The Bald Facts

EVERY WEEKDAY morning, at a little before 8am, Ruairi Quinn sits at his desk in the Department of Finance and writes a page-long meditation on the previous 24 hours. The updating of his diary is the first act of his working day, a strict routine he has followed, both inside outside government, since the early 1980s.

"It's not a recitation of the events that have taken place," he asserts. "It's a kind of temperature reading, a comment on what has happened. The facts have been recorded elsewhere."

When Quinn eventually retires from politics, he will publish his political memoirs. They won't, he insists, be either as saucy or as bitchy as the notorious Alan Clark Diaries. "I'm not a bitchy person," Quinn avers. "There hasn't been enough commentary by Irish politicians on their experience of the political process and their observations. It wouldn't be a history book, it would be a memoir. But I won't be writing it for some time yet."

The Irish Minister for Finance does not propose to follow in the footsteps of the former British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson, who put together a bestselling diet book after he left office. Ruairm Quinn admits, however, that he has gained "about 2 kilos" in weight during his tenure as chief tightener of the national belt.

A champion athlete in his youth, Quinn no longer has time to run or work-out but intends to shed those inflationary kilos over the next couple of months through a Thatcherite combination of getting on his bike and dietary cutbacks - a policy of physical rectitude.

Ruairm Quinn lives in Sandymount with his second wife, Liz Allman, and their young son. He has another son and daughter, now in their mid 20s, from his first marriage, which was dissolved in the 1980s. Quinn turned 50 on April 2nd last. A planned birthday party on that date was cancelled because his youngest child entered Harcourt Street hospital the night before for a minor operation. Ruairm Quinn now hopes to mark the end of his 50th year with a celebratory bash on April 2nd next.

Liam Fay: Would you consider holding the party at Blackhall Stud, given what we've been hearing about it lately?

Ruairi Quinn: (Laughs) No way, thank you very much!

LF: What did you make of the media coverage of the Michelle Rocca case?

RQ: It was a story that had all the ingredients of a classic soap. Given the people involved, and the fact that they're nearly all household names, it was inevitable that the media would cover it in the way that they did.

LF: Do you think the media went over the top?

RQ: Not particularly, no.

LF: You've been very critical of the media in terms of its political coverage. Do you believe that there has been an anti-Labour campaign going on in recent years?

RQ: I've been critical of the media in how it covers politicians, not the Labour party. It's up to the media to criticise political parties as they see fit. I think there's been a certain denigration of the role that politicians play in society which I do believe is dangerous to the fabric of democracy. That sounds slightly melodramatic and I don't mean to be melodramatic. It is also possible that the behaviour of some politicians has brought about some of that criticism. But just because some journalists behave irresponsibly or wrongly, I don't think people should attack the concept of a free press or the institution of the fourth estate. All politicians were being tarred because of the activities of one or two.

LF: Why shouldn't politicians be open to ridicule and denigration?

RQ: My concern with the media is not their attack on individual politicians but their ridiculing of the political process. I don't see who that serves. My taunt to the media was, "Well, come down here and try it for yourselves." By all means, we're fair game for severe comment and critical analysis and exposure of hypocrisy and dishonesty, but we shouldn't be ridiculed simply for what we do, which is an absolutely essential part of the democratic process. Look across at former-Yugoslavia and see what a denial of basic civil rights means to people. Or, what the reality of a really corrupt political system is, as in Albania. I'm not talking about the collapse of democracy overnight because of a couple of journalistic comments. But, ridicule for the sake of ridicule, because the journalist has the last word, without proffering anything in its place, is destructive, a kind of intellectual vandalism.

LF: Do you detect, within Independent Newspapers for instance, a particular campaign against Labour politicians?

RQ: I would see it more that the Independent Newspapers group have provided a platform for some journalists to attack the Labour party very virulently. That's been dealt with already; Dick Spring replied to a quite an over-the-top article by Eamon Dunphy.

LF: Do you believe that a shift to the right is inevitable now in this country?

RQ: I don't, actually. There's not all that much evidence of it. It's probably too early to say. Don't forget that the Labour party was at around 13% or 14% of opinion poll support until the November election was called in 1992. That election was called against the background of the collapse of the PD/Fianna Fail coalition. The reaction of the public to that particular event lead to a surge in support for the Labour party at that time. It was during the course of the campaign that Labour support took off.

