There are many issues that will be of concern to voters in the forthcoming General Election. Health, Education, Government spending, corruption in politics, the links between Church and state and so on. But one question will really obsess Labour Party supporters in particular. Namely, does Ruairi Quinn still play Bob Dylan’s ‘The Mighty Quinn’ as part of his election campaign? And does he know what the song is all about?

Come to think of it, Labour supporters might even be forgiven for thinking they’d need the likes of Dylan present on their bus – plus, perhaps, every other Left-wing icon in history – to make the kind of impact necessary to derail the juggernaut that is Fianna Fail at this point in time.

However, under the leadership of Quinn, the Labour party will not surrender without one hell of a fight. And despite views that are critically different from Fianna Fail on many issues, Labour will also strongly consider going into government with Fianna Fail. There are even those who say that Ruairi Quinn has his eye on the position of Tanaiste.

On that question, and many others, the man himself has his say in this interview. But, of course, we start with the big one…

JOE JACKSON: Do you still play ‘The Mighty Quinn’.

RUAIRI QUINN: Yes! We first ran it in ‘73, I was a big Dylan fan, still am.

JJ: Have you any idea of what the song is about?

RQ: Well, when it says “When Quinn the Eskimo gets here” I figured he wasn’t delivering snow!

JJ: So he’s a drugs dealer!

RQ: Yeah.

JJ: And you reckon that’s an appropriate song for a politician to use?

RQ: The real message is “come on without, come on within, you’ll not see nothing like the mighty Quinn”! That’s all we want to be seen as delivering!

JJ: You say you’re a fan of Dylan but you’ve also questioned whether or not fans take ideological messages from their heroes in rock.

RQ: Well, when it comes to Dylan, his early stuff, The Freewheeling Bob Dylan, ‘Blowing In The Wind’, ‘Masters of War’, was highly ideological. But then he went electric in the Highway 61 Revisited period and, I suspect, a lot of the lyrics became meaningless. You could attach to them your own interpretations.

JJ: Are you bothered by the fact that Dylan, this great socialist icon of the ’60s, now does corporate gigs?

RQ: No, because I wasn’t a great fan of Bob Dylan the person. I just liked some of his music. And also, what a lot of these people do politically, personally or ethically, doesn’t necessarily affect their music.

JJ: But do you believe that fans of Bono, for example, would take ideological messages from his songs?

RQ: Dylan’s stuff became very introverted and personalised; Bono has very clear political messages, most of which I support. His Cancel the Debt is a superb campaign. And his involvement with Trimble and Hume in the Good Friday Agreement, that concert he did where he pulled the two guys together, was very clear, focused politics. And it’s an external message he believes in, which he shares with an audience. Whereas in the Dylan stuff, about his personal/religious/philosophical odyssey, it’s more about himself talking to himself. I don’t think he’s preaching to anyone else. But I do have a lot of admiration for Hewson’s political focus and direction.

JJ: What about Ali Hewson? Is it true the Labour party are going to ask her to become their Presidential nominee?

RQ: No. First of all, I don’t know if she’s interested or not. The last time I met her was just before the Sellafield postcard campaign and, again, she is an impressive woman. Like Adi Roche. I don’t know either of them very well. I’ve only spoken to them in groups, I wouldn’t claim to know them.

JJ: On the issue of Sellafield itself, is there anything innovative you, in Government, could do?

RQ: The thing about Sellafield is that, yes, we have to focus attention and mobilise peoples’ concerns about it. But the only way Sellafield and other nuclear installations across the European Union will be changed and closed down – because you are talking about a gradual closedown; you couldn’t shut Sellafield overnight – is to see it as a European problem. It has to be dealt with at a European level.

So I would like to see the whole context of this taken out of the bilateral relationship between Dublin and London and put into a European context. Where we can also address questions like what are we going to do about the dangerous, radioactive, burnt-out, spent nuclear power stations the French have? And there are some in Germany. Let’s get objective European Union Commission inspectors in, which the British and the French are seriously resisting. And though, yes, we here in Ireland are more at risk in relative percentage terms (in relation to Sellafield) the British also are at risk. And there is a big financial cost associated with all this, to Cumbria.

JJ: On a more personal level, you have two children from your first marriage and a child with your second wife. Would they ever express their own fears about Sellafield?

RQ: Well, Malachy and Cian are 31 and 30 and I can’t honestly say they have ever expressed concern about Sellafield to me.

JJ: Did you ever sit down with your seven-year-old, and explain what Sellafield is all about?

RQ: No. I work on the principle that you answer the questions children ask. And he hasn’t yet asked me that. He will, in time, no doubt.

