Fine & Dandy

With the formation of a new government only weeks away, you could do worse than put your money on Simon Coveney for a position in the next cabinet. Indeed, when Hot Press catches up with Coveney, the 38-year-old Fine Gael TD seems quietly confident.

It’s his last day in Dublin before he heads home to Cork to fight his third general election since 1998, when he became one of the youngest ever TDs at just 26. That was in the by-election that followed the tragic death of his father, the popular former Fine Gael Minister Hugh Coveney, who drowned while out walking his dogs along cliffs on the Cork coast.
During his 13 years on the Opposition benches, Simon Coveney has also spent a term in Brussels, double-jobbing as an MEP.
These days, he’s one of the members of Enda Kenny’s front bench most often sent out to bat on TV and radio. Less theatrical than his right-wing colleague Leo Varadkar, and less adept at condensing complex questions of policy into snappy sound-bites than Michael Noonan, Coveney cuts a serious, slightly dry figure.
The impression of a clever but ascetic young man was compounded by his infamous tweet last September, when he accused the then-Taoiseach Brian Cowen of sounding “half way between drunk and hungover and totally disinterested (sic)” during an RTÉ radio interview.
Face to face, however, the Corkman is chatty and personable. He’s definitely most at ease when discussing abstruse matters of policy: Fine Gael’s economic stimulus policy is his baby, and he’s obviously terribly proud of it. But when the interview, conducted in the Dáil canteen, runs way over time, Coveney doesn’t so much as hint that I should take my tape recorder and piss off. Which is very nice of him, really. Here’s hoping he’ll be as gracious when he’s sitting on the other side of a mahogany Ministerial desk.

What kind of hours will you work during the election campaign?
I’ll be in the office at seven every morning trying to get media comment out early to be first with it and certainly three or four days a week we’ll be on bridges in Cork City meeting people on their way to work, trying to convince them that Fine Gael is the party to vote for. Really, it’s about trying to meet as many people as you can in your constituency and give them reassurances as to what the next government can do to improve things. The primary role of the next government is to give people cause for optimism and confidence. It’s not a hopeless situation, despite the fact that 300,000 people have lost their jobs in three years and a lot of people are having to emigrate – the kind of people who’d be reading Hot Press actually. That is something that I cannot accept and we shouldn’t accept as a society and any new government needs to have answers as to how we’re going to stem that flow of talent. There are a number of frauds, quite frankly, in politics at the moment, who are promising easy solutions that revolve around isolating ourselves from the rest of Europe, and defaulting on all of the bank debt…
Are you talking about Sinn Féin?
Yeah. Sinn Féin are saying they’re going to take Ireland out of the deal that’s been done with the European Union and the IMF but there is absolutely no credible answer as to how we’re going to fund the country, how we’re going to pay guards, doctors, teachers, doctors.
But in terms of the finer print of the EU/IMF bailout...
Oh, Fine Gael will very aggressively renegotiate that deal. But we recognise that Ireland needs to put in place a funding mechanism that can allow us borrow money to bridge this huge gap between what we spend and what we earn. Every single day, Ireland spends €55 million more than it earns, and we need to borrow the difference.
What aspects of the bailout deal will you renegotiate?
The interest rate on the money we borrow: we think it is unacceptable that Ireland is being asked to pay over six percent interest rate from our EU partners. Germany can borrow money at a little over three percent. The whole purpose of the European Union is based on solidarity. So when one or two or three countries are in trouble, stronger countries support them. But the idea that countries would be making money out of Ireland’s misfortune – that they can borrow money at three percent, put that money into a European stability fund, and then lend it to Ireland at six and a half percent – is outrageous. And that’s what happening.
Are you saying the existing deal will bring instability?
The actual interest charges will introduce real instability, and will raise the possibility of Ireland not being able to pay its debts and not being able to service the interest.
Is there anything else you’d renegotiate?
There are other issues around allowing flexibility for a new government to introduce stimulus into the Irish economy. So there are lines in the current deal which essentially say that if the Irish State sells assets then the EU and the IMF have first call on those assets for paying off debts.
