INTERVIEW:Noel Dempsey said yesterday his political life had been "a huge privilege and honour". Speaking to The Irish Timesin his Leinster House office about his lengthy political career, he said: "It has consumed my life."
It wouldn’t be easy to break away and he admitted it would be “a wrench” but he felt the time was ripe to make his decision.
Although he will get a generous lump-sum payment and pension, he insisted this had nothing to do with his retirement.
The Minister for Transport said he had given long service and would be paying back half his pension to the State in taxes and deductions.
Asked if he had any designs on Áras an Uachtaráin, which becomes vacant next year, he replied bluntly: “No.” Nor does he intend to go back to his former occupation as a teacher.
He sees no threat to Brian Cowen’s position as leader of Fianna Fáil. There was “no contest” and “nobody challenging”. Sure, there were critics in the party but this had been the case under previous leaders as well.
He was himself a member of the “Gang of Four” with Seán Power, Liam Fitzgerald and MJ Nolan (the latter is also retiring) who famously challenged the leadership of the late Charles Haughey.
The decision to take issue with the formidable Haughey was not taken lightly: “It took courage and naiveté. We just felt it was something that needed to be done.” He feels even more convinced now, in the light of subsequent revelations about Haughey’s finances.
He also served under Albert Reynolds who used to keep him in Government Buildings late at night, drinking tea as he recounted the latest development in the peace process which “totally consumed” the older man.
His abiding memory of Bertie Ahern is the latter’s opening remarks to a divided and tense front bench after he took over as leader when Fianna Fáil was in opposition.
“Listen, we have two years, we have to be a team, you don’t have to like one another but you do bloody well have to work with one another.”
Working with the current Taoiseach, he has been struck by the sheer extent of the effort, as he sees it, that Cowen has put into “trying to get things right” on the economy while at the same time, “in all of the adversity”, remaining the soul of courtesy.
Asked about reports of a recent blow-up between himself and the Green Party, he replies he felt their move to try to pre-empt the Government decision on the timing of the election “was not good for government as a whole and wasn’t good for the country”.
Admitting that current negative poll ratings cannot be lightly dismissed, he says:
“You can talk about snapshots in time and all the rest of that, and we all do, but they are reflective of a mood; we are going to have to change that mood.”
So what was the actual date of the general election: “Good question, very good question.”