JJ: In a previous hotpress interview it was claimed your first marriage was ‘dissolved’?

RQ: No. It was before divorce was available in this country so I got a divorce in the Dominican Republic and subsequently remarried in the United States. I wasn’t interested in an annulment. I wasn’t going to get remarried in a Catholic church anyway. Though I did originally. And I had a marriage that worked and, after a while it didn’t work and that was the end of it. So this was a way of getting married a second time.

JJ: Did any fellow politicians ever suggest that was an “inappropriate” way to end a marriage? Or give you grief because your first marriage had broken up?

RQ: No. I was always upfront about it. Obviously there are areas of privacy around the individuals concerned but I never made any secret of it.

JJ: And no politician said “there will be a political price to pay for this”?

RQ: Back in the early ’80s – it happened in ‘83 – there was a certain sense that this would not be helpful. That was said by people around you. And I just said, “Well, that’s me”.

JJ: Was politics – or your commitment to a particular vision of politics – a factor in your marriage break-up?

RQ: No. I got married very young. I had two children by the time I was 25. I got married straight from college. And we just grew in different directions, as I think a lot of people of that generation, who got married very quickly, did. But I was actively involved in politics when I was in college. In fact, when I think of the political starting point, from which I commenced my career, I actually realise that I’ve been on the winning side of more battles than on the losing side. And I feel vindicated that the stands I took way back, even as a student, in relation to South Africa, a civic and progressive republicanism in this society, the separation of Church and State – all those issues that, in some cases, seemed unachievable – have since come to pass.

JJ: Does that make you smug now?

RQ: No.

JJ: So is the fire still burning in you, that was there when you were a student?

RQ: Very much so. Because what we’re looking at is the transformation of this economy from being a very poorly performing economy to now being a wonderfully performing economy and we can now afford to do all the things that I was told, in Socialist and economic terms, you couldn’t afford to do in the past. That gives me the drive. And I absolutely still feel as driven as I ever did. You wouldn’t do this job if you didn’t. But it is a different kind of drive. There isn’t the kind of frenzied, “I gotta get out there and do it now”. I don’t panic anymore, internally, when something goes wrong.

JJ: You do have that image of being measured and considered.

RQ: Very much so. But inside the wheels are whirling round. Sometimes I watch re-runs of interviews and I appear to be very flat, nearly toneless, yet my head is racing.

JJ: That could be a problem politically because you also could seem vaguely disinterested.

RQ: Yeah. But what I now possess is a much better gear-box in terms of manouevring through difficulties, crises or problems.

JJ: Politically or in terms of your overall life?

RQ: Overall life. I’m much happier now than I’ve ever been.

JJ: In a recent issue of Phoenix you were depicted as a guy who was well-heeled, wears flashy ties, smokes a fat cigar, has a posh accent, a brother who chairs a bank – all of which is meant to suggest you are hardly the person to do battle with Gerry Adams for the working-class vote. Do you think that perception matters?

RQ: I think the perception matters and it is put out there. But I think the reality is that my father was a successful businessman, running a group of shops which went into decline and he had to sell or they would have gone into liquidation. We were brought up in a comfortable, middle-class environment. There was no spare cash around. We all worked every summer in the canning factories, where I earned money to pay fees to go through college. And when I was there I had part time jobs. I used to do posters in UCD for the various societies. Drew them, designed them. At one stage I had about five contracts and had to sub-contract them out!

JJ: And you became a socialist!

RQ: I was meeting demands! The unit price was one pound which was actually eight pints! So that was its value.

JJ: The ability to buy eight pints of beer!

RQ: That was the one currency that was constant. But, seriously, as for the fact that my brother is successful or that my sister has been successful… Actually, there are two other brothers who don’t get mentioned in such articles: one is a psychiatrist in Canada and the other is a doctor with the Eastern Health Board. So what we have we’ve achieved. There was no question of inherited wealth. There was no question of having it easy.

JJ: I suspect that a part of you feels you shouldn’t even have to defend your background in this sense and that, perhaps, it is a politically naive argument to suggest that if a person is “well-heeled” they can never empathise with, or work for, the poor.

RQ: Absolutely. Madame Mitterand, in an interview after François Mitterand was elected President and they moved into this magnificent house in Paris, was asked, “How do you reconcile all this with socialism?”. And she said, “Socialism is not poverty”. The redistribution of wealth, the elimination of inequality and so on is still my goal. When Combat Poverty say that if you look at the five budgets McCreevy – presided over by the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern – presented (you find that) in the areas over which they had total discretion – forget the Celtic Tiger and Foreign Direct Investment, social partnership and all that – the top 10% of the population in this country got 25% of what was redistributed and the bottom 20% got 5%. So the battle goes on.