Your economic plan is to sell off a load of Semi-States…
Well, not too many. But if we were to sell a State asset like Bord Gáis Energy and we were to raise €1.5 billion doing it, we want to be able to spend that money on economic stimulus and job creation strategies, rather than handing it over to the IMF. And we have spoken to the IMF and they are willing to renegotiate that.
The figure that’s being bandied about for your stimulus package is €18 billion, raised through the sale or ‘retooling’ of Semi-States.
No, no, no, no. The original New Era plan was to spend €18 billion over five years. But only a portion of money was being raised through the sale of State assets – we said €3 billion to €4 billion. We’ve now reviewed the New Era programme to actually reduce the levels of expenditure because we don’t have the access to large amounts of money from the National Pension Reserve Fund because, unfortunately, Fianna Fáil decided to pump that money into banks. We are only proposing to sell companies that the State doesn’t strategically need. We’re not selling any infrastructure, so gas pipelines will be staying in State ownership even if we are selling Bord Gáis.
Your probable future partners in government, Labour, say that’s a false economy because the Semi-States are profitable companies, able to borrow on the bond markets – which Ireland can’t.
ESB doesn’t make very much money out of generating power. They make all their money out of their grid and their networks. So we think that the State should be about facilitating the private sector in doing what it does best, which is to provide goods and services to people at a price they can afford in a competitive environment. Before we move off the IMF and EU deal, the other big area is how we deal with bank debt. You’ll hear totally false promises coming from hard-left parties saying that we should just burn all the bondholders and renege on all debts. You know, that will simply shut down the Irish economy overnight and we will go to unemployment rates that no-one ever imagined. People will just pull out of the Irish market. That is a frightening prospect. What Fine Gael will do is ensure that the debt burden the taxpayer is forced to pay because of private mistakes the banks have made, is minimised. And where possible we will negotiate to force institutions outside Ireland who lent money to Irish banks irresponsibly to take their fair share. But we’ll need agreement on a pan-European basis. The idea that Ireland can say “screw the rest of you” isn’t viable. And this is where what Sinn Féin is saying is just insanity – because Irish banks are funded by the European Central Bank. If we were to do that, the Irish economy would just collapse. We wouldn’t have banks. We wouldn’t have pass machines.
What do you see as the biggest policy differences between Fine Gael and Labour?
Fine Gael and Labour agree by and large on banking. We think that the Irish government should be much more aggressive in terms of the debt that isn’t guaranteed. In government there’ll be very little difference. The big difference is that Labour wants to take all banks into State ownership and Fine Gael believes that actually we should be trying to get banks back into private ownership, purchased by foreign banks that can introduce new capital into Ireland.
What about other areas?
On taxation, between the budget that’s just passed and the next four years, we have to save €15 billion in terms of the deficit. Labour believe half of that should be raised through taxes: that’s €7.5 billion. Fine Gael fundamentally disagrees with that. We say that only a quarter of it should be through taxes and three quarters should be through expenditure cuts.
How are you going to reconcile those differences?
We’re going to have to compromise. We (in Fine Gael) think we’re not going to rebuild the economy and get people back to work if we tax them too much and we think middle-income earners, middle-income families cannot afford to pay much more tax. The last time we were in government together we were creating a thousand jobs a week and I think you’ll see that again. But I do think, and this is where the voters need to make a decision: the bigger Labour is, the more emphasis there will be on increasing taxes.
In what areas are you going to make cuts?
We’re going to abolish 147 quangos that we don’t believe area necessary or are duplicating work. We’ve also said we’re going to reduce the public sector in size by 10 percent over five years, so people who are retiring out of the public service. we’re not going to replace them, unless they are frontline services. So we will protect frontlines services like teachers, guards, nurses, doctors, people who interact directly with the service. But we will look at cutting the bureaucratic layers. And that’s a big difference between ourselves and Labour. There are 340,000 people working in the public sector. What Labour are saying is, they will get rid of about 15,000, which is half our figure. And by the way, we’re going to start with politics.
So you’ll reduce the number of TDs?
