Just Mary

by Mary O'Rourke

  Looking back on it now, I marvel at the lack of fear which allowed me to take that flight. Oddly enough, once in the air, I felt secure. I quickly decided that the only thing I could do was to go to sleep, which I did. I woke up within two hours of Brussels and was elated to know that we were now so close to the security and safety of Europe. As soon as we landed, I got off the plane and made my way to the government buildings, where I had a shower, washed my hair and was ready for business. Luckily I had heeded a key piece of advice one is always given when in a government job: to bring a dark jacket with you whenever you are travelling, even if you are going on a holiday, as you never know if you might be called to a funeral or a state occasion. I had such a dark jacket with me, which I had brought in my overnight bag from Falmouth and so from the waist up at least, I was able to portray a business-like appearance.

  When I arrived at the Transport meeting, I was, as you can imagine, the talk of my colleagues and had to tell all about my escape from the US — all marvelled at how I had managed to do this. There was important business done that day at the Brussels meeting and for Ireland as an island nation it was, I think, vital that I should be there, so that I would be party to the new strategy which was being worked out for airport procedures, such as security, vetting, the checking in of luggage, etc., and which was to be adopted at all airports in Europe. It was a busy but fruitful day, and I was able to give all these matters my full attention.

  When we got back to Ireland that night, as you can imagine, I was wrung out and exhausted. I spoke by mobile phone to Kathryn and Ailish, who were staying in New York as planned. I was happy to learn that they had just heard that within 48 hours, they would be able to get a flight from Newark airport to Dublin with many, many others whose travel plans had been completely disrupted by the terrible events of the previous day.

  I was back in Dublin for the day of mourning for America. Ireland was the only country who undertook such a day of mourning — and why not, given all the links we share and the 84 million direct and indirect descendants of Irish people who live in the US, as well as all of those who had been lost in the Twin Towers? In the long and tragic catalogue of victims, there are many Irish names, which raises a chill of recognition and an awareness of the extent of the evil which was perpetrated on the American people on that awful day.

  Of course, we know the aftermath — Bush’s ‘War on Terror’, the enlistment of Tony Blair to his cause, the utter disregard for the resistance of the UN who had not approved of all-out war, and the gung-ho behaviour of Bush, which ensured that war there was to be, a war which has never ceased to this day.

  I think it was difficult for us then and it is still difficult now to comprehend the sheer terror that Americans felt and the deep, deep anger at having war perpetrated in their own homeland by this unknown, elusive and evil figure, Osama bin Laden. A sheer terror evoked in George W. Bush a primitive urge to destroy and wipe out this evil. And in that sense, it was hard to fault him at the time. He had the full support of the American people in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and it was only much, much later that the full repercussions of this sheer atavistic response would begin to emerge.

  When Kathryn and Ailish got back home, we met up soon afterwards to talk it all over at some length. I related to my friends and others at Cabinet the whole tale of my escape to Brussels and, of course, this was a foolish thing to do. Within ten days, there were front page headlines in a certain Sunday paper, talking of the extravagance of Mary O’Rourke and the privately commissioned flight out of Cape Cod. The story failed to mention that I had gone into the skies that day in sheer terror so that I could do my job in Brussels. That never emerged, naturally, and it took the publication of a strong and accurate, fact-filled letter from the Press Office of the Department of Public Enterprise to put things in perspective. I didn’t want to cost anyone anything, but I got the call that I had to go to Brussels and my feelings didn’t come into it. It was a matter of doing my job.

  I have been back to Boston since, but I have never again been to the Cape Cod coastline. What we saw of it during our short stay was beautiful, but it will be meshed forever in our minds with the terror unleashed on the people of America that day, the stark horror which struck us in that small beach house in Falmouth, and the way we clung together — three Irish women on an innocent holiday, caught up in the maelstrom of those terrible events.

