Just Mary

by Mary O'Rourke

  It transpired later that the meeting had been called by Charlie and held in his home in Kinsealy, so that he could urge all of the Cabinet members (except for me, of course) to sign a paper calling for my brother’s resignation and to support him if necessary in the sacking. Here I must give credit to Albert Reynolds, who as I have said was my constituency colleague as a TD for Longford–Westmeath. At that surreptitious meeting, Albert simply refused to sign the paper which Charlie had prepared for them all.

  Brian was sacked from the Cabinet just a few days later, on 31 October 1990. There was a formal vote in the Dáil, for which I had no choice but to side with the Fianna Fáil Party in a vote of confidence in Charlie as Taoiseach and in the Cabinet. It was a terrible time for us all.

  All the while, the Presidential campaign was gaining in momentum and intensity. In spite of everything that had happened, Brian’s response was that he would fight on regardless. And he fought like a lion throughout the whole of Ireland, and everywhere crowds and crowds came out to meet him. To this day, I meet people who will say, ‘I canvassed with Brian in Listowel’; ‘I canvassed with Brian in Limerick’; ‘I canvassed with Brian in Carrickmacross.’ The party faithful really rallied to him and even after all his recent troubles, it was clear that he still had huge support. As I have said, his main opponent was Mary Robinson. Late in the game, Alan Dukes had put forward the idea that Fine Gael should run a candidate and they nominated Austin Currie, a good guy but one who, realistically, hadn’t a chance. Alan Dukes could be very Machiavellian. He wanted Mary Robinson: she was a member of that Davos group of high-flying economists, academics and philosophers. Alan knew perfectly well that Austin Currie hadn’t a chance: he was just shoved in at the last moment in order to pump up Mary Robinson with transfers and put Brian Lenihan out.

  Although Brian was still riding high in the polls, there was another blow to his campaign, one particular Saturday afternoon, very close to Election Day. As I write this, I can remember that day very well. I was listening to the radio as I was driving to Tyrellspass, where I was going to do some canvassing on my brother’s behalf with some local party members. I had tuned in to a lunchtime news programme which included a live political debate featuring Michael McDowell, Pádraig Flynn and some other participants. McDowell was clearly in favour of Mary Robinson. Suddenly Flynn saw fit to interrupt and proceeded to make some highly insulting remarks about Robinson and her ‘newfound interest in her family, and in fashion and her hairdo’, etc., all of which was grossly untrue. When I heard this interjection, I knew at once that it would have huge repercussions. And, of course, it did. But there is no doubt in my mind, or in the minds of many other commentators at the time, that Flynn sealed Brian’s failure on that day. His attack on Robinson had the opposite effect to what he had apparently intended, as women voters in particular suddenly shifted their loyalties and rallied in droves to support the Robinson campaign. This was very difficult for Brian to overcome and for us to quantify now just how damaging that interview and Flynn’s comments were.

  When the vote came around, Brian still came out top, as the number one first preference. As a family, we always felt a certain delight in the fact that he was the first choice of the people of Ireland. To my mind, since the Presidency was for one job, the voting should never have been done under the ‘PR’ voting system anyway: it should have been a case of ‘first past the post’. Of course, what happened was that when Austin Currie went out as expected, he gave the vote to Mary Robinson. So in that sense, Alan Dukes’s dream was realised. Brian went along to the count at the RDS and when the final announcement came, he took it so manfully and in such valiant spirit that you couldn’t but be enriched by his demeanour and by his courage. I cannot leave any account of the battle for this particular Presidency without saying that during her term as President, Mary Robinson appointed me to the Council of State. It was a great honour to be so invited and I very much enjoyed my time in that service, which gave another enriching dimension to my life at that period.

