(by Niall O'Dowd, Ireland on Sunday)

The canonization of Jack Lynch which occurred in the Irish media last week was a revisionist attempt to justify the political career of a man who failed the two greatest tests of his time, managing the Irish economy and the Northern Ireland situation.

Those failures were hardly mentioned in the afterglow of his death and the recitation of his accomplishments. While there is an understandable tendency to not speak ill of the dead, the lack of almost any critical commentary on his political inadequacies when it came to the North and the economy was striking.

I met and interviewed Lynch once in the US and the abiding impression was of a decent man who was probably ill fitted to deal with the great issues he faced.

Niceness and decency and a tendency to vacillate do not a great politician make and in Lynch’s case it led to fatal indecision and wrong judgements at crucial times in his political career.

There are tens of thousands of unwilling Irish emigrants who would trace their decision to leave Ireland to Lynch’s 1977 election manifesto. Years of heavy borrowing followed to pay for the election promises and the nation’s economy was almost wrecked by the Lynch-led deficit financing.

As the economy spiralled downwards throughout the 1980s hundreds of thousands were forced to leave Ireland. Their views on Jack Lynch were obviously not solicited in recent weeks, but I have no doubt they would be unkind.

It is a matter of considerable irony, given his outright personal thievery, that it was Charles Haughey who eventually righted the state of the nation’s finances by sound fiscal policies of reducing borrowing, paying down debt and encouraging financial services and technology industries.

There have also been quite ludicrous statements that Lynch saved a civil war in Ireland by his actions in 1969 when he refused to send Irish troops over the border and by his subsequent handling of the arms importation issue.

The 30-year war, which resulted from that decision cost many Irish lives in the south as well as over 3,600 in the North and tends of thousands, injured, not to mention huge economic costs. We are only now recovering from what was as close a definition of civil war as the island of Ireland has ever experienced.

What Lynch was accepting in 1969 was the acceptance of partition, unilaterally imposed without a vote by the British government in 1921. Over 600,000 nationalists were corralled into a state, which they had no voice or place in. Two of the counties and probably a third had nationalist majorities, yet they were made part of the new state against their wishes.

Lynch would have been perfectly within his rights to call for the United Nations to step into the North at that time when Protestant pogroms were occurring and RUC police and "B" Specials were carrying out almost nightly killings.

A few years back Harold Wilson stated that he would not have opposed Irish troops if they had been sent over the border to defend nationalist areas at the time and that in fact British troops would have been under orders not to do so.

Lynch could have sent in those troops to the border areas and immediately brought about a UN intervention, as many of his cabinet wanted, to stabilise the other parts of the North.

In that event, the Provisional IRA would have been stillborn and the ultimate fallout would probably have been a version of joint authority, reflecting the make up of the population there, by the two sovereign governments.

There is no doubt that a sympathetic American government at the time could easily have brought about UN intervention to manage the Irish crisis. It is highly doubtful that the British would have disagreed, as they would have seen it as an effective way out of the mess for them.

Yes, such steps could have gone wrong, but Lynch’s alternative plan instead led to a thirty year war and a blighted generation, north and south who do not remember a time without the Northern troubles.

Lynch also ensured in subsequent years that the voice of Irish America was demonised when it spoke up on Northern Ireland. He was complicit in a policy, which saw Irish America as the enemy and the British and Irish government working together to combat it. Such a policy did untold damage to issues such as the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six which badly needed American intervention.

It is only in the past few years that a new rapprochement between the Irish government and Irish America begun. The fruits of that should be evident. The involvement in the peace process of President Bill Clinton and Senator George Mitchell initially came directly from Irish American activism backed by the Irish government. Ironically, it was Charles Haughey who reversed the Lynch policy and instead began to engage Irish America.

No, Jack Lynch did not earn the canonization conferred by the media last week. He was a likeable individual but a flawed politician whose best was not good enough either on the economy or the North. That is how I will remember him.

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