The New Long Fella

Minister Éamon Ó Cuív is the grandson of Éamon de Valera, the dominant Irish political figure of the 20th Century.
While Ó Cuív will never repeat the achievements of his grandfather, who was Taoiseach and President, there’s no disputing that the 59-year-old Minister has managed to give the Long Fella a run for his money when it comes to making headlines.

Ó Cuív most famously made news by publicly declaring that he voted 'No' to the first Nice Treaty. He has also raised eyebrows by declaring Ireland should rejoin the Commonwealth.
In recent months, he has been involved in an assortment of controversies. He is the Minister responsible for changing the name of Dingle into the Irish 'An Daingean'; last December he was involved in a scuffle with students protesting at NUI Galway; more recently, he apparently fell asleep in the Dáil chamber.
Despite being raised in Dublin, Ó Cuív now has an accent that political pundits like to make fun of.
“My son was in a certain establishment not too far from this building with a few friends of his,” Ó Cuív tells me, “and this dentist joined their company and he asked where they were from. My son said, ‘From Connemara’. And he said, ‘That phoney Éamon Ó Cuív who, I understand, comes from Dublin 4, has a phoney Connemara accent’!
“Now, of course, this man didn’t realise he was talking to my son. Eventually when they were leaving he asked each member of the group their name, and he came to my son. And he said, ‘Éamon Ó Cuív is my namesake’. And yer man says, ‘You’re coddin’!’ And he says, ‘No,’ he said and he pulls out a business card! So, yeah, I mean, there is that bit of an attitude alright. But I can smile at it.” Eamon Ó Cuív is in charge of a department – Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs – which An Bord Snip has recommended should be axed.

Jason O’Toole: Has your grandfather’s political career cast a shadow over your own?
Éamon Ó Cuív: In a lot of cases it was totally to my disadvantage, because people saw you coming. I served a long apprenticeship as an ordinary member of the party. There was no fast track. I was living in an area that geographically was very far out of the way, so I wasn’t seen as an instant candidate. So, the De Valera name certainly didn’t get me in.
Surely it must’ve been of some benefit?
I ran for the Senate in ’89, and for the first time ever, the name recognition amongst professional politicians – in other words TDs, Senators and particularly amongst councillors – was an advantage.
How did you feel the first time you ran for the Dáil and didn’t win a seat?
We knew it would be difficult because previous candidates from Connemara had got about 1,500 to 2,000 votes. I got 3,800 first-preferences, so I did relatively well for a Connemara-based candidate. The one that really disappointed us was the famous ‘Rod-Licence’ election in 1989, where I lost out effectively by 127 votes to Máire Geoghegan-Quinn. You know, there’s always the danger that when you try it twice – and fail – that you might have peaked and go down.
So, did you think about chucking it in?
I remember one day down in Castlebar, parking the car for an hour and wondering was it worth even finishing out the campaign? I decided to give it one more shot and got elected to the Senate. I got elected to the County Council in 1991, and then I ran in four general elections since 1992 and I’ve got elected in the first count in each election since.
Did your grandfather’s legacy put you under pressure to become a Minister?
Ah, no. One thing that was inculcated into us when we were children was to stand on your own two feet and never to use your family background. I’ve done that. I made things difficult for myself by having to prove myself to a community where I wasn’t a native. But the community in turn supported me. Not because I’m Eamon De Valera’s grandson, but because of what I did in their area over 15 years before I got into politics. Sometimes I get the impression that people think we have a little book hidden away at home, and we look it up to see what Grandad would say or do. I make my own decisions.
There’s conflicting versions of Dev in our history books...
Tim Pat Coogan’s book is not an accurate portrayal of either of my grandparents. He misreads the situation totally as to what kind of people they were. One simple instance is that my Grandmother was even more adamantly against the Treaty – even though she had a great grá for Michael Collins as a person.
What did you think of the portrayal of Dev in Neil Jordan's Michael Collins film?