  Chapter 14

  LIFE IN THE UPPER CHAMBER

  For a while after Enda died, I thought that life was over for me and in a way, it was. There was never again to be the surety and serenity of love, of comfort, of sustenance and of support which he gave to me so freely and generously for all of the years we were together. I was bereft. I was back at Cabinet within four or five days of him passing away and back in the Dáil within a week, but nevertheless, I thought for a while of resigning completely from public life and devoting myself to misery, so to speak. But then I rallied, and friends and family around me urged me to get back up and get going, and I did, sustained by the belief that this is what Enda would have wanted me to do. I had great friends — Hugh and Celine Campbell, Mícheál and Maura Ó’Faoláin, Niall and Angela McCormack, Seán Rowland, and so many others — who kept me going in those darkest of days.

  On 17 May 2002, barely 18 months after Enda’s death, there was to be a General Election. From the outset of that election period, I was very doubtful of the outcome. It seemed that Fianna Fáil, in the guise of P.J. Mara and Bertie Ahern, wanted to get three seats out of four in Longford–Westmeath. Or this is what Bertie and P.J. Mara told me, at any rate. Peter Kelly had emerged as the replacement for Albert Reynolds. There was myself in Athlone; and Bertie and Mara were, they said, keen to push Senator Donie Cassidy to become the standard-bearer in the Mullingar end. The night that Donie won that convention and became the approved candidate for that area, I knew that it was a bad omen for me.

  Why so? It wasn’t that Donie Cassidy was any bright, young, shining star — far from it. But I knew that there was an agenda to put me out and put him in. It was a political agenda, activated by P.J. Mara and by Bertie. It was being done under the pretext that they wanted three seats in my part of the country, and that they could get three seats. But I knew there were never to be three seats and there never could be. There had perhaps been a time, some fifteen years earlier, when this might have been feasible but we were now in very different times.

  I rang Bertie Ahern and arranged to see him in his office in St Luke’s in Drumcondra one morning. Now remember, at this point, I was deputy leader of Fianna Fáil and I was one of his Ministers at the Cabinet table. And I just couldn’t believe how the political ground was shifting beneath me and shifting me decisively away from him. When I met Bertie that day face-to-face, he was what I can only describe as evasive. Shifty would be too strong a word, but evasive is about right. ‘Oh no,’ he assured me, ‘that is not my agenda and never would be.’ He went on to say that of course I had ‘a great reputation as a high-profile Minister’, that of course I would ‘sweep the county’, and so on and so forth.

  But not so long after that, I saw the dirty work begin to operate. Fianna Fáil voters in Westmeath were told to vote ‘number one Donie Cassidy; number two Mary O’Rourke’, and that this would be the best way for us to get two seats in Westmeath, plus the seat in Longford. It was all so absurd and yet it happened anyway. Donie started to swagger, saying he would ‘drive Mary O’Rourke back to the bridge and the walls of Athlone’. When he started his canvassing in earnest, he began to put up posters in Moate and Kilbeggan and Tyrellspass — all my strongholds. ‘No holds barred’ — that seemed to be the mantra.

  So, why did I not, as a feisty person, put up a feisty response? Looking back now, it is clear that, in terms of my career, this was where the loss of Enda really began to manifest itself. He would have been up in his local, The Green Olive; he would have been around and about the town and would have had the ears and confidences of many; he would ha
ve been able to suss out what plots were going on. But Enda was gone and I was alone. Yes, of course I had my friends and my family and their great love and support, but I was alone as I never had been before, and, in a political sense, I had no one to watch out and be vigilant for me in the way that Enda always had.

  I did my best, however, to put up a good campaign and I canvassed as always, and my faithful rallied round me. But I had a leaden weight in my heart each night, when I came home to the house alone, knowing what awaited me. Added to that was the residual physical discomfort of having broken my left ankle some months earlier. Of course, it had been expertly fixed with five pins in the Mater Hospital, but it caused me discomfort and pain from time to time, particularly when I was tired. Add it all up, and I had a dispiriting campaign. When I went to Kenagh on the day of the count, it was as I had anticipated: I had lost my seat. In Mullingar they were rampant and, boy, were they rampant: ‘Back to Athlone with you, Madam’, was more or less what I was told, and the Cheshire cat grin on the face of P.J. Mara when he was asked the following day, in an RTÉ review of the election, what he thought of the result — well, that said it all, really!

