The man who would be Taoiseach
The slow rise and sudden fall of Ivor Callely. By Vincent Browne and John Byrne
When Katie Hannon spoke to Ivor Callely in April last he was talking of being Taoiseach some day. She wrote of him: "His political rise is driven by an aching ambition and a blinding self-belief. He already has the perfect vignette for the inauguration speech. It's a story his mother told him of an encounter with a soothsayer on a bus trip into Dublin when he was a boy. A woman called his mother aside when they were disembarking from the bus and said, 'You know you have a politician in that child? I can see this man being the President of Ireland'." Becoming Taoiseach, not President, was his ambition from his vantage point as a lowly junior minister he said in the interview.
"I'd like to think first I'll get another opportunity in a ministerial capacity. It's very difficult to prove yourself in a junior ministry because you really don't have full reign. You are the messenger boy. You are left with the crumbs on the table and it's a case of, you know, trying to get your teeth into something and doing something with it, and that is what I am doing on the accessible transport at the moment."
He was appointed junior minister in the Department of Health and Children in 2002, having been overlooked in 1997.
He was embroiled in the residential charges issue. He was at a meeting in December 2002 where it was stated clearly that legal opinion was advising the charges were illegal. Yet he never mentioned this to his senior minister, Micheál Martin, subsequently.
He was moved to the Department of Transport in 2004. "It is the type of stuff I like doing: making change, building roads, building cycle lanes, putting in place bridges and improving public transport."
His special area of responsibility in Transport was traffic management. He said to Katie Hannon: "From here where do I go? I would like to move up the ladder as most people would like to do who are enthusiastic and ambitious, a word used by my colleagues in describing me, and I think there's nothing wrong with guys in my position being ambitious. I think you have to be ambitious, you have to have vision and you have to have a desire to achieve and I am happy to indicate that yes, I am ambitious, yes, I am visionary and I think it would be wrong if I wasn't."
The visionary "thing" will be suspended for a while in the wake of the revelation that one of the State's biggest building contractors, John Paul Construction, while undertaking major work for the Eastern Health Board of which Callely was then chairman, had refurbished his home in Clontarf for nothing in the early 1990s.
The news followed a series of embarrassing controversies. On Friday 18 November, his private secretary, Una McDermott, resigned after he asked her to attend a political event. Eleven days later his constituency secretary, Niall Phelan, quit. Calleley had offered him a car as an inducement to remain on, but without success. It was also revealed that four other civil servants had applied to be transferred from his office since he took up his post in the Department of Transport. Around the same time he had engaged in a cheeky piece of self-promotion by appearing in a advertisement for Operation Freeflow in Dublin.
In 1997 he said "rogue" asylum-seekers should be "kicked out" of Ireland, and that it was "time to call a halt" to the spending of £50 million of taxpayers' money on asylum-seekers. He was reported as saying that "any Tom, Dick or Harry" could become an asylum-seeker and claim benefits while waiting for the Department of Justice to process applications, and that refugees were "carrying on in a culture that is not akin to Irish culture" such as "bleeding of lambs in the back garden".