Yes, by 20. We’re going to abolish the Seanad. We’re going to reduce the number of national politicians by 35%. And also we want to get rid of wasteful expenditure like, for example, Ministerial cars. If I’m lucky enough to be a Minister in the next government, I won’t accept a Ministerial car. I don’t want one. We’re going to apply the same rationale to the government jet. The government jet should and will be used only when there isn’t a commercial flight option available.
Is that not just a question of optics? The Irish people will lose one centre-right government and gain another one.
I don’t think Fine Gael are centre-right.
What about right-right?
No. Why do you think we’re right?
You wouldn’t describe yourself as a right-wing politician or Fine Gael as a right-wing party?
No. I think Fine Gael is a pragmatic, centralist party. It has people in it who would describe themselves as socialist, it has people in it who would describe themselves as liberal.
Who in Fine Gael describes themselves as a socialist?
Certainly Gerard Murphy who is a former TD for North Cork, who is a councillor now, has always called himself a socialist. Catherine Byrne (TD), for example in Dublin, would certainly pride herself on representing working class people. And then you have people who would describe themselves as very conservative or liberal. So Fine Gael is a catch-all party. I think left and right descriptions of politics are totally narrow-minded. On social issues I consider myself quite liberal. On economic issues I’m quite conservative. So you can try and put me into whatever box you want, but I don’t consider myself either right-wing or left-wing. Were New Labour right, left or centre? What’s Tony Blair? Is he a left-wing politician or is he right-wing? He’s neither: he was a pragmatic politician who looked at problems and said, “What’s the best way of approaching this?”
Do you admire Tony Blair?
I do. There are elements about Tony Blair that I found irritating but I admired what he did with the Labour Party in the UK, where he modernised a party, he separated the Labour Party from a union influence that was overly powerful and inappropriate. Politicians should be about representing the public of all hues, rich people, poor people, unemployed people, people on social welfare, people who are sick.
You’re from a well-off background. Do you find it hard at all to connect with people who are poor or on social welfare?
I’m very lucky in terms of my background. I had a privileged education. I had parents who provided me with everything I could have wanted or needed in terms of giving me the opportunities in life that most people aren’t lucky enough to have. I’ve managed to travel the world. I’ve had huge opportunities in politics too. But I intend to put the skill-set and the broad thinking I have been allowed to develop, because of all of that, to good use and I hope I’ll be able to help and inspire other people who haven’t had that background to maximise their own potential. This idea that just because you grew up in a family that isn’t financially poor – that doesn’t mean that you can’t understand and talk to people. You don’t have to have suffered intensely to understand other people’s suffering.
What did you do for a living before you were a TD?
Well, immediately before I entered politics I was in the middle of a big project, sailing a boat around the world for charity. We raised just under €1 million for the Chernobyl Children’s Project and it was an adventure, essentially. I was in my mid-20s. But before that I was working on a family farm in Mallow as a farm manager. I got a science degree in agriculture and land management.
Would you have entered politics if your father hadn’t died so suddenly?
Not at 25. I would have liked to have developed financial independence and a career before entering politics. I think it’s a good thing if people have some sort of background in a profession. That said, I think we need young people in politics and their idealism and drive and energy. The Dáil needs to represent all strands of Irish society, all ages, both sexes.
What kind of effect did your father’s death have on you?
Oh massive. That was the watershed in the life of all my brothers and sister – and my mother. We were, and still are, an incredibly close family. Dad was very much the leader. So when the rock on which your whole family structure is built disappears, all of a sudden you’re lost until you can find a direction again. For a lot of us, dad’s death was difficult to accept because he was seen as indestructible. My attitude to life changed at that moment. I went from being someone who was excited about an adventure sailing around the world, to actually wanting to take up positions of responsibility in my family. I looked for the first time in a very serious way at whether I had something to offer my community and to politics. Everyone in my family refocused in terms of what they were doing. Patrick, my oldest brother, was busy at the time developing a career for himself and I think he became very focussed on that as well as becoming a patriarchal figure in the family. My younger brothers and sister refocused on the charity project and went back more determined to make that project a success. Obviously it was more difficult for my mother because she had to live with it and went through a very lonely period – but she has come out the other end of it as well.