JJ: Another site of battle is the Arts, and culture in general. How do you rate Sile De Valera as Minister?

RQ: I think that Sile De Valera has been a very poor Minister for the Arts. And I wouldn’t rate her in any way like Michael D. (Higgins) was. But I think what she has done to – or, should we say, allowed to happen to – IMMA, RTE and the very ungracious way the Millennium extension was opened and the credit she claimed for the government’s giving of the money, and all of that, was poor.

JJ: What, then, is your position on the battle between Sile De Valera and the Abbey in terms of Ben Barnes’ argument that it needs to be moved to a new site?

RQ: Again, that whole issue was badly handled. By Sile De Valera. The Abbey is not an independent institution, with its own budget and own status like, say, the National Gallery. It is the national theatre company but its share structure is complex. It’s not a semi-state body. And it gets a major grant from the Arts Council, rather than getting a grant directly from the Department of Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht. But I know, for a fact, that informal contacts were made, with the department, at Secretary General level, and subsequently the Minister, in terms of possible sites, and at no stage, at the start, did she say to Ben Barnes, “Look, you simply cannot contemplate such a move”.

JJ: So what changed? Did Bertie insist that the Abbey be kept in his own constituency?

RQ: I don’t think Bertie is all that interested in the Abbey. But it would be very difficult, it seems to me, to enlarge the Abbey on its present site. And keep the Abbey Theatre going.

JJ: So what difference can you make – in coalition or opposition – in terms of the Abbey?

RQ: What the Abbey needs, first and foremost, is certainty. It needs a degree of operational, independence and autonomy. It is a national institution. I think it should and this is me speaking personally rather than giving any formal party position – be treated as a national institution. It needs to have a direct line to the Department. Meaning it needs a separate board, properly constituted, and a line of finance coming from the Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht.

JJ: Cutting out the Arts Council?

RQ: Cutting out the Arts Council, yeah. I think the building maintenance of the Abbey, and all of that, as a national institution, should be done by the OPW, the same way as other major institutions. Then if the Abbey wants to make an application to the Arts Council for a particular cultural programme, let it take its place in competition with the Gate and all the other theatres. But let’s separate the institution from what happens on the stage. The present institution, physically, isn’t adequate. I don’t really mind where the theatre itself is, in the city centre, provided that it is an appropriate location, there is a decent budget allocated for it and that there is certainty. But it does seem to me that we need to build a new building somewhere else because I don’t think rebuilding in the present site is feasible. Leave the existing Abbey Theatre there, build wherever you’re going to build and then decamp from an existing theatre into a new theatre. And you are then left with a second Dublin city theatre premises.

JJ: When you say Sile De Valera has been “poor” as an Arts Minister in terms of RTE, are you referring to the licence fees battle?

RQ: Yes. Paddy Wright is known as a clear supporter of Fianna Fail for many years and was a safe pair of hands put in as the Chairman of RTE. He was out on the golfcourse, I understand, when he got a phone call saying what the licence fee would be. He came into us – plus, presumably Fine Gael and others – with Bob Collins to make the case for the increase in the licence fee. But the problem wouldn’t have arisen if, in fact, the indexation decision we left on the desk in 1997, had gone through. That’s not to say that RTE doesn’t have to modernise and reinvent itself and all those other things. But if you want public service broadcasting and if you want an Irish national station then you need to have it properly resourced.

RTE has to have a very clear, cultural public service broadcasting domain to it. And not political, ministerial interference in the content of programmes. Nothing like that.

JJ: But do you feel that RTE is now being seriously damaged – even at the level of morale – by that kind of political interference?

RQ: I do. And do I think morale out there is really low because of that. The most damaging thing that a Government can do in a democracy – either in the economy or within sections of the administration of society – is to feed uncertainty and provide indecision. If you do that, everything comes to a halt. If you’re in an organisation and you know it is going in a particular direction and that this is the corporate plan for the next five years, with the view that it will be projected on for another ten, fifteen years, then people make their own plans within that organisation. It’s the lack of decision that creates so much frustration. And in a big, bureaucratic organisation – and RTE is large and bureaucratic and needs to address that question themselves – all that energy starts to get turned in on people, which it’s said is happening in RTE.

JJ: Do you, as a socialist, believe that the secularisation of Ireland is a healthy development?

