Fianna Fáil has been responsible for many of the major developments in Irish society over the past 100 years, including the Constitution, free education, joining the European Union and achieving peace in Northern Ireland, Taoiseach Micheál Martin has said.
Speaking at a special ardfheis marking the 100th anniversary of the founding of Fianna Fáil in 1926, Martin said he had no doubt the party would remain a political force despite the increasingly fragmented landscape.
“Fianna Fáil has been responsible for a lot of significant developments over those 100 years, not least giving us a Constitution that has stood the test of time,” he said.
Martin, who has led the party for 15 years, described the Constitution, introduced in the 1930s, as “a remarkable political achievement” that protected fundamental rights and religious minorities at a time when fascism was spreading across Europe.
“Ireland took a different tack,” he said. “It was a Constitution that put limits on the power of government through judicial interpretation, while also allowing the people to amend that Constitution into the future.”
Martin also highlighted the introduction of free second-level education and the expansion of third-level colleges, which he said broadened participation in higher education and underpinned Ireland’s industrial development in the decades that followed.
He said joining what was then the Common Market had been an ambition of former taoiseach Seán Lemass as early as 1961.
“If you take free second-level education and joining the European Union, economically and socially they were transformative.”
The Taoiseach said the success of the Northern Ireland peace process was a big milestone in recent Irish history and former Fianna Fáil leaders Charles Haughey, Albert Reynolds and Bertie Ahern played significant roles, culminating in the signing of the Belfast Agreement.
“There was a lot more in between,” he said. “We didn’t get everything right, obviously, but measures such as the Succession Act in the mid-1960s were very significant for women in terms of inheritance.”
Asked whether Fianna Fáil’s greatest electoral successes were now behind it given the fragmentation of Irish politics, Martin said he believed the party had “turned the corner” after the setback of the 2011 general election, in which it lost 58 Dáil seats after being in power for the economic crash and international bailout.
“We are in a much more fragmented political situation today,” he said, adding that coalition governments were now common across Europe.
He said the party achieved a strong result in the last general election and benefited from a new generation of TDs bringing “significant energy” to the organisation.
“There will be bumps along the road, of course there will, but I think we’ve substantially turned the corner,” he said.
Asked what the party’s founders would make of the high homelessness figures, Martin responded that 177,000 new homes had been delivered since Fianna Fáil returned to government in 2020. However, he acknowledged this was not enough.
“We need to get to about 50,000 to 60,000 homes per annum, and sustain that for about 10 years,” he said.
Martin said the Government had significantly increased social housing delivery and aimed to reach 10,000 newly built social homes annually.
The Taoiseach said the Government recognised many workers were under pressure because of rising living costs.
Asked whether there would be a cost-of-living package in October’s budget, Martin said there were “a number of different mechanisms” available to ease pressure on families.
He pointed to measures from the last budget, including increased social welfare and transport supports, particularly for lower-income households and children.
On political funding, the Taoiseach said Ireland had relatively strict rules governing party financing compared with the UK and the US.
He said there had been “insufficient analysis” of the sources of big political funding in Britain, particularly in relation to Brexit and wider political developments.
“We are in a particular era at the moment in terms of what I would term external pressures on political systems across Europe,” he said. “We have to be very resilient about that.”