  I was on RTÉ myself that night, beamed in from the Athlone studio to join Charlie McCreevy (our then Minister for Finance) and the commentator in a discussion. At one point the presenter said, ‘Well, is it back to the knitting for you now, Mary?’ I was indignant at this, and when I replied, ‘I never knitted and I don’t intend to start now’, McCreevy chipped in and said, ‘No, I can’t imagine Mary either knitting or being quiet . . .’ Anyway I went home after that, and I was fuming, absolutely fuming!

  I was angry about the subterranean campaign which had been waged against me and annoyed with myself too, for not putting up more of a fight in the face of it. As well as the loss of Enda, I suppose one other reason for this was that, as deputy leader of the party, I had felt that I should set a good example to other candidates throughout the country, go with party strategy and not be seen to get involved in internal wrangling. Apart from my own instincts about it all, I had had an early warning about what was to happen, and I should have heeded it. John O’Donoghue, my colleague and dear friend from Kerry, had telephoned me one day some time before the election and said, ‘Beef up, Mary! I have been told to give territory to [whichever candidate was running with him], and I said “Oh sure, yes, that’s what I’ll do”, and off I went. But I have no intention of doing what they’ve told me, of course!’ But John’s patch in south Kerry was a long, long way from Dublin, whereas I was right in the line of fire. Anyway, be that as it may, I suppose in the end we have to take fate as it comes. I tried to keep thinking of Enda and what he would be saying to me, now that I had lost my seat. But, of course, none of it would have happened if he had been alive.

  There was to be a further development, however: a positive adjunct to that defeat. Later on, when I got home that night to my house in Athlone, all of my friends and my political colleagues came round, and we drank and talked and moaned for a number of hours. I suppose I didn’t get to bed until about two o’clock in the morning, in fact. Before I went to bed, Feargal — who was down from Dublin and staying overnight — and Aengus and I came up with a plan. They bolstered me up and egged me on, saying, ‘You’ll ring Bertie tomorrow [which was a Sunday], and you’ll tell him what you want!’

  I finally went to bed. At five o’clock in the morning, I got a call from Senator Terry Leyden, a good friend whom I had always held close, from the time when he was a young man, aged 21 and Deputy Director of Elections for my brother Brian, and later as a family friend. Terry commiserated with me and then said, ‘By the way, there is an immediate vacancy in the Seanad now.’ It seemed that Senator Tom Fitzgerald had decided just a few days earlier to retire because of ill-health. Terry was insistent, saying, ‘Get in touch with Bertie Ahern immediately, and say you want to be given this.’

  With Terry’s words and the urging of my sons the night before still ringing in my ears, when I got up a few hours later, I was more or less decided that I would ring Bertie. I can still remember how determined I felt that I would do now what I had not done throughout the whole campaign: stand up on my feet and demand! Interestingly but not surprisingly, I suppose, was the fact that the night before, and with all the otherwise good news for Fianna Fáil, Bertie Ahern had not once thought to telephone me in Westmeath to commiserate with me — and I was his deputy leader, after all. But that was Bertie. No doubt he knew that I would begin to berate him and probably he thought, ‘Let’s put it off for a while.’ The night before, in fact, Mandy Johnston — who was Communications Director of Fianna Fáil at the time, and a very fine one too — had telephoned me to say that she was prevailing on Bertie to call me.

  Mandy rang again that Sunday morning to say that I should be expecting a call from Bertie soon and so I held myself in readiness. When he rang, I took the call in the room I use as my office, and Feargal and Aengus came in to stand beside me. The Taoiseach offered his commiserations in that nice, soft voice and, do you know, I very nearly weakened. But I had a son on either side of me, prodding me and spurring me on. I told Bertie I wanted the vacant Seanad seat and that I wanted to be Leader of the Seanad too, which was also in the gift of the Taoiseach. I said this was the least I was owed for the way I had been ‘done’ — and many more strong words besides. It was as if suddenly I got my voice and spirit back and was determined to see this through. Finally he agreed to my request, telling me too that he would as leader put forward my nomination when the time came, so I would not have to go around the country myself, seeking the votes of the Fianna Fáil county councillors and borough councillors.

