More than three years after the “swing-gate” controversy, former Fine Gael TD Maria Bailey gets why her party leader, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, had political reasons to demote her in 2019.
At a time when the Fine Gael-led government was trying to crack down on a compensation culture and runaway insurance costs, a member of the party taking a personal injuries claim for falling off a swing in a bar of a Dublin hotel on a night out in 2015 reflected badly on the party.
Details of Bailey’s legal action against the Dean over her fall hit the news-stands in May 2019, just days before that year’s local and European elections. Fine Gael later said the controversy damaged the party when it was out canvassing for votes during that campaign.
Looking back now, what Bailey does not get is – as she says – the “very cold” and “manipulative” manner in which she was “destroyed” at a time of great personal stress when her father, John Bailey, a Fine Gael councillor, was in the final stages of a terminal illness.
Neither does she accept the “unfounded” grounds on which Varadkar demoted her. She claims his reasons were not supported by an internal review that he commissioned from David Kennedy SC to establish the facts around her case and “didn’t suit Leo’s narrative”.
The whole affair ruined her, she tells The Irish Times.
“Privately, it destroyed me. It had an enormous impact not just on my family – my kids, my husband and my immediate family. I didn’t realise that my family had me on suicide watch for a period of time. It was only afterwards that that came to light,” she says.
Bailey contacted this newspaper after reading comments by an unnamed associate of Varadkar’s in a profile article of the newly reinstalled Taoiseach published in this newspaper last month, saying that the Fine Gael leader showed sympathy towards Bailey during the episode.
The former Dún Laoghaire TD insists that this was at odds with her recollection of how she was treated during the controversy that marked the end of her 16-year career in politics.
The Irish Times put a number of questions to Varadkar through his spokesman about Bailey’s grievances over what happened to her in 2019, but he declined to comment on these queries.
Sitting in a coffee shop in south Dublin, a reflective Bailey says she became publicly portrayed as “a character beyond recognition to what the actual facts were”. She became the subject of public ridicule, lampooned with Halloween costumes and at Christmas pantomimes.
“I just became unrecognisable. I was just a laughing stock,” she says.
Bailey understands the “funny” aspect of her fall while out socialising on July 10th, 2015. The Kennedy review – which Fine Gael never published but which has been seen by The Irish Times – states she fell backwards from the swing, hitting her head and back. The review states that when she fell, she was holding a bottle of beer in one hand and a wine cooler containing a bottle of wine in the other. The wine cooler hit her on the side of her face.
“I can see the comedy side but at the end of the day – comedy aside – I was hurt and those are injuries I have had to manage extensively for the last number of years,” she says.
She accepts that her damaging radio interview with RTÉ broadcaster Sean O’Rourke, six days after the story broke, “backfired” on her and that it was “a mistake” and “an error of judgment”. People in Fine Gael had advised her against doing any media interviews but she took her own public relations advice to try to give herself and her family space.
“It was my mistake; I knew I wasn’t in the right frame of mind, but what politician hasn’t done a bad interview?” she says.
She acknowledges that the tone of the interview was “awful” and she doesn’t recognise the person interviewed when she listens back to it. “I hear distress,” she says.
Bailey puts this down to the political crisis and media frenzy engulfing her while dealing with the trauma of her father’s final stages of rapid motor neuron disease. She becomes upset remembering how her late father, a man she describes as her “best friend” and whom she likened to her partner in politics, knew what was happening to her but was powerless to help.
“For the first time ever in our political career, he couldn’t help. He couldn’t speak. He had no voice. He couldn’t put his arm around me,” she says.
On the fall itself, she knew instantly she was hurt. She felt a very sharp pain. The next morning, she went to the emergency department at the Beacon Hospital.
“I have had nine surgical procedures, the last one being recently which was major spinal surgery. That was in October and hopefully that will be the last one for a very long time. For the first time in seven years, I am 90 per cent pain-free,” she says.
She accepts her own actions may have complicated her legal claim had she not withdrawn it after coming under political pressure to “pull the case”. She says she was “fine” with the fact that the case might have been affected by her own contributory negligence.
“I accepted I was there. I sat on the swings,” she says.
“The swings now have non-slip strips on them. They didn’t have them at the time. I wasn’t drunk and it could happen to anyone.”
The fact that Bailey, a dedicated runner, participated in a 10-kilometre run just over three weeks after her fall raised questions around her injuries. Matters were complicated further for her by a line in the affidavit she signed verifying her personal injury summons that she could not run at all for three months. This was an error that should have been corrected, she says. Kennedy found that legal papers stated that Bailey’s running was impeded, not prevented.
“I never said that. I put in that I couldn’t run for almost four weeks. He [Kennedy] found that that was true,” she says.
