Just Mary

by Mary O'Rourke

  I started to look further into the matter, and whenever a new school was opened — few and far between as these were — I would always read the associated files very carefully. It struck me that there were many teams of consulting architects, of civil engineers, of electrical engineers, and on it went, and so the bills kept mounting up. I was no expert in construction, yet the thought came to me that there must be some way of building what was needed in a more economic fashion, one which related more directly to the circumstances we were now living in.

  I enlisted the help of George Rowley, a wonderful person in the Primary Building Unit, and we set to the challenge. When a school deputation came to see me, they would always be fired up with the plan that had been prepared or that was in the process of being drawn up, with its various teams of associated professionals, and so on and so forth. I would say to them, ‘What is your greatest need?’

  ‘We need six classrooms, we need a drama room, we need a PE hall and we need and we need and we need . . .’ would often be the reply.

  And doubtless they did need all of these things — but to make it happen for them, I needed money which I knew I wasn’t going to get. So we would say to them, ‘We can offer you £100,000.’ Now I am talking twenty years ago, when this was a substantial amount of money. And we would propose employing a good Clerk of Works to work with the Office of Public Works who would be able to tell them what they could build for such a sum. ‘Oh, no, no, no’ would be the schools’ first reaction to this offer. They were holding out for the full bells and whistles, of course.

  ‘This is all that is on offer,’ I would reply. ‘And if you don’t accept the £100,000, we will have to give it to the next school in the queue.’

  So they would waltz out and the next school would come in, and very quickly the word spread through the primary schools network that you could get funding for your building from the Department, but that you had to take it in a basic fashion. We were not proposing prefabs, however: there would be proper classrooms with all of the necessary modern appliances, but there was not going to be room for sports halls, for assembly rooms, for this room or that room. It wasn’t long before the Boards of Management of the schools began to accept what was on offer, and in many cases we were able to reach compromises and away a school would go, to make the best possible use of the money. In due course, I would arrive to open the new building or development and to see the plaque on the wall. I always felt a great pride that in a practical way I was able to move ahead so many schools. It sounds small beer now, but then it was huge. Even today, if I go to a particular part of the country and I see my name on plaque on the wall of a particular school, a surge of pride will come to me.

  The presence in Athlone of the then Regional College and my own involvement for many years on the board of this establishment meant that when I was Minister for Education, I was even more intensely interested in that branch of third-level education. Through visits to the various Regional Colleges, through perusing the relevant files and talking to the people involved, I began to realise that the role of the Institutes of Technology was not being fully explored. They had been shoe-horned into being associated with certain disciplines or areas only, and all in all the huge potential they had was not being realised. I thought long and hard about this, and again talked to my officials in the Department. It became clear to me that there was a need for a developmental type of legislation which would give further legs to the existing Regional Colleges, enabling them to develop fully into research, to offer degree-level and postgraduate tuition and, in a general way, to interact more closely and more fruitfully with the wider community.

  Now much of this was in practice already being done by the colleges, as they were pushing the boundaries themselves and were taking liberties well beyond their initial remit at the time they had been founded — but all for the good of the furtherance of education, of course. But legislation would put all of this on a more formal footing and enable still more development in a structured way. In due course, my legislative Memorandum went to Cabinet and was approved, and Charlie Haughey was most interested in the idea of RCTS doing more for themselves and for the wider community. I was able to introduce the legislation to the Dáil; although, by the time it had passed through all its stages, I had been moved to another role in government, and it was the very capable Séamus Brennan as Minister for Education who ensured that it came to full fruition.

  People have often asked me which of the ministries I presided over was my favourite, and of course it was Education. I often think of what Tony Blair said when he faced into victory with the Labour Party and he was asked by a probing journalist what his main aim would be, if and when he got into government: his unhesitating reply was, ‘Education, Education, Education.’ How right he was and how right these priorities are. I always believed and will continue to believe that education is and should be the centre of our considerations, both economically and socially.

  Chapter 6

  BRIAN LENIHAN SNR

  The drama of the 2011 Irish Presidential campaign brought back very vividly for me the events of 1990 and my brother Brian Lenihan’s own bid for the Presidency that year. It was a very difficult time for Brian, coinciding with his unfair sacking from Cabinet by Charlie Haughey and this, as well as other circumstances which conspired against him, resulted in the sabotaging of any Presidential hopes he had. To my mind, Brian Snr should have won that race: he would have made a very good President. The battering he took in his political career at this point was keenly felt by all of us who were close to him.

  It is undeniable that the primitive feelings of a family in circumstances such as this are very strong. For good or for ill, I am infused with those primitive feelings as much as the next person — perhaps more, even. Particularly in political situations or in moments of high drama, I do not just get fired up but I become filled with determination and with the intent to kill politically if necessary (in a metaphorical sense. of course) anyone who is trying to thwart what is a very legitimate aim and campaign. With the passing years, that fighting spirit has not left me and I suppose it is above all an instinct — every animal fights for its young. I feel the same in relation my two sons, who are young men in their own right, as I feel and felt for Brian and my two nephews, Brian Jnr and Conor Lenihan.