It wasn’t him as a person. De Valera, according to everybody who knew him, was a big personality. I thought he was portrayed as weak, a person totally devoid in personality. My memory of him was of somebody very engaging, very warm, very open, very willing to give his views. To this day, I still get people coming to me saying that their mother absolutely adored him, or their father absolutely adored him, and so on. The person portayed in the film couldn't have attracted that type of loyalty.
Dev is often portrayed as being responsible for the split…
Yeah. Unfortunately, the film didn’t go into the politics of the situation. I always believed that the most misunderstood document in the whole saga was Document II. It is an absolute work of art. It was a very modern way of dealing with the dilemma.
Do you think Dev made the right decisions?
One of the reasons he was opposed to the treaty was because it was always going to split the country. There was no way that Stack, De Brugha, Mary McSweeney and the hardliners were going to accept The Treaty. So, the challenge was, how do you stop the split? And he came up with this idea – Document II – and they started writing it one night, (in the hope) that you would get the Dáil to reject the treaty, but you would rewrite the treaty. You’d make it look as like the treaty as possible, and that you would go back to the British and say, ‘But we’ll sign this’. The onus then would be on the British to explain the differences. And even though the differences were substantial, they were couched in very clever language, so it would be very hard to explain why they were so substantial. He believed that the British would have been put on the defensive. It was a very subtle solution. I always regret that they didn’t give it a shot.
Why didn’t they?
I think that sheer inexperience caught out the Irish side. The more you look at The Good Friday Agreement, the patience that Sinn Fein showed in avoiding the split, and the way they kept going back to their own people, and the subtlety of the wording and so on was remarkable.
Did your grandfather ever say anything to you about why he didn’t go over to London for the Anglo-Irish Treaty negotiations?
He had gone to London – everyone forgets he was part of the treaty negotiations! And if you take any modern negotiation, at different phases, different people are involved. My own view is that there’s too much made of that. Keeping the President or the Taoiseach or the equivalent at home meant you had your fall-back position if the negotiations failed – you still had one card to play. The Treaty was signed on the Tuesday night. On the Saturday, the delegation were home in Dublin and they had a big meeting. And a solemn undertaking was given by Griffith, before they left, that they would not sign anything without bringing it back. I can understand how, under pressure, there might be guys who caved in. We did ask him the question, ‘Granda, what would you have done, or what would you have said if you had been threatened with terrible and immediate war?’ Which he was, as it happens, in earlier discussions but we didn’t know that. And the answer was, ‘I would have told Lloyd George he was starting a war’. In other words, he would have faced him down.
Which of De Valera's achievements stand out for you?
I’m always fascinated by how he managed to keep such popular support even though he only won the 1966 election by a short head. From his emergence in politics in 1918 to 1966 – that is an unparalleled length in politics commanding the kind of support in a democratic system that he did. In time, his achievements will be recognised. When one looks at the Constitution, the principles enunciated there – particularly when you take the circumstances of the mid-30s – are very much of a liberal democracy. He was the ultimate democrat. All of that generation – in fairness, including Willie Cosgrave and the rest – created a very stable democracy in this country, and one we take for granted. When you look at other post-colonial countries in Africa, South America, or anywhere else, how many of them can say that they have had unbroken democracy since their freedom?
Do you think there is "Dublin 4" bias in the Irish media?
Because there’s such a concentration of media in Dublin – and if I might say so, middle-class Dublin – it is inevitable that it gets disproportionate attention from the media, which reflects the attitudes and so on of a fairly small set of people. And I say that without in any way being personally critical. There would be an argument, for example, that Irish language media tends to be very much dominated by Connemara, because it’s located there.
Do you feel the media has run you down?
I think certain sections of the media would probably feel that (pause)… they wouldn’t empathise with what I stand for. I can live with that. I think that they’d see me as ‘gone totally native’.
They say you’ve lost your Dublin accent, for example.
Well, I’ve often remarked that Michael McDowell doesn't have a very pronounced Dublin accent; Michael McDowell comes from the same part of Dublin as I do. And Dublin 4 – the part of Dublin 4 that I grew up in – didn’t have much of a Dublin accent anyway. It certainly didn’t have a DART accent. However, my accent changed. It’s hugely influenced by where I live, but also by the fact that I speak Irish at home, and I consciously don’t speak Irish with a Dublin accent. I suppose I speak it with a fair Connemara blas at this stage.