There was speculation in the media at the time as to whether your father’s death was an accident or suicide. Was that very upsetting?
Yeah, it was very upsetting and really irresponsible of the journalists involved. It’s quite clear to us that suicide wasn’t a factor in his death. There’s no evidence to suggest at all that it was and for those of us who would have known him that very suggestion is so ridiculous and inconsistent with his love of life. It’s so upsetting that people would try and get headlines in newspapers about something that wasn’t true. That was very disappointing because for people who didn’t know dad well, that would have helped to form a very inaccurate judgement of him. What dad was all about which was living life to the full and maximising his own potential and the potential of his family, which is totally inconsistent with suicide.
A quarter of young people aged 18 to 24 are unemployed. What exactly is Fine Gael going to do about that?
What the next government needs to do is target specific sections of the community. So, for instance, graduates in Ireland, coming out of third-level institutions are trained, motivated people looking for work and they can’t find it. So we need to put in place a structure that can allow those people to stay in Ireland. They may not be able to find jobs, but we need to be able to keep them here. So we’re going to have a very ambitious graduate internship programme that won’t pay people a fortune but will pay people the dole plus a bit more. We want to place tens of thousands of people on that kind of programme. We’re also going to look at job-share programmes where companies would take people on and pay them a proper salary for three days a week and the State would pay them for the other two days. So in other words, the State pays the equivalent of social welfare but it’s just for two days a week. The other thing is – for engineers, architects, construction workers – Fine Gael has a very ambitious infrastructure programme that we’re going to build over the next five years and we’re going to finance it through selling State assets. There’s 125,000 kilometres of water pipeline in Ireland and about 40 percent or 50 percent needs to be replaced. So that’s a huge project where we can employ a lot of people.
Would Fine Gael reassess the terms of Ireland’s offshore drilling licenses?
Yeah, we would look at that. Some people are simplifying this, saying we’re being ripped off by big multi-nationals like Shell and giving away our natural resources. I don’t agree. I do think it needs to be reviewed. We clearly can’t have big multinationals coming into Ireland, taking our gas and oil and not paying anything for it. There’s a balance between attracting investment and bringing companies to Irish waters to find natural resources and ensuring that if and when they do find them that the Irish State gains out of them in a significant way.
Do you believe in God?
I do, yeah.
Do you go to Mass?
I do. Some of church teaching I find incompatible with my own personal beliefs but I do think that Christianity and Catholicism is, by and large, a good way to set your moral compass in terms of how you live your life and bring up your family. But I have huge difficulties with how the Church has handled certain crises in recent times and some of their teaching around issues like contraception and women priests, around priests being able to marry. I think they need to get into the real world on issues like that.
What do you think of the deal struck by Fianna Fáil whereby it’s the State and not the Church that pays most compensation to victims of clerical sex abuse?
I think there needs to be a sharing of responsibility. I’m not sure that the Church are making a substantial enough contribution. But I don’t think that the State should be trying to bankrupt the Church either.
Should the Church’s contribution be reassessed?
Well I’d need to familiarise myself with the last deal but I certainly wouldn’t be opposed to looking at that again.
How do you rate Mícheál Martin?
He’s a very good communicator. I think he’s got lots of energy and I think he’s a straight politician. But I think he has a very difficult job to do because I think people will see him as part of the team that brought Ireland to virtual bankruptcy and whose policies resulted in the IMF essentially taking over our budgetary policy. He is as responsible as the rest of his former cabinet have been for the loss of 300,000 jobs over the last three years and for all of the people who are forced to emigrate. I think it’s unlikely that he will rebuild the trust that has been lost between Fianna Fáil and the electorate in the short time before the election. But I think after the election he’s well placed to build a new identity for Fianna Fáil – he’s a good communicator.
Is Enda Kenny a good communicator?
If you meet him on the campaign trail, talk to him one-to-one, or meet him in a restaurant or socially, I think he’s a phenomenally good communicator. I think he has certainly at times had difficulty getting his personality and message across on television and that’s been a great frustration for him and other people who believe in him.