  Let me go back to the beginning of what was happening for my brother Brian in those years. He had been suffering for some time as a result of problems related to his liver. So much so that by the beginning of 1989, his health had deteriorated very badly and he was gravely ill. The myth went around that the problems with his liver were the result of heavy drinking on his part over the years, but that was simply not the case. In fact, Brian was suffering from haemochromatosis, which is an iron overload in one’s system and which can be extremely damaging to the liver. At the time, this disease was practically unheard of in Ireland — although in the UK and the US there was much more medical knowledge about it. In the early stages of the condition, therefore, Brian’s doctors hadn’t been able to identify the problem and by the time it was finally diagnosed, he was on the verge of liver failure and very seriously ill. He was told that only a liver transplant would give him any chance of survival. This was a highly complex procedure which was not done in Ireland at the time, but it was advised that he could go to the US. The only location where this operation had been carried out successfully was a specialist hospital there — the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. And so in spring 1989, Brian’s own hospital, the Mater in Dublin, duly arranged for him to go there and to await a liver transplant.

  I often think of those who await transplants of any organ, and how they must feel, especially in the knowledge that they will only have a chance to live if someone else dies. I would strongly urge anyone of a young age to sign up as a donor and carry their card at all times, so that if anything happens to them, such as an accident, the necessary organs can be removed with their prior permission and someone else’s life might be sa
ved. (I do not carry such a card myself now, as my own organs are by now well past their sell-by date and would be of no use to anyone, I fear!)

  Anyway, off to the Mayo Clinic Brian Snr went with his wife, Ann, to await a suitable donor. There wasn’t much time left: complete renal failure and indeed death were imminent. I can only imagine how deeply the poignancy of the whole scenario must have struck him, as he opened his eyes each morning. Brian was to be one of the lucky ones, however, and in May 1989, the call finally came to say that a suitable donor had been found. A young man had, tragically, been killed in a boating accident and his liver was a match for Brian.

  The long and complex operation was soon underway and, amazingly, the transplant took hold and the liver was not rejected by Brian’s body. Receiving a transplant and having it satisfactorily bedded in are two separate components of a highly complex procedure, and the second does not always automatically follow the first. As an aside to this and very poignantly also, before Brian left the Mayo Clinic, he had the chance to meet the mother and father of the young man whose liver he had inherited. There followed a very emotional and heartfelt exchange. It seemed that the young man had been brought up on the shores of a large lake and that there had been a great similarity between the kind of upbringing he had had and Brian’s own early years. Brian was always convinced that this was one of the encounters which the Lord had arranged for him.

  As we know, there has since been much discussion around the fact that Charlie Haughey launched a private appeal for funding for Brian to have the operation in the US, which was going to cost a great deal of money. As it turned out, the fund was massively oversubscribed — people were extremely generous. The reproaches levelled at Charlie Haughey in later years in relation to this particular matter centred on allegations that he used some of the money for his own purposes, siphoning it off into his personal bank account. I have always been very clear — Brian got every financial assistance he needed for his trip to the Mayo Clinic, for his stay there and for his aftercare. In that sense, Haughey did not plunder any of the funds which should have gone to my brother. It was the leftover money he plundered and, of course, that should have either gone back to the subscribers or perhaps been donated to further research on haemochromatosis. I suppose we took the pragmatic view — Brian got the funding he needed to enable him to have a life-saving operation in the US, and we were extremely grateful to the donors. It could be said that what happened to the leftover money — and whether this was a mortal or a venial sin — is for the historians to establish.

  In any case, Brian was returned after the General Election of 15 June 1989. In fact, he topped the polls without ever having canvassed, as he had still been in the US recovering from his operation at the time. On his first day back in Dáil Éireann, he was met with thunderous applause and otherwise was greeted with a rapturous response from his constituency — and from the whole of Ireland, in fact. Subsequently he spoke movingly about his health ordeal on many occasions on radio and TV, and about the condition which is now universally recognised, but was then unknown in Ireland.

  Brian Snr was appointed Minister for Defence by Charlie Haughey in the new Cabinet. This was an important position, of course, but also not as onerous for him in his present state of recovery as his Foreign Affairs portfolio had been. He loved working in the Department of Defence, having been reared in Athlone, which is the headquarters of the Western Command.

  In his new Cabinet role, Brian was faced straight away with a very difficult situation which needed to be resolved urgently. There had been huge unrest among army wives around that time, which was a reflection of the deep discontent among the members of the defence forces, who, by the nature of their role as professionals, were not able to give expression to it themselves. It was clear that the army had been neglected in a material way and it was Brian’s job to build it up again, and to liaise with the newly founded Permanent Defence Force Other Ranks Representative Association (PDFORRA), representing the ranks, and Representative Association of Commissioned Officers (RACO). These were and are quasi-representative bodies — trade unions, in effect, although they cannot be called so.