LF: But Dick Spring had been as popular in the lead up to the election as Mary Harney is now?

RQ: He was effectively the leader of the opposition in terms of articulating a criticism and a concern that the public had about what was going on within the PD/Fianna Fail coalition at the time. It would appear that Mary Harney has performed a somewhat similar role at the present time.

LF: How can Labour counteract that?

RQ: There's two ways to do it. The first is to ask people what do they want in terms of the next 5 years in government. The second is to look at the credibility of the parties and what they are offering, and contrast their credibility with what they have done the last time they were in government. Whether it's on the liberal agenda of which the PDs would claim to be highly supportive - but they weren't able to deliver a single reform in liberal terms when they were in government with Fianna Fail. When Labour first proposed the introduction of divorce in this country, back in the mid-'70s, Mary Harney was either a senator or a deputy, Dessie O'Malley was certainly a Minister, and they all voted against it. The Labour party's involvement in government with Fianna Fail was the critical determining element that ensured that those issues, about which there had been a campaign for the last 20 years, were finally enacted into law. We have a track record in terms of achievement, of actually implementing what we said we would implement on that territory. It's now done-business. On the area of economic management, if you contrast my own record in the Department of Enterprise and Employment with that of Mr. O'Malley's when he was Minister for Industry and Commerce, there's just no comparison. There were jobs being lost every day that Dessie O'Malley was Minister for Industry and Commerce.

LF: And that was directly his fault?

RQ: To a large extent, yes.

LF: Why?

RQ: Because he was preoccupied with his obsession with Fianna Fail and Charlie Haughey and Mr. Reynolds.

LF: And that was literally taking up hours of his every working day, was it?

RQ: Well, it certainly would appear that he neglected entirely the small business sector. That was something that was very high up the agenda when I went into the Department. He set up the Culliton Review Group which then went off and did its own business, and there was little or no input from him in respect of that either.

LF: How do you see your constituency breaking in seat terms after the next election? Won't John Gormley of the Greens make a strong showing?

RQ: I don't think there'll be any change. It'll be one Labour, one Fine Gael, one Fianna Fail and one PD.

LF: Do you absolutely rule out coalition with the PDs after the election?

RQ: Politicians never rule out anything absolutely because you don't know what the public are going to say to you. As for me personally, I can't see how a coalition between Labour and the PDs would last kissing time.

LF: Will the election be sooner or later?

RQ: I honestly don't know. It hasn't been discussed at Cabinet. And I'm not, as such, permitted to reveal what items are discussed at Cabinet. It obviously is the focus of discussion from time to time. It is the Taoiseach's prerogative but he will not make that decision without consultation with the other party leaders. To the best of my knowledge, they have not yet decided when the election should be.

LF: Is part of the government's strategy to keep Fianna Fail on a permanent election footing so that they'll shoot their bolt before the real thing?

RQ: No. Fianna Fail have put themselves onto that. Fianna Fail started this hype about an election taking place immediately after the Budget. We didn't do it.

LF: Is Fianna Fail's touting of Albert Reynolds as the Saviour of the Peace Process a cynical election ploy?

RQ: You better ask Bertie Ahern if he's gonna let Albert Reynolds, as some sort of special negotiator for Peace, pre-empt the role of the Department of Foreign Affairs and, more importantly, the Department of An Taoiseach. I think it is a cynical ploy to suggest that Albert was uniquely responsible for the Peace Process. It diminishes very much the role of John Hume. It also diminishes very much the role of Dick Spring. The critical element that changed when the PDs left government with Fianna Fail was the advent of Labour and Labour's contacts with Unionists, and with the perception by people in the Unionist community that Labour was not a rabid nationalist party. They remember Dessie O'Malley and Bobby Molloy as former Fianna Fail Ministers and they were the two Cabinet Ministers with whom they were dealing.

LF: Do you think that the Tories are a lame duck administration now and that nothing is going to happen this side of a British general election?

RQ: Ah, yes. On anything.

LF: So, the sooner an election is called over there the better?

RQ: From everybody's point of view, primarily the British people. They have, it would appear, a government that is effectively paralysed from taking any effective action on any real front. The European Union is being prevented from moving forward because the British government is not in a position to give a clear, constructive response to a lot of issues that are currently before us.