RQ: I think it has the potential to be very healthy. Even the strongest materialist, myself included, would have a spiritual context for their beliefs. If you give up believing in this set of beliefs and don’t, consciously, work to put something in its place, you get a kind of hollowed out egg. And when you hit some kind of personal crisis and there’s nothing there – or what’s there doesn’t work, or hasn’t been maintained or replaced – then people become rudderless. You need guidance, you need some kind of anchor for yourself. I certainly do.

So the danger I see in the secularisation of Irish society is that people may abandon a particular set of religious beliefs without replacing them. Yet it does seem to me that, increasingly, Christianity or Catholicism, in the Northern hemisphere – Europe, North America – is losing out to the triumph of Protestantism. And that the single, uniform Catholic Church, with its authority being the Vatican, is falling fast. I was listening to a group of priests and seminarians on the radio recently and they were saying that the Catholic Church is not a democracy and can’t, any longer, maintain its authority. No more than the old Communist Party could maintain the authority of the Central Committee in the Politburo. In fact the parallels between the Vatican and the Politburo are frighteningly similar!

JJ: So, are you saying it is healthier for society in general, if the “central power” of the Catholic Church falls apart?

RQ: The institutional Church as we know it – that was characterised in the Redemptionist sermon in Joyce’s Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man – dates from about 1870. Prior to that it was more relaxed. Irish Christianity, Irish Catholicism has not been continuously rigid right back to Saint Patrick. And it survived up to 1870. So there is no reason it’s not, now, going to survive. But I think the institutional Church we know – and I’m 56 – the kind of oppressive certitude it could bring to bear on people, is over.

I got reprimanded by some of our own members for saying, on the morning after the Abortion Referendum, that it was the first time in the history of Ireland, that Fianna Fail and the Catholic Church had been defeated. And I regret the way I said it. Because what I really meant was that it was the first time that the hierarchy, the Catholic Bishops and Fianna Fail, had been defeated. In other words, don’t confuse the Catholic Church and more than a million plus devout believers, with the institutions of authority which have discredited themselves.

JJ: Should bishops who hold back, from the police, files on priests who are accused of sexual abuse, be seen as accessories to these crimes?

RQ: Absolutely. If the files relate to activities that civic society has determined, through legislation, to be criminal then there is no protection in Canon Law for that, as far as I am concerned. We don’t have a state within a State. And in areas where Leinster House has defined certain acts as being criminal then people who participate in those crimes – or try to shield them – should be treated as such.

JJ: You said recently that Charlie McCreevy is afraid to debate the Government Health Strategy. But mightn’t that also be a case of Labour attempting to deflect from the fact that they, too, will deplete the National Pension Plan in order to pay for the health strategy?

RQ: First of all, nobody’s pension is going to be affected by any of this. Because public servants – civil servants, guards, nurses etc – have ‘defined benefits’ in law. At the moment all the money to pay the existing pensioners comes out of the Pay As You Go tax revenue. But down the road we are going to have less people working and more people drawing pensions. Therefore we need to have an independent pension fund to help us pay for that.

So we’re saying that instead of putting a thousand million in for the next five years, let’s put 250 million into the pension fund, keep the other seven hundred and fifty and build, only build, medical facilities. Create the extra beds that are needed. Put back the 3,000 beds that were taken out by Charlie Haughey and Fianna Fail between 1987 and 1992 and use them as the step-down facilities to take the pressure off the acute hospital system. The immediate beneficiaries of that system will be the elderly pensioners, who are currently alive but won’t be alive in the year 2025, to benefit from the new funding mechanisms for pensions.

JJ: So how does Labour’s strategy differ from Fianna Fail?

RQ: What Bertie Ahern said at their Ard Fheis, was that they are going to implement the National Health Strategy, complete the National Development plan and do a few other things, with no increase in taxes and no borrowing of any kind. And yet, even on McCreevy’s figures we are looking at a deficit, for 2003, of three billion euro. So you cannot do the two. We’re saying, yes, we will borrow for capital purposes. Like the same way you’d borrow to buy a house. But you don’t borrow to go out on the piss at the weekend.

JJ: So are you saying that Charlie McCreevy has been borrowing to go out on the piss?

RQ: I’ll delete that phrase! But that is what it is in the minds of people who can think back far enough. The danger in borrowing is to borrow for current consumption. Because it is not sustainable.

JJ: Earlier I referred to your seeming lack of “street cred” when it comes to taking on Gerry Adams for the working class vote. Is Sinn Fein now a serious threat to the Labour party?

RQ: No. Because, in fact, Sinn Fein are getting the vote from right across the community. Sinn Fein are a chic nationalist party. I see them in the same category as the Front Nationale in France. They are part of that family of intense European Nationalism.

