved families provoked especially intense criticism, illustrating how unresolved experiences of loss remained politically and emotionally charged.

Institutions Confronted

The year was also a watershed in the public reckoning with clerical and institutional abuse. On 20 May, the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse published its final report, generally called the Ryan Report after its chair, Mr Justice Sean Ryan. The inquiry dealt with abuse suffered by children in institutions over earlier decades, rather than events of 2009 itself; nevertheless, publication was a major event of that year. Its findings forced a national confrontation with the suffering of survivors and with failures of supervision and accountability by both religious congregations and the State. The Government subsequently issued an implementation plan containing 99 actions, linking historical redress to reforms in child protection, inspection and services.

On 29 November the report of the Commission of Investigation into the Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin was published. Commonly called the Murphy Report, it examined the handling of allegations and suspicions of clerical child sexual abuse between 1975 and 2004. The report’s remit concerned the past, but its publication had immediate consequences for public trust in Church and State institutions. It found that abuse had been covered up by Archdiocesan and other Church authorities and that State authorities had facilitated that cover-up by failing to apply the law equally. The Garda Commissioner ordered an examination of its findings. Taken together, the Ryan and Murphy reports made 2009 a decisive year in the erosion of the deference that had long protected powerful religious institutions in Irish society.

Change was visible in family and personal law too. The Civil Partnership Bill 2009 reached Second Stage in the Dáil on 3 December. It proposed a registration scheme for same-sex couples, alongside a redress scheme for qualifying cohabitants. The Bill was not enacted during 2009, so it should not be treated as an accomplished legal right in this year. Its introduction nevertheless recognised relationships for which Irish law had previously provided little or no security in matters such as maintenance, inheritance, pensions and shared homes.

Flood, Health and a Moment of Joy

Everyday life was further tested by health and weather. Ireland responded to the global H1N1 influenza pandemic from the spring onwards, moving in July from an attempted containment strategy to mitigation as the virus circulated more widely. Vaccination began on 2 November, initially prioritising those at greatest risk of serious illness. That same month brought exceptional rain. Met Éireann recorded severe flooding across many parts of the country after persistent Atlantic depressions; at Valentia Observatory, 360 mm of rain fell, its highest total for any month since observations began there in 1866. Flooded homes, damaged roads and disrupted services gave an environmental dimension to an already punishing year.

There was, however, a powerful shared release in sport. On 21 March, Ireland defeated Wales 17–15 in Cardiff to win the Six Nations Grand Slam, the country’s first since 1948. Brian O’Driscoll’s side, coached by Declan Kidney, secured victory through Ronan O’Gara’s late drop goal and survived a final Welsh penalty attempt. In a year marked by bank failures and bad news, the achievement offered a rare all-island occasion of celebration, with players including O’Driscoll, Paul O’Connell, Tommy Bowe and O’Gara becoming familiar symbols of collective pride.

By the end of 2009, Ireland had not escaped recession, resolved its bank liabilities or settled the questions raised by institutional abuse. NAMA had been legislated for but was not yet the fully operating mechanism it would become; civil partnership remained a bill; Northern Ireland’s peace was tested but not overturned. Yet the year established the terms of an era: a State deeply involved in rescuing finance, a society less willing to defer to Church authority, and an electorate that reaffirmed its European membership while demanding stronger accountability at home.

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