Do you believe in him?
I do. I’ve had my differences with him. But I think he’s a person who’s in politics for all the right reasons. He’s an incredibly optimistic, idealistic, energetic person who’s unusual in that he has no ego. Enda is very happy to let other people on his team take the limelight.
Is that not because he does so badly when he takes the limelight?
No. This idea that every time Enda Kenny speaks on the television he does badly is not true. In the leaders’ debate in the last general election, Enda more than held his own. All of the commentators were saying, “That was pretty even”. But by the following day, Fianna Fáil had done a really good spin job on undermining Enda’s performance. So I actually think Enda will do fine in the leaders’ debates.
But you backed Richard Bruton against Enda.
Well, I thought that Fine Gael would have benefited from a change of leader. It’s no secret that I believe in Richard Bruton. When Richard was running for leader against Enda Kenny in 2002, I was the person who proposed him and I still believe Richard is a fantastic mind, in terms of his economic philosophy, his solutions to get Ireland back on its feet and get people back to work. I lost that debate. But that doesn’t mean I don’t believe in Enda.
Do you think Enda Kenny has the same intellectual capabilities as Richard Bruton?
They have different strengths. Enda has more ability than Richard in a lot of areas, and I think that Richard has more ability than Enda in other areas. Richard has a forensic way of looking at problems and coming up with solutions that most of us can’t match.
You sound an awful lot more enthusiastic about Richard than about Enda.
No. Many people will be very pleasantly surprised. There is a caricature that has been allowed to develop about Enda that I think is very unfair to him, just like there was a caricature developed about Brian Cowen that was very unfair. In some ways I contributed to that by comments that I made.
By tweeting…
Yeah, but that was a particular comment around a particular interview, as opposed to a comment on the person himself. But what has tended to happen in Ireland is that political leaders’ weaknesses are caricatured for effect and that’s true of Enda.
Do you think that the impression of you in the media is accurate?
I’m sometimes seen in the media as someone who’s a bit boring, is too serious and who takes himself too seriously, as someone who is very straight-laced and has never stepped out of line or been rebellious in any way. And actually, none of those things are true. Yes I’ve had, in some ways, a very privileged upbringing but I’ve certainly gone off the rails a few times, particularly when I was younger.
How?
I was expelled from school and asked back again. I went through a stage that most people went through of drinking and smoking and breaking the rules and getting a kick out of that. I broke one too many rules and got punished for it. It wasn’t a big deal, we went out to a party overnight on a beach in Sutton when we were supposed to be in school, and I thought I was kind of a rebellious figure to be doing that, and that was after my Inter Cert results, going out and drinking. But these are things that people do when they’re teenagers.
Are you still a drinker?
I drink very little now. Not because I don’t enjoy the odd pint. Most of the time when I’m out, it’s at a function. Politics has become such a serious business, people come up and approach you with serious problems and concerns. Sometimes they want to solve the problems of the world and they’re half jarred themselves. But I like to be sharp and have my wits about me so I generally don’t drink. So I only have a drink when I’m at home with friends or if I’m at a wedding or on holidays.
In terms of that whole ‘Garglegate’ thing, there’s kind of this impression that the Fianna Fáil boyos know how to have the craic and Fine Gael are ridiculously straight-laced.
Come to a Fine Gael Árd-Fheis and you’ll see that they’re not. Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil are very similar in lots of ways. I suppose I broke the rules of the old boys’ club in Leinster House and I make no apologies for that, but for me this wasn’t about Fianna Fáil or about Brian Cowen. It was about the Taoiseach, speaking to half a million people on Morning Ireland, without being prepared. I was annoyed because it was a really important time: the Dáil was about to come back and here was the Taoiseach giving an important interview from a think-in which was supposed to be providing solutions, and clearly the interview was way below par.
Your wife and your daughter live in Cork and you’re in Dublin a lot of the time. Is that hard?