LF: I'm sure you're aware of a rumour that went around about 6 months ago that you were thinking of joining Fianna Fail.

RQ: (Laughs) No, I didn't actually hear that one. No, I wouldn't join any other political party. My spiritual home is very much in the Labour movement and the European socialist tradition. If I felt that I couldn't make a contribution in the Oireachtas as a Labour deputy, I would resign and get out of politics from the age of 16, I was a socialist, and supported the whole intellectual tradition of the left in Europe. If I had wanted to get into politics for the sake of being in politics, Fianna Fail would have been the very obvious and logical place for me to have gone. It would've been a much easier road but it wouldn't have interested me in the slightest, and even less so now.

LF: If you had become a Fianna Fail TD, would we ever have discovered that you're bald? Fianna Fail have more of a toupee culture.

RQ: (Laughs) There was no question of me ever becoming a Fianna Fail toupee TD or of wearing a toupee at all.

LF: Did you start to lose your hair when you were very young?

RQ: Yeah. The first clump of it came out when I was about 10 years of age. I always knew I was going to be bald.

LF: Did that bother you?

RQ: At one stage, it did, yeah. You try various ways to stop it. You read the advertisements and you buy the creams. Then, you look at your father and his four brothers, and realise that it's going to happen and that's it. You just come to terms with it.

LF: Was the beard a compensation?

RQ: No, not at all. Some men have great angst and anguish about losing their hair, especially when it starts to happen young. They will go to great lengths to stop it happening. Fortunately, I was lucky in that I was able to realise that I was going to go bald and it just didn't bother me after a while. But I wouldn't quite say that I woke up one morning and thought, "Hey great, I'm gonna to be bald!" I've been the way I am today since my mid 20s.

LF: And you never considered a wig or a comb-over?

RQ: No. In fact, what I started to do was to cut it very short. I've a son now who's 26 years of age, he's even gone further; he's effectively shaved his head. He's nearly balder than I was at that age. Fashion makes it a little bit easier to be bald now than it was 26 years ago.

LF: To get back to politics - why do you think Labour are languishing so far behind in the polls?

RQ: We're not languishing. We've started to come back up again. We got a lot of blame for certain things. We made mistakes. People had an expectation of us back in 1992 that was way in excess of what any party could deliver upon. I understand, from the private polling that has been done, that the recognition and support for individual Labour TDs is higher in some cases than the actual support for the party. That will always be the case with smaller parties because of the size of the sample base. Democratic Left have 2% nationally and yet I don't think that anybody would doubt that their 6 TDs will get re-elected. There's also a quite a substantial amount of Don't Knows and, as people begin to look at what's on offer, I think we will improve in terms of support.

LF: So the prediction that you'll be down to between 16 and 20 seats is too pessimistic?

RQ: If anybody gives me odds on that, I'll take them.

LF: You say that Labour has made mistakes - what has been the biggest mistake that you've made in the course of the current Dail?

RQ: (Pause) I think it was a series of small things which, taken together, gave the impression that we were setting standards of behaviour for other people which we weren't prepared to apply to ourselves. The debacle over the fund-raising event - fairly minor fund-raising event as it was - with Eithne Fitzgerald. Likewise, a pretty innocuous fund-raising Race Night with Michael D. Higgins. My own involvement with the Eithne Fitzgerald thing was part of that. The perception that we had, so to speak, appointed family and friends to posts, a wrong perception in the sense that we were doing simply what had been done and is currently done by all of the political parties. But it was lifted out and presented in a particular way. Our reaction to that criticism conveyed the impression that we were somehow different in that we could say one thing and do another. I very much regret that. We are not the moral custodians of the nation or its people.

LF: How should the Labour party have reacted to the criticism?

RQ: Wisdom is a wonderful thing with hindsight. I think we should have been a bit more humble in the way in which we recognised that we had made mistakes. I don't think any of the issues involved were issues involving resignation. But, rather than attempting to defend aggressively certain things, we should have gone out and said, "Sorry, we got that one wrong, it shouldn't have happened."

LF: How did Labour get it so wrong given that you're supposed to have this elite squad of spindoctors and advisors who are said to be the envy of all the other parties?

