THE SATURDAY INTERVIEW: MÁIRE GEOGHEGAN-QUINN:The woman once tipped to be the next leader of Fianna Fáil on her abrubt departure from national politics at 46, and how she landed the EU job she so coveted
EVENING SUNLIGHT glints over the Brussels skyline as Máire Geoghegan-Quinn steps forward from behind the desk in her 10th-floor office. Not two months since her return after a long absence to front-line politics, Ireland’s new EU commissioner is in upbeat mode. She commands a multibillion-euro budget but is a complete newcomer to the vast science and research brief. So she’s busy – very busy indeed.
Brian Cowen plucked Geoghegan-Quinn from the tranquillity of her life in Luxembourg in the EU’s audit body for a place in the Union’s executive branch last autumn. Cowen’s options were curtailed because of the Dáil arithmetic and MGQ, as she is known, was quickly established as staunch favourite for the post. When the Taoiseach’s call finally came through, she was minding her now five-year-old grand-daughter on a holiday near Florida.
Geoghegan-Quinn’s was the name on everyone’s lips, but her dash to Brussels for a meeting with José Manuel Barroso, the Commission’s Portuguese chief, went unnoticed. “I managed to come back from the States, through Dublin airport, to Brussels airport, to stay in Brussels overnight, to come into the Commission and visit president Barroso, and go back to Luxembourg without any journalist ever finding out. I was really happy about that, because there was a bit of paranoia around.”
She turns 60 next September, a forceful personality who burst onto the national scene when first elected to the Dáil at the age of 24. Her father, Johnny Geoghegan, a TD and former minister, had passed away. At 29, she was the first woman to join the Cabinet. Although the new job is but the latest in a line of senior assignments, she has also known stark setbacks in her long career in the upper reaches of the Fianna Fáil hierarchy. But she always bounced back.
Powerful figures such as Charlie Haughey, Albert Reynolds and Bertie Ahern loom large in her story, as does the vicious internecine intrigue that roiled the party in the 1970s, 1980s and beyond. Haughey took her into his cabinet in his first government, but kept her out in his second and third terms. She sided with Reynolds, told Haughey she didn’t want to see his face again on a poster, voted against him in a heave, and paid for it with her job as junior minister.
In policy terms, she is best known for decriminalising homosexuality when she headed the Department of Justice under Reynolds. It was no small achievement. “At the time everybody said, ‘you can’t do this – Fianna Fáil is a back woods party. There is no way that they’ll go for this’ – and all the rest of it. Yet the parliamentary party supported it and it was brought through in the Dáil without any murmur of discontent from Fianna Fáil. The people who created the problem were Fine Gael in relation to it”.
Famously, she retreated from national politics by retiring from the Dáil, at the age of 46, in 1997. She unsuccessfully contested the Fianna Fáil leadership after Reynolds, outgunned by Ahern’s superior campaign and the TDs who flocked to his support.
Geoghegan-Quinn says she “never” thought in her youth that she might one day lead the party. She is coy about any hopes she ever had of becoming taoiseach.
“I think when I went into the Department of Justice, and was working there for a while, I kind of said to myself: if the government goes its full term and Albert is there for two terms as leader or whatever, then I might consider it. But it all came so quickly, and once Bertie became the leader it was very obvious it would pass a generation – that Bertie would be there for the long haul – which proved correct.”
She insists there was no deal when Ahern appointed her to the European Court of Auditors in 2000. She is adamant on that, even though she says she would harbour the same thoughts if the tables were turned. After all, she hardly posed a threat to Ahern once she walked out the gates of Leinster House.
In her telling, it was all very spontaneous. On holidays in Spain, she received a call on her mobile from Ahern’s private secretary, asking would she be available on a landline to take a call from the Taoiseach.
“He said: ‘I need you to do a favour for me.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘you know I’m in Spain. It might be difficult to do a favour for you.’ ‘Ah no,’ he said, ‘not that kind of a favour.’ And I said: ‘Okay, what’s all this about?’ And he said: ‘would you go as Irish nominee to the Court of Auditors for six years?’ And I said: ‘Oh, I’ll have to talk to John about it’.”