I’ve been twelve years in politics. We’ve been together for a long time. It’s more difficult now that there’s a baby involved. We have a nineteen-month-old daughter. She’s fantastic and I do feel guilty about my wife essentially being like a lone parent for much of the week. Which is why, when I’m at home, I try and set time aside to spend with them and particularly with my daughter. Often on a Friday night, even though she’s happily asleep in her cot in a separate room, I take her out and bring her into our bed, which is a bad habit. But you know when you’ve been away from your daughter from Monday night until Thursday night, I think it’s important to make an extra effort to build a bond. We’re about to have another child, right in the middle of the election campaign! Ruth is due to have a baby at the end of February and, going on her record, I expect she’ll be a few weeks early.
There’s a lot said about the difficulties for women in politics. Is it just as hard for men with young families?
No, it’s probably more difficult for women. It’s more difficult for a mother to be away from her child for three or four days a week than for a man. I have no issue at all with men who want to stay at home and mothers who are out working. But I think often a bond between a young baby and a mother is one that would be under more stress, with a mother being away. But every couple is different and they need to decide what works for them and their children. Ruth and I work together as a team. She understands that I have to be in Dublin and that if I’m lucky enough to be a Minister in the next government, I’m probably going to be away more. But I understand that when I’m at home I have a greater responsibility to give them time. This is a partnership. Ruth needs to make sacrifies around my work commitments and of course she works as well, with the IDA.
You’re very clued in with the internet and Twitter and those little Audioboo sound snippet things you use. What do you think of the Fine Gael ‘Big Conversation’ website?
Well, look, I think it’s a good concept. I think the reality is that a lot of people communicate online rather than on the telephone or by writing letters.
Are the comments on the Fine Gael press office website censored, like the Anonymous hackers claimed?
I don’t think they are. I’ve been over to our team who get them in and put them on. There are some critical ones too. I used to look at those comments for the first couple of days. To be honest, I’ve kind of lost interest now. I think the Fine Gael website will very shortly go back to being what it needs to be, which is accepting people’s comments but also explaining our solutions. The interaction stuff can happen much more effectively over social media than it can on a website like that.
What was the last book you read?
Alastair Campbell’s book, The Blair Years. I tend not to read too much fiction. I read mostly biographies or autobiographies. I like facts, on everything from climate change to world hunger. Whenever I’m reading a novel for entertainment, I feel like I’m wasting my time. For me, reading is more about information-gathering. Most of my reading is sort of boring stuff like The Economist or Newsweek. My wife and I joke about it because when we go on holidays she reads four or five books in 10 days and I read a biography of Winston Churchill or Eamon De Valera.
Will Fine Gael introduce something like the Greens’ proposed climate change Bill, with the same kind of ambitious targets for carbon emission cuts?
We are committed to putting together a piece of climate change legislation but we will try and get all-party consensus on it because this is something that will impact on government policies for the next 50 years. We need to ensure that any climate change Bill is realistic and commits Ireland to targets that we’re signing up to on an international basis but we don’t necessarily go beyond that and tie our hands behind our backs. What matters here is global targets. So we shouldn’t have a climate change Bill that doesn’t allow the agriculture industry to grow.
But the Irish agriculture industry contributes most to our greenhouse gas emissions.
It’s also the only area whose emissions are reducing. In transport we’ve seen a 150% increase since 1990. Since 1990, agricultural emissions have reduced. The truth is Ireland as an island has six million people but we produce enough food for 36 million. Ireland produces milk and beef and lamb and pork with a carbon footprint that is less than anywhere else in the world with the exception of New Zealand. If climate change is a global problem, and we have to feed the world as well as solve our emissions problems, actually Ireland should be producing more food because we’re good at producing food with a low carbon footprint because most of the food we produce is based on grass. Most of the beef produced in other parts of the world is a more intensive form of farming where cattle are fed meal and are kept in sheds. The idea that we would just halve our herd size to cut our emissions just means that food production will just go somewhere else in the world, with a much more significant greenhouse gas emission problem.
What’s the last album you really liked?
Probably Mumford and Sons is my favourite album at the moment. It’s great. I listen to quite a lot of music in my car because I end up driving late at night a lot, to and from Dublin. I like a broad range from the early days of U2 to Mumford and Sons and everything in between.