RQ: People get things permanently wrong. A lot of this is judgement and reaction under pressure. And people under pressure get things wrong. It was heightened by a sense that we were the party to be attacked because we were the new element. A lot of the commentators, some of the Irish Independent but also Irish Times people, still don't forgive us for having gone into coalition with Fianna Fail. They thought that when they were voting for the Labour party they were voting to get Fianna Fail out of office. We didn't stand on the basis of getting Fianna Fail out of office. We stood on the basis of advancing the Labour party's policy agenda. People also forgot that John Bruton and Fine Gael resolutely stated that, under no circumstances, would they have a coalition of which Democratic Left were an integral part. We were open to the idea of a coalition with Fine Gael, ourselves and DL. We weren't prepared to have a coalition with the PDs because we knew it wouldn't have lasted jig-time. Let me recall for you that one of the big crises in the course of the November '92 election was the crisis in Aer Lingus. Given the commitment to wholesale privatisation of state companies which the PDs have consistently stated, we would not have been able to have gotten a resolution of the Aer Lingus conflict had the PDs been in government. It simply wouldn't have been on. People forget these things.

LF: Did you support the decision to coalesce with Fianna Fail?

RQ: Yes, and I supported it for the following reason: I was convinced then, and am even more convinced now, that we would never have got completed the liberal agenda without Fianna Fail inside the government. We had to bring their key voters with us, their popular support - not necessarily their own members, although some of their own members are intensely conservative - and there's nothing wrong with that, I just don't happen to agree with it. It was obvious to me in the course of the '70s and '80s that we could not deal with issues like the decriminalisation of homosexuality, like the final rationalisation of family planning, coming to terms as far as we can on the whole question of abortion information and, of course, the question of divorce, without the support of Fianna Fail in government. If you look at how narrow the majority was for the divorce issue after Fianna Fail had ceased to be in the government, I think that judgement was correct.

LF: Would the divorce referendum have been won by a greater margin if Fianna Fail had been in power with Labour?

RQ: I believe so, yeah.

LF: Despite the popular perception then that Labour were just looking for an excuse to quit the Albert Reynolds led coalition, is it the case that this was the last thing that the Labour Ministers wanted?

RQ: Yes. The government was working well with one minor but critically important exception: the relationship between the Taoiseach and Tanaiste was steadily and surely deteriorating. But we weren't aware of it for quite some time because Dick had internalised it and kept it very much to himself. There were a number of events, which are history now and I don't want to go into them, where undertakings were given and subsequently not delivered upon. We ended up apparently defending somebody else's inexplicable actions. A specific example was the famous Masri passports affair. In order to maintain a unity of government response, and having satisfied himself that what he had seen in the Department of Justice was satisfactory and acceptable, Dick Spring went into the Dail and made a statement to that effect on the understanding that Albert Reynolds was going to do the same. But Albert Reynolds never spoke to the Dail directly in the context of that particular debate.

LF: What was he going to say?

RQ: I don't know. But he was going to come on the record himself on the floor of the House. Now, there's two sides to every story and I don't want in any way to be unfair to the man, he's not here. I'm just giving our side of the story.

LF: Was Albert's undertaking to speak in the Dail on this issue given in writing?

RQ: Albert was not a man who put very much in writing. It wouldn't have been the sort of thing that would've been given in writing anyway. It was an arrangement. The handling of the Beef Tribunal Report over the August Bank Holiday weekend has been well documented and that was another example. Dick spoke in the debate immediately after that and said okay, that's the last time, do this once more and it's curtains. Albert's insistence on going ahead with the Harry Whelehan appointment against all our desires and wishes just pushed it to the brink. Fianna Fail, and Albert Reynolds in particular, felt that he could push and push and push and we wouldn't resist. He didn't realise who he was dealing with.

LF: When you say Dick Spring internalised his difficulties with Reynolds, did he not even express his anger, rage, to his Ministerial colleagues socially?

RQ: He did, but not to the extent that we realised the full breakdown, or deterioration, in the relationship. We, the other Labour Ministers, realised there were difficulties. We meet every Tuesday morning at 9am for an hour prior to the Cabinet meeting, have always done that and do it now. What has been a revelation to me has been the way in which John Bruton has managed to maintain and consolidate the trust between the three party leaders. Maybe a triangular structure is more stable than a dual structure.