Ahern wanted an answer that evening. When she phoned her husband he was on Galway Bay golf course, anxious that he was breaking the rules by taking the call, but happy to agree to the move. “I rang Bertie back and said: ‘The answer is yes.’ And he said: ‘Okay, I’ll fax out a statement to you.’ And I said: ‘Why?’ And he said: ‘It’s going out on the news tonight’.”
Geoghegan-Quinn says there were probably others who deserved the job more. “I don’t know why it happened or why he decided, because I don’t think he owed me anything.”
Life in Luxembourg was quiet. She liked it that way. “It was the only time in my life since 1975 that I could go out and I could walk from one end to the other end of a city without somebody saying hello or recognising me or whatever. And I loved the anonymity of that, I have to say. It was a great feeling of freedom, in a way.”
Yet she jumped at the chance to go to Brussels as commissioner, an unavoidably public job that she coveted as far back as 1993, when Reynolds handed Ireland’s seat on the EU executive to his close ally Pádraig Flynn. Disappointed? Yes, she says. But she moved on. Little did she know that her chance would come again almost 20 years later.
Although some pro-Europeans in Dublin take issue in private with her silence during the Nice and Lisbon referendums – there were four – she says it was not open to her to intervene. “It wasn’t possible, and it’s not possible for a member of the Court of Auditors to have a political involvement or be involved in a political campaign or anything like that. You couldn’t. I went home and I voted. I did my constitutional duty.”
GEOGHEGAN-QUINN’S first meeting with Barroso as commissioner-designate was several months ago. A tedious process of formal appointment followed, interrupted for several weeks by the Christmas festivities and a political scrap in the European Parliament over her would-be Bulgarian colleague. “It took such a long time.”
She never anticipated that she would be put in charge of science and research, the talk around the Commission’s Berlaymont building suggesting she might be in line for the administrative budget portfolio.
She was “shocked, but very pleased” when Barroso assigned the job to her. “He was obviously sussing me out and asking what I had done in my political career, what interests I had and things like that, policies and stuff. But he never at any stage intimated that this was what you were going to get or anything like that,” she says.
“He said to me during the course of the conversation: ‘this is going to be central to the policy, this is an area that’s going to be the engine for growth and for sustainability in getting us out of the crisis’, and he said ‘I’m giving it to you on the basis that I feel you’re a doer and that you will commit yourself totally to it’.”
THE JOB NECESSITATED a lot of cramming in advance of a crucial three-hour confirmation hearing with MEPs, a performance of marked self-confidence approaching a tour de force. “It was like doing the Leaving Cert all over again,” she said of her preparations for the encounter.
If lab coats and mathematical formulae were once alien ground for Geoghegan-Quinn, she starts the job determined to build a big public profile for important research undertaken behind the scenes by legions of experts. She feels inspired by groundbreaking work to tackle Alzheimer’s disease and the transmission of the HIV virus from mother to baby in Africa. On a recent trip to Spain (one of many – the country holds the EU presidency) she visited the world’s largest solar power site. It was, she says, the most fascinating place she has ever been to.
“I’m tough, I would think, as a boss, but I’m also very fair, I hope. I would make demands and I have deadlines and all that kind of thing. I also like things to be communicated,” she says.
“There is an incredible amount of good research being done. But who knows about it? They don’t talk about it; they don’t communicate it. Nobody knows about it only themselves. It’s all good news and we’re not communicating it.”
This task is all the more important given the emphasis on innovation in Barroso’s new grand plan for the union, an initiative to breathe new impetus into its ailing economies. Geoghegan-Quinn’s job brings significant responsibility in this milieu – several other commissioners are “clients” of her office – but she doesn’t appear keen to encourage descriptions of her post as that of research tsar. “I’m sure there’d be politicians in Ireland who’d call me something else and it wouldn’t either be a tsar or a tsarina.”
Quite what former Green senator Déirdre de Búrca might call the lady from Galway we don’t know. De Búrca resigned her Seanad seat a few weeks back when Geoghegan-Quinn refused to appoint her to her cabinet or private office. There were allegations of a Fianna Fáil “shaft” and whispers that the commissioner, who has oversight of nuclear research, didn’t want someone from the Green movement in her inner circle.