  To my mind, there is no doubt that Charlie Haughey did Brian a great wrong in having him sacked from Cabinet. Of course, Haughey would say afterwards that it was through loyalty to the party that he had taken that course of action; that he had no other choice because the PDS were calling the shots, and so on. It wasn’t the case, however, that Brian and Charlie Haughey were ever very close friends, because they weren’t — they were political allies. Some may say that Brian lost face at a certain point, with his ‘on mature reflection’ remarks (when he appeared to contradict what he had said earlier about having made the calls to President Hillery). But in my view, he was done for by that stage anyway: someone had it in for him, and wanted him to go. Jim Duffy, the researcher in question, was sent out to get Brian. In any case, even if he had made the calls, would it have really been so wrong? It wasn’t such a big deal, but it was purposely blown up into something extraordinary.

  In the final event, Brian was able to overcome all the terrible experiences he went through during those two years, and in the 1992 General Election he was triumphant once more. He died in 1995, having had the extra five years of life which his surgeon had promised him following the transplant — and one bonus year besides. To his immediate and wider Lenihan family and indeed to the Fianna Fáil Party, Brian will always represent our Camelot. He was the shining one whose lustre had never dimmed; the man who survived all of the years of politics without ever being tainted with having done anything underhand or smacking of a venal transaction — unlike so many of the others of his time. I will always be proud of him, as will all of our family.

  Chapter 7

  EUROPE AND EDUCATION

  The early 1990s was a wonderful time to be involved in Europe. Walls were coming down (literally!); everything was opening up; spring was flowering. As Education Minister for Ireland, I remember well a visit to my Hungarian counterpart in Budapest. He had recently broken free of communist shackles and his party were in government but he was still filled with a huge sense of paranoia, that elements of the previous regime were spying on him. I remember how I went up in an old-fashioned lift in a beautiful old building in Budapest to meet him. He brought me into his inner office, closed the door, checked all the windows, looked behind the pictures and said, ‘I have to be very careful. The communist spies are watching us all.’ Now I didn’t know if they were or not — how would I? But I felt greatly enriched by the whole meeting between us. He was a wonderful person: a professor of history with huge, terrific ideas on education, and I very much enjoyed working with him.

  In 1990, Ireland held the Presidency of the European Council of Ministers for six months, and I can remember the great leadership Charlie Haughey gave in this context. For me as Minister for Education, it meant that each time in the course of those six months that the Council of Ministers for Education met in Brussels, I would chair the meeting and preside over the discussion of the issues on the agenda. It was during this period I met and had a very fruitful relationship with Kenneth Clarke, who was then Minister for Education in the UK. When I see him now on TV as a serving Minister in David Cameron’s government, I think to myself, ‘Well, you really lasted the course, Kenneth.’ He was quirky then, as he is quirky now, but also very intelligent and astute.

  In this period in Europe, the Erasmus scheme for third-level education was bedded down. The seed for the scheme, which provided grants for third-level students to travel and spend time at universities in the cities of other member countries, had been sown in Gemma Hussey’s time, but now it was flowering and I was able to fully nurture its growth. Fortunately for me, of course, I did not have to take the money from my budget to do so, as the programme was fully funded by Europe. Whenever now I meet a young person and they say, ‘I have been on Erasmus for a year in Turin’ — or in Paris, in Budapest, in Vienna — I am always so pleased, and I think back to the day I chaired the meeting in Brussels of all the European Education Ministers, at which we firmly set the full financial par
ameters and targets of student numbers of the Programme. It was and is and will always be a wonderful scheme and it gave full expression to the European ideal.

  I remember coming back on the flight from Brussels that day, very excited about what we had achieved. I was aware too that the path we had set ourselves was in fact nothing new. I thought of Clonmacnoise, so close to my home town of Athlone, just twelve miles up the road in County Offaly — Clonmacnoise, the place to which, centuries ago, scholars from all over Europe flocked for reflection, for learning, for study. I found myself reflecting that the students of now, by going to these foreign cities, these other centres of learning in Europe, were replicating the paths of the scholars who came to us then. I remembered also the students of eighteenth-century Ireland who, because of the penal laws which forbade the education of Catholics, flocked to France and to Italy to enrol in the great halls of learning there, to bring back in turn their new knowledge to Ireland.