What’s your reaction to the closing of the Irish language newspaper?
It’s very unfortunate – and steps have been taken to get a new paper. I understand from Foras na nGaeilge there was a tender competition. A tender came in from Faoinse, it won the competition. They were made an offer and they didn’t accept it and decided to close. Now, I understand there was no other viable tender, so we have to just go through the process again. But I think in a year’s time it will be seen as a hiatus. There will be an Irish language newspaper.
So it will be done by the winter?
Oh, I’d hope so.
What’s going to be the biggest obstacle?
The biggest problem is distribution. I notice it more and more, for example, in hotels and airplanes and so on, you are given free copies of the daily newspapers because they now realise the advertising is much more valuable to them than the share of the sale price. Similarly, you have a lot of free newspapers like the Galway Advertiser, so maybe we have to look at that as well, and be a little bit radical about how we distribute an Irish language newspaper.
Can it change with the times?
The other thing that was mentioned was the possibility of having a daily update of the newspaper on the web. And the final issue that arises, now that we are at this particular situation, is we already have big newsrooms in TG4 and Radio na nGaeltachta. Is there any reason that Foras couldn’t be published by TG4/Radio na nGaeltachta as an adjunct? I believe in being radical in solutions to problems.
There has been huge controversy over your decision to change the name of Dingle. The residents held a plebiscite on reverting back to the English name and – much to the chagrin of some Irish speakers there – you accepted that. However, you have since done an about-face.
They held a referendum under the Local Government Act, and therefore the Minister who could act upon that, in law, was the Minister for the Environment. However, what was advised was that the Official Languages Act superseded the (Local Government) act. Now the problem is that you couldn’t legally do it that way in the act, so it was agreed then that the planning act would be amended to accommodate the use of An Daingean Uí Chuais and Dingle, and there is no problem with that. Now, as I understand it, the nub of the issue is two-fold: the argument between An Daingean and An Daingean Ui Chuais; and the second issue is can you have the road signs bilingual? I have an open mind on that. As long as, by inserting one problem, we don’t create 2,000 more problems. The order that incorporated The Dingle, also incorporated 2,000 other Irish language places and they seem happy with the law. So it’s a question of satisfying one without dissatisfying 1,999.
What about the Daingean Ui Chuais argument?
We have a very, very well tried and tested methodology to deal with that. If somebody says, ‘I don’t like the Irish version', we give them the advice of the Place Names Branch and the Place Names Commission, which is all well-researched. If they still want to persist, we then go to the local authority and ask them what they want. If they still persist with it, we go back to the commission and ask them for their advice. In the case of Dún Bleisce, even though the commission was very strongly in favour of Doon, they did admit that Dún Bleisce had been a previous name again, and I signed the order.
So why is there a controversy in Dingle?
I’m willing to follow the same procedure in relation to An Daingean versus Daingean Ui Chuais. It’s a little bit more controversial because when the English-speakers want Daingean Ui Chuais as the Irish version, the Irish-speakers of the Gaeltacht of Corca Dhuibhne always and ever use An Daingean. It’s not something that I made up, and in fact the irony of the Daingean issue is that Pádraig Ó Siochrú, who came from Corca Dhuibhne, was chairman of the Place Names Commission the first time they recommended An Daingean. Now, I’m easy about it: if the people down there want Daingean Ui Chuais and they follow the procedure we can change it from An Daingean to Daingean Ui Chuais very quickly. But they have to follow that procedure. And that doesn’t take any change of the law: whereas the signpost issue takes a change of the law, and we can deal with that.
You raised eyebrows before by suggesting Ireland should re-join the Commonwealth.