Geoghegan-Quinn won’t go there. “You won’t draw me on this, absolutely not, no,” she says. “The only thing I will say about that is that I think the Taoiseach dealt with that matter in the Dáil in a very eloquent manner and there is nothing that I could add to what he said. Full stop.” Cowen said he indicated de Búrca’s interest to the commissioner, adding that Geoghegan-Quinn said she was prepared to have a look at that possibility, while asserting her independence. It later “became clear that it would not be possible for her to become a member of the cabinet”, the Taoiseach said.
IN BRUSSELS, meanwhile, the entire EU system was in a funk over the financial meltdown in Greece. There was fear of financial market contagion as the European authorities struggled to persuade Germany to come on board to help create a special rescue net for Athens. Bags under the eyes of senior officials are emblematic of the strain.
Geoghegan-Quinn says it’s been a difficult period. “My neighbour at the table is Maria Damanaki, the Greek commissioner, and I have said to myself on so many occasions when we have been discussing Greece that I am so happy that I’m not the Greek commissioner, because I think it must be an incredibly difficult time to be a commissioner when your country is in the eye of the storm.”
While Greece is in a different category to Ireland, she says that the efforts made in Dublin to steady the ship are well recognised in Brussels. “That action hasn’t come without a lot of pain, as we know, for Irish people, and that pain is going to continue for some time.” Still, she takes issue with critics who say the euro is done for, and agrees with those who say membership of the currency was crucial for Ireland’s survival when the economic earthquake struck.
“Some people criticised it and said ‘this proves the euro is not going to work and is the wrong project’, etc, etc. I mean where would some of us be without the euro zone? That’s the way I look at it. Where would Ireland be without the euro zone? We couldn’t have survived this on our own. We needed the support that we got from the European Central Bank. We needed the support of member countries in the euro zone to help us.”
While a high-wire game of political cat and mouse over Greece between Berlin, Paris and Brussels took up huge amounts of time, German chancellor Angela Merkel ultimately prevailed by imposing her terms on the rescue mechanism for Greece. Merkel made life very uneasy in Brussels for days on end, but the politician in Geoghegan-Quinn recognises the doughty campaign she waged. “I think you wouldn’t survive in German politics very long unless you played a good political game,” she says.
GEOGHEGAN-QUINN is still the woman who withdrew from the political fray in her prime. At the time, the main reason cited was the invasion of privacy caused by newspaper reports that one of her two sons had been expelled from school.
She now says there was more to it than that. “Bertie Ahern and I were the same age. He was a year younger than me. So therefore, there was no possibility at that stage of me becoming leader of the party. So what was left for me to do? That was the only thing really that was left for me to do. I had been a cabinet minister. I had been incredibly privileged to work as a cabinet minister for several leaders of the party and as a junior minister for a number of leaders of the party. So there wasn’t really anything further or any other sort of thing that I had left to do or ambition that I had left to fulfil in politics.
“And I was coming to an age when if I wanted to do something else I had to actually make the decision then, because unfortunately, because of ageism, I would be considered too old later to change career, and that played into it.” Of Ahern’s resignation as taoiseach she has little to say. She hasn’t seen him since he left office, saying she probably would have were it not for the leg injury he sustained after he left office. She maintains regular contact with former commissioner David Byrne, however. “David keeps me in touch, because David sees him.”
She will visit Ahern before long, she says. “I’m going to have tea and apple tart with him soon in Dublin.” It promises to be an interesting conversation.
BORN
Galway, September 1950
FAMILY
Married to John Quinn. Two grown sons and a granddaughter.
CAREER HIGHLIGHTS
Won her father's seat in the Dáil, but never found it easy to retain her seat in Galway West. She was minister for the Gaeltacht; minister for tourism, transport and communications; and minister for justice. In the junior ministerial ranks, she was minister of state for education and minister for European affairs. She spent 10 years in the European Court of Auditors. In February she became European commissioner for research, innovation and science. She also wrote a novel, The Green Diamond, about four girls sharing a house in Dublin in the late 1960s, one of whose father is involved in politics.