  I had at least taken something from the ashes and I began to feel more mollified and settled. There was a further little twist to this tale, which is illustrative, I suppose, of my nature and my approach, and indeed of Bertie’s nature too. It happened after he had been proclaimed Taoiseach once more, with the Progressive Democrats as his partners. Some of the Independents were being kept on board also: Bertie always clung to them as a kind of comfort blanket to ensure that he would have a fall-back position if need be, and how wise he was in that. There is no doubt in my mind that he was ‘the most cunning, the most devious’, as Charlie Haughey famously said.

  Anyway, in the time immediately after his reinstatement as Taoiseach, Bertie said he wanted to meet with me. I duly went over to his office — down that beautiful, long, blue-carpeted corridor and into his inner sanctum, with the portrait of Pádraig Pearse on the wall. There he was waiting for me, with his gentle, limpid eyes. He proceeded to ask if I would not go around the country after all, to get the votes of the councils, as he felt sure that if I did so, I would be returned to Seanad Éireann without any difficulty. I just looked at him, horrified. It was not that I was afraid of the hard work which would be involved, but that he had promised me that I would be one of his eleven (by law, the Taoiseach is entitled to appoint eleven members of his own choosing to the Seanad)!

  When I said as much to him, Bertie backed down quite quickly, saying, ‘Oh, okay, okay, alright, alright, Mary! You will be appointed.’ Yet he had tried the trick to see if I would go for it, because he would have preferred to have had another Seanad seat to give away to someone else. But I was fired up by the thought that I was well due this kind of recognition at the very least, for all the time I had worked for the party, right from my very early days and including my years as a Minister and as deputy leader. In addition to this, Bertie had already promised to grant my request, so there was no way I was going to let him away with anything else! In many ways, this encounter spoke volumes about my modus operandi — and his.

  Anne Garland was very good to me. Anne — who has since retired — was in charge of looking after the Fianna Fáil TDS and Senators with regards to office arrangements, equipment, staffing, and so on. She was excellent at her job and was in fact an office manager, a housekeeper and a fairy godmother all rolled into one! Anne and I had always bee
n friends and got along very well, and she was very sympathetic when she heard I had now lost my seat, as well as very annoyed at the way the campaign had been played out. After my conversation with Bertie that day, I sought her out, saying, ‘I have no office, Anne — so where should I go?’ I told her confidentially that Bertie Ahern was going to make me Leader of the Seanad, although it was yet to be announced and that she should not mention it to anyone for the time being. Anne immediately offered to try to help, saying, ‘I’ll find you an office, not to worry!’ And she did.

  When he stood down as Taoiseach, Albert Reynolds had been given an office at the top of the Ministers of State corridor. It was a big, lofty, cold office, but it was an office nonetheless and had an adjoining office with two places for staff. So Anne said to me, ‘Why don’t you move in there, Mary, and for the time being, I’ll put a notice on the door saying “Reserved”.’ And so this is what she did and I did. I would spend the rest of the summer in that office, mopping up the correspondence left over from the General Election, feeling weepy and emotional at times and feeling generally that life had passed me by.

  In due course, Bertie officially announced his eleven nominations, as well as my new position as Leader of the Seanad. Then followed the election of the Cathaoirleach (Chairperson) of the Seanad by the Senators. When the first day of the assembly of the new Seanad dawned, we were all formally inaugurated. My son Feargal came to see the ceremony. After the formalities were over, I stood up and gave the Order of Business for the day, and so my life as a Senator began. To be truthful, I had absolutely no idea how one acted as Leader of this House, but there was, and is, a very supportive, professional and talented office team attached to the Seanad, headed by Deirdre Lane as Clerk of the Seanad and Jody Blake as Clerk Assistant. Of course Deirdre and Jody gave full respect to the Cathaoirleach and to the Leader of the Seanad, but they were also very helpful in filling me in on what my duties would be and how it would all would operate.