Most Irish people in a theoretical way favour a united Ireland. I don’t think too many people have rationalised how they would accommodate the million people who have an attachment to the Union within that united Ireland. So what I’m talking about is accommodating, within this island, Unionists and Nationalists, which is what our flag is about. Our flag is about peace between the green and the orange. It isn’t about making all the orange green. This notion that we someday might, in some magic way, persuade Unionists to give up all of their attachment to their culture and to the British throne and so on, is in my view totally impractical. Now, I try to live out what I believe. I believe passionately in a united Ireland. It would be better for everybody on this island – but only if it fully accommodates the Unionists and their tradition. And I have, for example, (as a Minister) given money to the Orange Order in the south.
That’s contentious, isn’t it?
Well, it may be contentious but, I believe, it is right. We talk about cherishing minorities but we can be very, very impatient with them. I was a guest of honour last year at the Orange March in Drum, and I spoke at it. I have been an enthusiastic supporter of the Ulster-Scots body. I have funded, directly from this department, an Ulster-Scots centre in East Donegal. I have at all times tried to show courtesy and respect to the Ulster-Scot tradition.
What about Orange Marches in Dublin?
I think it was a disgrace the way the march was broken up. There was a certain element in the ‘Love Ulster’ organisation that wasn’t as positive as I would like. That said, if any group want to march down here, I would like that we’d accommodate them. I cannot see why an Orange March through Dublin couldn’t become a very good carnival day. I would be on the radical side here, that those of us who really believe in true republicanism, true pluralism, true sharing of identities, who really believe in our flag, have to accommodate the Orange.
Are you a Catholic?
Oh yeah, sure, yeah.
Committed?
I go to Mass on a Sunday. I wouldn’t be the holiest person in the world.
Do you pray?
I hope I do [laughs].
How do you incorporate your belief into your everyday life?
Well, I don’t know. I think I’d be very typical of a lot of the Catholics around who go to Mass on a Sunday and whatever. Certainly where I live, it’s a fairly normal state of affairs.
Do you believe in heaven?
Yeah, well obviously if I’m a Catholic I do, yeah.
And are we all going to heaven, or just Catholics?
Well, I don’t know the answer to all those questions. But there is a question, a mathematical question to do with that and that is – people are finite beings, by definition one has to question whether they can totally love or totally turn away from God. It’s a kind of theological question.
But you believe in evil.
Absolutely. I believe in good and in evil.
Turning to the economy, where there's been lots of evil, do you think this government can weather the current storm of public outrage?
You couldn’t have a whole lot of people losing part of their income, losing their jobs, being uncertain about their future, wondering where their children are going to get jobs, without a lot of disenchantment. We have a huge challenge to explain to the people that the decisions we have taken are in their long-term interest. I always believe that the first thing you have to do is to do the right thing. There are times you have to do the things that aren’t popular if you honestly believe they are right, but I also believe that given time and space you should be able to persuade the majority to your view.
NAMA is burdening ordinary people with the debts of the banks and developers’ toxic assets. How are you going to persuade people to support that?
I don’t accept that. If we were to give a grant to the banks of €30 million, a cash injection, and just borrow it on the strength of the taxpayer and of the State and give a present of it to the banks to make them liquid again – obviously, that would be, literally, the government taking a total risk. But we’re not. What we’re doing is, we’re saying: ‘We’ll give ye a load of cash but we want the keys to all the assets'. I am utterly 100% convinced that NAMA is by far the best way forward.
The McCarthy report recommends that your brief – the Department of Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs – be scrapped altogether.
I read the whole thing from end to end, examined every proposal very carefully. Obviously, there are some that I think are very good and some that aren’t good. What I’ll now do is, in relation to that, I’ll be well informed when we debate at cabinet and come up with our joint conclusions. In relation to the structure of departments, that’s an issue for the Taoiseach and I’m sure he’s read McCarthy with great interest. The big issue isn’t my Ministry or anybody else’s Ministry. I was in Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands, now it’s Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs. I was in Agriculture when it was Rural Development, now it’s Agriculture, Food and Fisheries. Departments keep changing.
Will you be making any representation to defend the existence of your Department?
No, not at all. Ministers don’t make representations, they discuss things at the cabinet table. I don’t think the configuration of departments is an item on the agenda. What is much more important is what in total, all the government departments do and that they do it in the most efficient and effective manner to serve the people.