  Travel broadens the mind, as they say, and there is many a man and woman in Ireland now or across the world who can look back to the Erasmus scheme and what it gave them. Of course, I am not dwelling on this here in order to say how wonderful I was — after all, the scheme had already started and I was just fortunate enough to be in charge of the European Education seat when it reached its full flowering. Rather, I am telling the story to highlight the great remit and range of European policies on education, and what these meant for a small country in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Britain. Europe saw how education could help and, as full members of the European project, we were able to benefit wholly from this wonderful vision.

  As well as the Erasmus scheme, a huge range of other literacy projects and various other measures were introduced, in which Ireland was keen to participate. Initially, we would receive full funding for such schemes, as the Vocational Training Opportunities Scheme (VTOS), which enabled those who had opted out earlier a wonderful re-entry into education. As time went on and as we grew comparatively richer, we would have to make our contribution to it, but all in all, the early 1990s was a wonderful period for the flourishing of education in Ireland. I was so much aware at the time of the extent to which the good reputation and renown of Irish education had spread, and Ministers from other countries would always show a great appreciation of the role Ireland had played throughout the centuries. In fact, long after I had left Education, I remember meeting in Clonmacnoise the then Austrian Minister for Education: she had come to visit the site with a group of her friends, not as part of her parliamentarian duties, but purely out of interest and a desire to see that ancient seat of learning. I thought to myself how wonderful it was, that we had been able to build on those foundations.

  Of the latter years of my tenure at the Department of Education, there is one episode in particular which gives a sense of the flavour of life back then in the early 1990s and still has resonance today. Sometime in the late summer of 1991, I was contacted by Joe O’Toole, then General Secretary of the INTO, along with two educational professionals from North County Dublin, Dr Deirdre McIntyre and Dr Maria Lawlor. These two women had been involved in a particular school project about which they wanted to tell me. I was always very easy to meet. I do not regard this as a fault — in fact, I always regarded it as a positive thing in any Minister, that he or she should not think themselves so important that they are not prepared to meet, on the spot, people who have something to tell them.

  It was the month of August, and we had arranged a meeting in my Department for 2 p.m. It was a beautiful sunny afternoon. Joe O’Toole and the two women came in and the tale they had to tell was a good one, which I was very glad to hear. At a primary school in North County Dublin, Dr McIntyre and Dr Lawlor — an educational psychologist and an educational psychiatrist respectively — had initiated a project they were calling ‘Stay Safe’. The aim of this initiative was to highlight the importance of assuring the safety of young children in their journeys to and from school. They had devised a very simple programme which outlined for young pupils the rules of the road — not just in a traffic way but in a ‘human traffic’ way too. It also emphasised in particular the importance of never getting into a stranger’s car, and so on. I think at that time there had been a spate of incidents whereby total strangers had been pulling up in their cars and saying to a little boy or girl walking home, ‘Your mammy sent me to pick you up . . .’ Fortunately in each case, another adult had spotted what was happening before the child in question could get into the car. My memory is that it was these incidents which had sparked this initiative on the part of these two professionals.

  I felt it was a very worthy scheme and set about looking into it further. We called in Tony O’Gorman, Head Psychologist at the time in the Department of Education, and Tom Gillen, Head of Primary Education. After a long discussion with them, I made an on-the-spot ministerial decision. Now, for those who are not political anoraks, ministerial decisions made on-the-spot are relatively rare: things are not often done this way and sometimes such an approach can go awry. But my instincts as a parent told me that this particular measure would not go wrong — in fact, all it could do was go right.

  Tony O’Gorman and Tom Gillen consulted with their teams and each other, and came back with a circular for the primary schools — all 3,250 of them throughout the country — asking them to implement, or to consider implementing the Stay Safe Programme. We couldn’t order anyone to do this — only the Chairperson of each of their Boards of Management would have had such authority — but we indicated that the Department of Education was giving the scheme their strong stamp of approval, and that the Minister — i.e. myself — was very much behind such a move. Most of the schools reacted enthusiastically and began to take steps to implement the programme.