LF: Isn't part of the reason that Bruton is maintaining the cohesion of the three parties in government now, that he felt very chastened by the collapse of his attempt at forming a government in '92? There was the famous meeting with Spring in The Shelbourne from which he emerged ashen-faced?

RQ: Which I wasn't at. I just saw the coverage on the TV. John Bruton himself would be the first to say that he has learnt an awful lot. Certainly, from the John Bruton with whom I worked in Cabinet in the mid-1980s, he's a very different person. Mind you, I suspect I'm also a different person as well.

LF: What's different about Bruton now?

RQ: He listens. He's open to your point of view. While he may not agree with you intellectually, he'll recognise the political reality of the strengths of your conviction and the support for a particular position, and will attempt to deal with it politically. Whereas, 10 years ago, he would attempt to demolish the rationale of the position and say that's a stupid position to hold and ridicule it. Now, he'll say, "Okay, if that's your point of view, I'll respect it. Now, how do we deal with it?"

LF: It has been suggested that if Michael Lowry had been a Fianna Fail Minister in a Labour/Fianna Fail coalition, the Lowry/Ben Dunne affair would have broken up the government. When a Fianna Failer does something wrong, it's not just an individual's shame, it is, in Labour's eyes, evidence of "a cancer at the heart of the party." As a Fine Gaeler, Lowry resigned and that seems to have been the end of it as far as Labour is concerned.

RQ: That's speculative thinking. The question is if Michael Lowry was a Fianna Fail TD, would he have resigned?

LF: Do you think he would?

RQ: Probably not.

LF: Will it be difficult for you as a party in coalition with Fine Gael to go the electorate if Lowry is standing on the Fine Gael ticket?

RQ: I don't think so. Those are issues for Fine Gael. We will be standing as the Labour party. We will be looking for support in preference terms for the other two parties with whom we form a government. Who those parties select as their candidates has to be, and must exclusively be, a matter for them. I think you get into very dangerous water if one political party starts to tell another political party who their candidates or their leader or what their policy should be. A political party has enough trouble minding its own backyard, getting its own candidates properly selected and elected. The people will decide. If they don't like the colour of a particular candidate running for any political party, they'll make that known fairly clearly. I would respect that judgement.

LF: Having worked side by side with Lowry, were you surprised when the truth emerged about his business affairs?

RQ: I don't know the man very well. I hardly knew him before we started negotiations to form the government. He was the chief negotiator on the Fine Gael side so he was my counterpart in effect. I was surprised that someone who was in public office and who had aspired to become a major public figure, as he did, had his business affairs in the state they were in.

LF: It is commonly accepted that you threatened to resign as Finance Minister during the negotiations with the unions because of an intervention by Dick Spring which you felt undermined you. How serious were you about that threat?

RQ: I'm not going to comment on that.

LF: Why not?

RQ: It's a matter between myself and my party leader.

LF: Are you surprised that news of the threat got out to the media?

RQ: As I said, I'm not going to comment on it.

LF: It would've been an extraordinary and unprecedented move for a Minister for Finance to resign in such a manner?

(Silence).

LF: You have nothing to say about it whatsoever?

(Shakes head).

LF: Is it true that you wanted to help the students battling against SPUC with their legal fees and that John Bruton has thwarted this idea?

RQ: That certainly has not happened. First of all, I support the students. One of the student activists who was involved in the original case, Ivana Bacik, is a personal friend of mine and is a member of the party in Dublin South East, and was when she was in Trinity. I have a great respect for students and for student politicians, having been one myself. My information is that if the student unions lose in the Irish courts, they will appeal to the European Court of Human Rights and the prospect, I'm told in informal legal advice, is that they'll probably win their case. If that happened, we would ultimately end up, as the state, having to pick up the tab for that set of legal fees. If that is the case, and it's a big if, I think we should pick up the tab now, when it's half the size it's going to be when it comes back from Strasbourg. But that is purely on the basis of advice I have received informally. It's not advice from the Attorney General.

LF: If you don't pick up the tab, the legal fees are going to bankrupt the student unions for generations to come.