With only 17% of people saying they'd vote for Fianna Fáil in the polls, is the next general election a lost cause?
Elections are not won on the big policies, but are actually won parish by parish, polling station by polling station, street by street. We will have to do a lot of work in the next few years – reconnecting the party, particularly in urban areas, with the people, literally in every street.
Pundits are forecasting that Fianna Fáil will be wiped out.
We had a very bad showing in the local elections. But there are many more parties in the Dáil who would love to get on a good day what we think was a disastrous day. Therefore, any forecast of the demise of Fianna Fáil is premature. And as Charlie Haughey said on one famous occasion, ‘Go and dance on somebody else’s grave’. But we have a challenge if we want to become by far the biggest party in the State again. But I take huge heart from Fine Gael: if you remember back to the 2002 election there were plenty of pundits forecasting the demise of Fine Gael; when Enda Kenny became leader they said that no way could Enda Kenny revive the party. And one has to take their hat off to Enda Kenny and what he has achieved for Fine Gael. There’s nobody writing them off at the moment.
You famously voted ‘no’ in the first Nice Treaty referendum...
I am never going to answer that question in relation to any election again because the principle that politicians would have to declare their vote either in a general election or a referendum goes totally in the face of the whole principle of the secret ballot. So, I did say before the last Lisbon referendum that I was volunteering the information well in advance of the Lisbon referendum but I also made it absolutely clear that nobody had the right to ask me how I voted, and that from now on if anybody asked me in any future election, on a matter of principle I’ll tell them that is an incorrect question to ask – because it would be me this week, some other politician another week, and the whole principle of the secret ballot would unravel.
Did you ever try marijuana when you were a student?
Never. There was a rumour that there were drugs available in the bar at the time, but I was never in the bar in Belfield until I went back there as a politician.
What do you think about the idea of legalising marijuana?
More people die from drug-related causes of death in this country than from car accidents. So drugs aren’t a trivial issue. I don’t think marijuana is good for people, and therefore I don’t think it should be legalised. Now, I hear an argument that if you legalised it, you’d reduce crime and you’d be able to take away Garda resources from hunting down people with marijuana. I don’t buy the argument, because you have to look at the nature of the criminal. If the criminal wasn’t dealing marijuana, they’d trade in something worse.
What makes you say that?
The criminals aren’t going to go away because you make a thing legal – they’ll find something else illegal to trade in, because that’s how they live. And it might be something a lot more lethal than marijuana. Therefore the idea that in some way you would solve the crime problem by legalising any substance that’s illegal doesn’t stand up. Are you going to tell me that the criminals are going to go out of business because you make something legal?
So, why not make all drugs legal?
Whereas I do accept that in itself marijuana mightn’t be the most potent of drugs, one thing that we do know is that drugs are not good for people. Many people take drugs and it doesn’t have long-term harm, but other people take drugs and it ruins their lives. And when you start – drugs tend to be a gateway. For example, one of the challenges even with the legal drug, alcohol, is that it becomes a gateway drug to other drugs. We know for example that people who start drinking very young, which is illegal, are much more likely to end up with drink and drug problems.
The junior minister in your department, John Curran, said last week that he thinks the extent of drug use in Ireland is overestimated, that most young people don’t take drugs and the cocaine problem is exaggerated.
The actual percentages that use drugs are small. Obviously, younger age groups have a higher incidence and then certain areas have a much higher incidence – in particular, heroin is very much linked to social disadvantage.
For many young people, Curran’s comments jar with the anecdotal evidence. There’s festivals on every weekend at which thousands of people are going to go along and get off their faces on pills.
I have children. They’re adults now, but this was a discussion and I’d have known the nightclubs they’d have gone to. [To] the question, ‘Are there drugs in the nightclub?’, they’d tell you, ‘Of course there are.’ What they seemed to say to me was: yes, there would be, no question, and if you wanted to you’d get them with very little difficulty but if you didn’t want them they weren’t pushed on you. But to think that the vast majority of kids are into illegal substances, it certainly isn’t borne out in the surveys.