JJ: So could you ever see Labour and Sinn Fein as political partners?

RQ: No, because, as I say, I don’t regard them as a Left party.

JJ: But they regard themselves as a Socialist party for the 32 counties.

RQ: But when they start talking about greening West of the Bann, it means everybody out bar their own. I’ve always asked the simple question: what about the million, or so, Unionists? And I said famously at a dinner in Washington in terms of this ‘Brits Out ‘ stuff: “These people have been on the island of Ireland longer than you have been here in North America. If they’re not Irish, you’re not American.”

JJ: So no matter how Sinn Fein readapts itself, you could never merge with them?

RQ: No. Because, as I say, they’ve gone down a very nationalist path. And I really do see them as being part and parcel of that political family which has nationalists in Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands. And that whole concept is having a new resonance with people as the traditional characteristics of the nation states are being shared and pooled. People are wondering what is all this leading to? This is the nature of the debate. Because what Europe is engaged in is an extraordinarily exciting experiment. How do you pool bits of sovereignty together to maximise the effects for all of us? And the great thing about the European project is that everybody is around the table. Rather than the French, the Germans, the British telling the little nations around Europe what should be.

That’s why I think this is the most exciting thing to happen to us in years. If Connolly, Larkin, Pearse, were alive they would see this as absolutely unbelievable. The idea that an Irish person – as I had the honour to do – could preside over a meeting on behalf of the whole of the European Union and say, ‘OK, Germany, we’ll let you in, but first...’ they, I am sure, would love. And I do believe that if we can make the European Union project successful it has the capacity, in a globalised world system, to introduce a set of civilising values. I don’t see Europe as a Super-State or a Super-Power but I see it as a Super Influence.

JJ: After the general election, do you hope to see yourself in some kind of coalition scenario?

RQ: The one thing I am very clear about is that I don’t feel the over-riding need to be in office. I’ve been there and it’s wonderful when you can exercise power. As we did in the mid ’80s, trying to mediate between the harsh, sort of liberal instincts of Alan Dukes, John Bruton and others and, at the same time, getting grief, because we had to pull back the excesses of the legacy of the 1977 election. That was extremely difficult. And we had a disunited party. So I’m more interested in being in power than being in office. And if the Labour Party can participate in the next Government and have our Six Pledges implemented then I’m hopeful we can do that. But I am not going to propose to Conference that we simply go into Government because of the numbers.

JJ: Apart from Sinn Fein, I presume the other party you wouldn’t go into coalition with is the PDs.

RQ: I don’t think the PDs matter any more. I think they are a spent force. They had two driving motivations: (1) they were very much against the kind of corruption within public life that Haughey introduced within Fianna Fail – and it is to Dessie O’ Malley’s credit that he confronted that – and (2) as they saw it, changing the tax mix. Both of those things have been achieved so there is nothing left for the PDs to do. It’s up to the electorate to decide how many come back to Dail Eireann but I think the number will be small.

JJ: If you got a Ministry what would you want?

RQ: First of all, if you have an overall responsibility as Taoiseach or Tanaiste – particularly as Taoiseach – you can actually drive things in certain areas. The Arts clearly would be of big interest to me. Environment, likewise.

JJ: So it is Tanaiste you want, if you can’t be Taoiseach!

RQ: (Smiles) The one thing I wouldn’t take on is Foreign Affairs. Because I think it is very demanding and I don’t think you could be Party Leader at the same time. I think it took a lot out of Dick Spring. Now he did a fantastic job. One of the key factors in keeping Clinton engaged in that whole Irish process was the magic between himself and Dick Spring. They had respect for each other. And that influence Spring exercised, combined with his mobilisation of the heads up in Iveagh House, really made a great contribution to the Northern process. But it took a toll on him, personally, in terms of other things in the party. Even so it is a hell of legacy for Dick Spring to have.

JJ: What would Ruairi Quinn’s legacy be?

RQ: I don’t think it is complete yet! But if the cut-off point was now, there are a few things I’d like to be part of my legacy. From within the party, I played a role, along with others, in bringing the parties of the Left together. So I am proud, overall, of having helped make the Labour party a much stronger party, a better resourced party, a serious political instrument in Irish society.

And, in office, I’m proud of setting up the Social Employment Scheme, which has subsequently become Community Employment. There’s over 300,000 people have gone through that. And certainly the role I played in terms of the Single Currency. If those things alone are my legacy, I’d be happy with that. But, as I say, the journey is not over yet! Far from it.