  A very curious matter developed on the back of this initiative, however. As I had done for many years, at the time I would hold a public clinic each Saturday in an office at my home. This was basically for my constituents, but anyone in Ireland was welcome to come to see and talk to me. On two successive Saturdays after the unveiling of the Stay Safe Programme, I found my clinic being visited by busloads of parents from Cork, there to protest against the Stay Safe Programme. Put down in cold print and plain English like this, I know it sounds dotty — but that is what they were about. They couldn’t all come in — because they wouldn’t all have fitted into my office — but they sent in their spokespersons as they waited outside. Their point of view, they explained, was that it was solely up to parents to ensure the safety of their children going to and from school. It had nothing to do with, as they saw it, interfering teachers and interfering Ministers and interfering officials from the Department of Education, who had no business coming in and trying to lay down the law about what a child could and couldn’t do.

  I was baffled, horrified and completely unable to understand their point of view, and as I tried to do so, echoes kept coming back to me of what had happened four decades earlier with Noël Browne and the Bishops, and how they and the Church had been so vehemently opposed to his proposed measures to ensure good healthcare for expectant mothers, insisting that doing so was solely the job of the husband and not the Irish State!

  Many years later, when I was in the Dáil between 2007 and 2011, I put forward a question in the House as to what percentage of the country’s primary schools had implemented the Stay Safe Programme — an echo in fact of an earlier question I had put down in an Adjournment Debate in the Seanad. Interestingly, the percentage of schools not participating in the scheme — which had as its only purpose to try to ensure the safety of young children — remained stubbornly high, at over 25 per cent. Most of these non-participating schools were in the Munster region. I puzzled over this for a short time, but soon the reason became obvious. It was not that the roads were safer in Munster than anywhere else. It was not that Munster did not have its fair share of lone drivers with bad thoughts cruising the roads. No — it was, in my opinion, the wide prevalence in that part of the cou
ntry of a typically strong, far-right Catholic ethos which determined that people there were going to steadfastly resist the Stay Safe Programme.

  Of course, time has moved on and, sadly, recent revelations about the terribly damaging effects some elements in the Church have had on the lives of children and young people have made it clear that it is not always the stranger a child must fear, but sometimes a person within their own community circle. As was brought home to me in later years when I was Chairperson of the All-Party Joint Committee on the Constitutional Amendment on Children, there is a strong underlying attitude in Irish national life of, ‘My child is my child, and hands off anyone who seeks to interfere.’ The vast majority of Irish parents will send their child to school because they need education, but as regards many other needs, the overriding feeling is that the mother and father know best, and that is that. Of course, most often, they do know best, but surely matters of child safety are of huge importance and any way in which the State can assist in this area should be welcomed with open arms by any reasonable and caring parent?

  One very important task which I undertook in the latter years of my time in the Department of Education was the preparation and drafting of a Green Paper — later to become a White Paper — on Education Development. Just to clarify these terms, if a Minister in any Department wants to set out key policy ideas for eventual implementation, the way he or she must go about it is to firstly produce a Green Paper, which will lead to a White Paper, which will ultimately be translated into the formal legislation. The Green Paper with which I was associated, Education for a Changing World, would be published in 1992, shortly after my departure as Minister, to be succeeded in due course by the publication of a White Paper, Charting Our Education Future, in 1995. John Walshe, who was then Education Editor for the Irish Independent, later wrote an invaluable book in relation to this type of legislative process: Partnership in Education: From Consultation to Legislation in the Nineties (published by the Institute of Public Administration in 1999). This key initiative — the preparation of the Green Paper — was, I always felt, a very satisfactory way of rounding off the happy and productive four-and-three-quarter years I spent in my favourite ministry.