[ Hotel hands over file on Maria Bailey swing case to FG reviewerOpens in new window ]
Today, Bailey believes she was pressured by Varadkar into co-operating with the Kennedy review. She initially resisted participating when she met Varadkar in late May as it was a private matter. She told him she was at breaking point and not mentally or physically able, particularly with her father’s illness. Varadkar told her if she didn’t participate, she would “forever have a cloud over her head” and he threatened to remove the party whip. She reluctantly agreed to co-operate.
Bailey said she also told Varadkar that she needed help and that she was not mentally in a good place, and that he replied that he couldn’t help her.
In a further query to the Taoiseach’s spokesman to ask about this, he said Varadkar had no recollection of Bailey making such a request for help. The spokesman said “free counselling sessions and professional mental health support is provided to TDs, senators and party staff on request, on a confidential and self-referral basis”.
On July 4th, after the review was completed, Bailey met Varadkar to discuss what would happen next. According to minutes of their meeting, Bailey said the Taoiseach told her that he believed she had only suffered a soft tissue injury in the 2015 fall and that her recovery would only take a number of weeks. Bailey asked Varadkar whether he was diagnosing her as Taoiseach or a doctor without her medical records. “As a doctor,” he replied.
Varadkar told her she had brought the party into disrepute and had exaggerated her injuries.
She rejected this, saying that this was not found by the Kennedy review. She admitted that she had made mistakes but told him that she was not a liar.
The following weekend, a newspaper headline read: “FG swing fall probe finds Bailey’s claim overstated impact of injuries.”
Her father died two days later. Bailey says her family were upset that Varadkar turned up at the funeral home in light of what she was going through.
She says her family were also upset that then Fine Gael minister Josepha Madigan came to the funeral days after publicly saying that she was “very satisfied” with what the Kennedy review said about her. The suggestion that Madigan had been cleared by the review coming after a news report that Bailey overstated her injuries “inferred that it didn’t clear me”, says Bailey.
Madigan’s family law firm handled her legal claim and Madigan herself processed Bailey’s application to the Personal Injuries Assessment Board, the statutory body that deals with initial personal injury claims, but not with her legal claim; Madigan left the firm in 2017.
How is Leo’s position not untenable? He has brought the party into disrepute in terms of his leak of a confidential document. The polls reflect that. He damaged the party. There was no review of Leo Varadkar
In demoting her as chair of the Oireachtas housing committee on July 23rd, 2019, Varadkar made his position clear. In his press release, he referred to the incorrect legal statement, saying that Bailey signed an affidavit that overstated the impact of her injuries on her running.
He acknowledged Kennedy’s finding that it was unlikely that a court could conclude that she deliberately sought to mislead about the impact on her running, but said there were “inconsistencies in Deputy Bailey’s account of events to me and the media that I cannot reconcile”. Varadkar concluded that Bailey made “numerous errors of judgment in her handling of this matter from the outset, during and even after she’d withdrawn the case”.
She has sought, unsuccessfully, further detail from Varadkar on “inconsistencies” referred to in his press release which she argues are “unfounded and not true”.
In retrospect, Bailey believes the Kennedy review was an attempt to create the impression that due process was followed, only for Varadkar to disregard the findings of the review.
“During this time, all that was mentioned was due process, transparency and fair procedure, but nothing can be further from the truth. It was a predetermined outcome,” she says.
Bailey believes Varadkar’s suggestion that she overstated her injuries implied that she lied in her claim when Kennedy categorically found her action was “not a fraudulent claim”.
Kennedy concluded that Bailey had sustained a genuine injury from the fall, which was seen on CCTV and diagnosed by doctors, and that her solicitors and junior counsel considered the case was “statable”, meaning there was a legal basis for her personal injuries claim.
“I understand if it was a political decision; that is fine. I would have to have taken that on the chin,” she says of the conclusions Varadkar reached.
“But this was different. This was going to damage my character and my reputation ... it was going to destroy me, like, finish me off completely on the basis that I overstated my case.”
Bailey believes that there were double standards at play within Fine Gael given that Varadkar’s leaking of a confidential GP contract documents led to a Garda investigation but no criminal charges, yet this, like her personal injuries claim, also damaged the party’s reputation.
“How is Leo’s position not untenable? He has brought the party into disrepute in terms of his leak of a confidential document. The polls reflect that. He damaged the party. There was no review of Leo Varadkar,” she says.
[ Varadkar: ‘Reputational harm’ to FG from Maria Bailey caseOpens in new window ]
In the period between her legal claim surfacing and November 2019 when she was “deleted” from the Fine Gael ticket for the 2020 general election – on a proposal from Varadkar – Bailey says she was subjected to vile online abuse and death threats. She had to install CCTV cameras at home for security reasons because of people calling to her home. Once, when she and a friend were out walking, they were followed by a man in a car who verbally abused her. She says Varadkar’s statements about her legal claim helped to create a climate for that abuse.
“We are constantly eroding the idea that politicians are people too, with families. It is the ripple effect. What Leo did was play into that. He was throwing petrol on a fire,” she says.