  Brian set to working with these groups and other individuals to address all of the many queries and worries and real shortcomings faced by those working in the army and the navy. He established a wonderful rapport with them. In this work he was greatly helped by Dr Brian Hillery, who was a trained psychologist. Brian did some sterling work and was able to resolve many of the issues and problems very satisfactorily. Towards the end of that year, there was much speculation in the papers regarding the Presidential Election of the following year and which names the parties might put forward as their nominees. Brian’s name began to be floated. I still don’t really know — none of us do — if Brian was greatly enlivened by the idea, but he went for it anyway and was duly selected by Fianna Fáil as our candidate. All was well, you might think, but there was soon to be trouble in the Garden of Eden.

  New Year 1990 came and went, and as the months passed, Brian’s campaign for the Presidency gathered pace. Other candidates entered the fray — among these, Mary Robinson, running for Labour, but in an independent way. But Brian Snr was the firm favourite, and regarded by the vast majority as a sure-fire winner. In September 1990, however, on the back of an article in the press, a row arose about who had telephoned the then President, Patrick Hillery in Áras an Uachtaráin in January 1982, asking him to refuse the then Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald’s request to dissolve the Dáil. Brian Lenihan became involved in the so-called scandal, when it was alleged that he, on behalf of Charlie Haughey, had made such a call to Hillery in order to persuade or pressurise him into a refusal. To its everlasting shame, The Irish Times then printed part of an interview which Brian had given to a young research student from UCD called Jim Duffy. In the interview, Brian admitted he had made the phone call to the President. In his book, For the Record (Blackwater Press, 1991), he would later explain fully the exact circumstances of this interview.

  Looking back, it’s amazing that this action ever achieved any sort of notoriety. But Des O’Malley as leader of the Progressive Democrats, with whom we were in government, demanded that Brian should resign as Tánaiste and Minister, otherwise the PDS would force an immediate General Election. Brian refused to sign a letter of resignation drawn up for him by Charlie Haughey, and the die was cast.

  While all of this was brewing, Brian had kicked off his Presidential campaign in earnest in the constituency of Longford–Westmeath. It was already October and the election, which had been set for 7 November, was fast approaching. We all went to Granard, where Brian landed by helicopter. On that cold, early autumn evening, we campaigned through Edgeworthstown, Rathowen, Mullingar, Kinnegad, Tyrellspass, Kilbeggan and Moate. On each stop, people came out to meet him, shake his hand and to pledge their support. It was public knowledge of course that Brian’s resignation was being called for. All the world loves a hero, and in the eyes of his loyal supporters, Brian was the hero battling against the might of Charlie Haughey.

  I was standing on the step of the campaign bus as we pulled up in Moate. I looked to one side and who did I see, but Pádraig Flynn, getting out of his big Merc with that familiar, grinning face.

  ‘What are you doing here, Minister Flynn?’ I said.

  ‘I am here to knock sense into all of you,’ he replied.

  Of course, he had been sent by Charlie Haughey. I lost the rag completely and, using some very unparliamentary language, told him to get back across the Shannon from whence he had come; that he was not wanted here. It was a raw message and he turned on his heels, got into his car and drove off to Athlone. By the time we arrived there ourselves, Flynn was already at the Prince of Wales Hotel, where our meeting was to be held.

  Garda numbers put the crowd that night in Athlone at around 4,000 people. The Prince of Wales Hotel was packed to capacity, as was the main street outside. People milled around, crowding in on Brian, voicing their encourage
ment and support with low, raucous cries of, ‘No resignation, Brian! No resignation Brian!’ The issue had clearly formulated itself thus: Brian was battling Charlie Haughey; he was not accepting the call to resign. There followed a tense election meeting in the Prince of Wales ballroom, as more crowds gathered to listen to Brian, who put up a wonderful display. Albert Reynolds was there with us: it was his constituency as it was mine. At one point, Bertie Ahern turned up: he had obviously been sent by Charlie Haughey too. Bertie, however, took one look at the crowds and disappeared back to Dublin — wise man!

  A very interesting thing happened around this time, which has never been written about in the media or in any of the books of the period. In the Sunday papers of that Halloween weekend, I happened upon a stray portion of an article, which said that there was to be an urgent Cabinet meeting the following week. Even though I was Minister for Education at the time, I had had no notification of such a meeting. The Bank Holiday Monday dawned and still no word came. I telephoned Teresa O’Hanlon, the wife of Rory O’Hanlon, whom I regarded as a Cabinet friend. Before I even had a chance to broach the matter, Teresa said, ‘Mary, are you not gone to Kinsealy? There’s a Cabinet meeting in Kinsealy today. Rory got word of it over the last few days.’ I knew then that the meeting was about Brian and that I, even as a full Cabinet Minister, had simply not been invited. I was angry on two fronts: furious for Brian, and livid that I had not been informed as was my right!