You were involved in a scuffle at NUI Galway with anti-fee protestors.
About 20 students invaded my office when I wasn’t there, and my staff rang me. I was a bit annoyed, in that it was a bit unfair to enter my office, particularly when I was in Dublin. There are four female staff working in my office. They rang me and we got the Guards, and they left peacefully about half an hour later. The following week I was in Galway with Minister Batt O’Keefe and I arrived in the square in the Quadrangle in NUIG after Batt. When I went to go in the door with one of the girls who had been in the office, they charged and blocked our way. So there were two security men there, and they led us over to another door, and there was a wheelchair ramp up to the door with a railing on the outside. They were coming in over the railing and I grabbed one of them by the arms and I stopped him climbing over the railing. Now, they were all going to pour in after us. We were going to get cornered.
The student said you man-handled him...
Well, I did. I grabbed him by the lapels and I shook him. Now, as somebody who has been on the odd picket in my time, if 50 people are coming charging at you – some of them up the ramp and some of them over the railing and you are restrained – well I think that’s fair game. I wasn’t going to allow my secretary to be squashed or pushed into a corner and I don’t think I used undue force. I had the right to restrain him from climbing over the barrier.
That protest was over the re-introduction of third level education fees.
As somebody who believes in the social redistribution of money, I cannot find the logical argument against charging those who can well afford to pay fees, so that you have more money to give to those who cannot afford to pay and as a result don’t go to college. For example, charge fees to those whose parents earn over €150,000 a year, and if you used that money to increase the maintenance grants or to give special access to travellers or to people from very poor areas to go to University, would you in principle be against that? The real scandal is not about fees, it is that if (pauses)… the day a child is born, if they are born into a traveller family or if they’re born into a family in a very disadvantaged area, they have a very small chance of ever getting to third-level. That is the great injustice of our society. And if those students had been protesting about that scandal they would have got a lot more sympathy from me than trying to protect the rich against fees. What I find very strange is that socialists would be arguing against fees as a matter of principle.
You apparently went for a snooze recently in the Dáil?
We were all contemplating (smiles)! I would say one thing: as somebody who passionately believes in debate, and who would be known in a proactive debate to probably exhaust everybody with my ability to keep going, I do find the Dáil very nineteenth century.
In what way?
A lot of the way it is just for ritual. On a lot of issues I don’t believe that it engages in real debate. The committees are the only place in the Dáil that we ever get to the meat of any matter. Question time is very curtailed, and we don’t use the committees enough to really tease out issues. A lot of the speeching, and a lot of the time spent in the Dáil is very non-productive.
So, what should be done about it?
We really have to look at the whole idea of why we have a parliament; what it’s there to do, and how could it actually really debate out issues and tease them out in a non-partisan manner to get much better results than we get at the moment. I am talking about really radical Dáil reform, not what passes for Dáil reform here, which is just sitting more hours for the sake of sitting more hours. If we could do our business to a higher quality, in less time, then there’s no reason why we shouldn’t.
Would your thoughts on reform include extending the Dáil during the summer?
Well, I don’t see that there’s any point if we are just extending the Dáil for people to read scripts that they could read off the internet anyway.
Why not?
The whole attitude towards the Dáil, in a lot of media debate, is too focussed on the amount of time. What I would ask people is, for the amount of time we put in, how many things do we change by interactive debate? If we are not doing that, there is no point in the Dáil. There is a need to decide what should the Dáil be doing.
What should it be doing?
Now, let’s presume this afternoon we went in and we had a committee debate. Not me standing and making a speech, you standing and making a speech, somebody else standing and making a speech. A real proactive debate to tease out some issue and we actually came to a consensus through tossing it over and back. If we could do that in an hour rather than five hours of us all reading out speeches, which would be the better for the country?
As for the question about the snoozing, was that true?
We were all contemplating deeply (smiles sheepishly)! I have been known many times for people to think I was snoozing – but when they tried to get away with what they might have said when they thought I was snoozing, I always seem to know what was being said.