RQ: Yes, and I would be very much opposed to that. But I don't think we could unilaterally step in as a government and justify picking up the legal bill of one particular group of peole simply because we happen to like them. We would certainly have to get the authority of the Oireachtas to do that if we wanted to do it and I don't know if that would be forthcoming. It would create a precedent that every aggreieved group who took a case, so to speak, in the public intrest, or who defended a case in the public interest, and who lost in the courts, would then turn around to the state and say pick up my legal bill.

LF: Is it on the basis of the economic wisdom of paying the legal fees now that you will sell the proposition to John Bruton who is not, after all, as well disposed to the students' case as you might be?

RQ: The matter hasn't been discussed by government Ministers or between myself and the Taoiseach.

LF: Do you think Jim Larkin would approve of what you've been doing as Minister for Finance?

RQ: I think Jim Larkin would die and go to Heaven three times over if he thought that the SIPTU union, which he helped to form, had successfully negotiated the fourth partnership agreement, Partnership 2000. And that trade union leaders were able to walk into Government Buildings and sit down with the government of the day. In his time, they were beaten up by the police outside Government Buildings.

LF: Is the privatisation of Telecom inevitable?

RQ: No, not necessarily. Privatisation started in Mrs. Thatcher's land, for two reasons. She wanted to break the power of the unions. She succeeded in doing that. Union power was exercised very irresponsibly in Britain, in marked contrast to here. She also wanted individual people in the United Kingdom to own shares. For those reasons, she sold off a whole lot of state-owned companies at below market value. As soon as people were able to sell them on, they sold them on. Instead of having a share-owning, property-owning democracy, 90% of all the shares in Britain are held by pension funds and big institutions. She literally sold the family silver. They have a higher deficit than we have. They have used that deficit to have low taxes, particularly low taxes on very wealthy people. The way that the Conservative party has run the British economy over the last 17 years is something just short of criminal. When you think of it, they've sold off major assets which they've privatised. They've nothing to show for the money that they got for it. And they've had a constant stream of North Sea oil. They have no contingency fund, nothing to show for it. Their workforce is poorly educated and poorly trained, by their own admission. They have a poor health service relative to ours. They have a wider gap between rich and poor now than in 1979.

LF: So, having said all that, will you be going into the election saying that Labour will not privatise Telecom?

RQ: Why should we privatise it while we're getting a stream of income from it? I believe that state-owned companies should pay a dividend, should actually earn their keep. We have no need to privatise it.

LF: Do you share the distrust that some of the Irish Labour party are said to feel towards Tony Blair?

RQ: No. I think Tony Blair is working in a very difficult situation. The British Labour party has to get elected or else you're looking at an extraordinary society that, over 20 years, is incapable of changing its government. He has had to make the changes that he has made. The test of Tony Blair will be when he becomes Prime Minister.

LF: To get back to the broader Irish scene, there is still a debate raging in the media about whether or not Michelle Smith's Olympic Games victories were achieved with the help of steroids. Do you think people are entitled to be suspicious or should they leave her alone?

RQ: I don't think they're entitled to be suspicious. I think they're entitled to ask a question. And the answer she has given is, from my point of view, very conclusive. I think the response from the Americans was very much sour grapes. The American coverage of those Olympic Games was outrageous - it was America-versus-the-Rest-of-the-World stuff. Michelle Smith totally changed her entire lifestyle and her training regime over the last 4 years. I did intensive training for a period of time. I know what it can do to your performance, physically. I have seen quantum leaps in people's performance by the application of rigorous training techniques. She clearly was doing that.

LF: The media debate seems to have damaged Michelle Smith's reputation. She doesn't seem to have capitalised on the medals in terms of very many endorsements or advertising contracts.

RQ: It has, unfortunately. And I'm very sad for her personally, even though I've never met the woman. Here is a youngster who applies herself, dedicates herself, and has not got the golden crown as a result of it. That sends a negative message for other people.

LF: Does the government have a vested interest in the vindication of her success? The feelgood factor associated with her victories last summer was so immense that, presumably, were those victories shown to be a sham, it would have a very negative effect on the national morale.

RQ: No, we don't have a vested interest in her success. No more than we have a vested interest in artistic success. If the government starts to claim ownership of cultural or sporting or intellectual success, it becomes a bit ridiculous. Seamus Heaney did not win the Nobel Prize because Michael D. Higgins is a superb Minister for Culture. What the government can recognise, and what I certainly do recognise, is that the level