Her supporters, inside and outside Fine Gael, believe she was treated very badly. One expressed shock that the party got hold of Bailey’s medical file with such personal details in it.
“She was treated appallingly. It went far beyond what is cut-and-thrust politics,” said a former colleague. “It was the brutality of the finish. It was like clubbing an animal to death.”
Fine Gael TD Charlie Flanagan, who was Minister for Justice at the time of the controversy, told The Irish Times that he believes Bailey was “treated unfairly and arbitrarily”.
“She made mistakes, of that there is no doubt. She was ill-advised to do a radio interview, feeding the insatiable appetite of the media beast and that kept the controversy firmly centre-stage at a crucial time,” he said.
Flanagan said that, as a solicitor who practised for many years in the civil courts, he believed the importance of due process was “sacrosanct” and, in the case of a dispute that cannot be resolved, he strongly defended any citizen’s right to have access to the courts.
“One could argue that this was denied to Maria Bailey. I know that she suffered personal trauma and professional devastation in what was a political maelstrom,” he said.
Bailey was not the first politician to make mistakes and, as recent events have shown with the resignation of Damien English as Fine Gael junior minister over a false claim in a planning application and Minister for Public Expenditure Paschal Donohoe not disclosing 2016 election expenses in his official declarations, she was not the last.
“I put my hands up to any mistakes that I made myself – the Sean O’Rourke programme and any embarrassment that I caused at the start – but I was a loyal, hardworking Fine Gael TD for many years,” says Bailey. “I just became surplus to requirements because you fitted a narrative that they were trying to deal with the insurance industry at the time. The way that the facts were distorted to damage me wasn’t necessary.”
Asked if she wished she had not taken the case, Bailey says there is “no point in having regrets”. She misses politics but never thought it could be so destructive. In hindsight, she feels she was in “no position” to take on what she faced as “one voice against a mammoth machine”.
“You kind of know that politics can be brutal. You kind of accept that as the rough-and-tumble of politics, but not when it goes so deep or so private,” she says.
Timeline of a political fall
July 10th, 2015: Maria Bailey, then a Fine Gael councillor, falls backwards off a swing on a night out with friends at Sophie’s in the Dean Hotel in Dublin, hitting her head and back.
July 11th, 2015: Bailey attends the Beacon Clinic and is diagnosed with an injury to her back and head.
August 3rd, 2015: Bailey runs the Bay 10k in Dún Laoghaire, recording a time of 53 minutes and 56 seconds.
April 2016: Bailey is elected as a TD for Dún Laoghaire in the general election.
August 2017: Bailey instructs Madigan Solicitors, the family law firm of Fine Gael colleague Josepha Madigan, to issue legal proceedings against the Dean for a personal injuries claim over the fall.
May 20th, 2019: Newspaper articles appear revealing Bailey’s claim against the Dean.
May 25th, 2019: Taoiseach Leo Varadkar says her legal action is a private matter and that it relates to an incident that occurred before she was elected to the Dáil.
May 26th, 2019: Varadkar says Bailey’s legal action was brought up when candidates were canvassing in the local elections the previous week and that it had caused “reputational damage” to Fine Gael.
May 27th, 2019: Bailey is interviewed by RTÉ broadcaster Sean O’Rourke in a much-criticised appearance.
May 29th, 2019: Under mounting political pressure, Bailey drops her legal action against the Dean. Fine Gael asks senior counsel David Kennedy to lead a fact-finding review of Bailey’s legal action.
June 15th, 2019: Varadkar orders all future Fine Gael election candidates to fully disclose their involvement in any legal proceedings because of their impact on others standing in elections.
July 4th, 2019: In a private meeting, Varadkar tells Bailey that he believes she exaggerated her injuries in her legal claim – an accusation she rejects as it is not contained in the Kennedy review.
July 9th, 2019: Bailey’s father John Bailey, a Fine Gael councillor for the Dún Laoghaire area, dies at home after battling rapid motor neuron disease.
July 23rd, 2019: Varadkar removes Bailey as chair of the Oireachtas housing committee. He says she overstated the impact of her injuries on her running, that there were inconsistencies in her account of events to him and the media, and that she made numerous errors of judgment. He says her approach “jars with that of a government taking action to reduce personal injuries payments, claims and insurance”. He declines to publish the Kennedy review.
August 2019: Bailey steps down as chair of the Select Committee on Members’ Interests and as chair of the Working Group of Committee Chairs.
November 14th, 2019: Fine Gael removes Bailey from the Dún Laoghaire constituency ticket for the February 2020 general election on a proposal from taoiseach Leo Varadkar. Jennifer Carroll MacNeill, then a Fine Gael councillor and now a junior Minister, was later added to the ticket.
January 22nd, 2020: Bailey confirms she will not be standing in the following month’s general election.
