Ruairi Quinn: A reflective man loses his way
Ruairi Quinn's autobiography unwittingly shows how the pressures of modern politics and public office determine agenda at variance from initial ambitions
In the penultimate sentence of his 411 page autobiography, Ruairi Quinn writes: "The advocacy of ideas, the mobilisation of support, the pursuit of democratic power and the implementation of change in the path that we must follow". It is a path that he appears to have wanted to follow at the outset of his career; it is a path he patently did not follow (even on the basis of his own account) in the course of that career.
Ruairi Quinn is a well-read, reflective, concerned person and, as such, unusual in Irish politics. He read many of the great works of politics, including Koestler's Darkness at Noon, Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Donald Sassoon's One Hundred Years of Socialism, as well as works by James Connolly, Marx and Engels. He was propelled into politics by dismay at social conditions in Dublin in the 1960s and a sense that society was grossly unfair. His sense of politics seems also to have been influenced by his architectural background, a desire to create elegant public spaces and fine, affordable housing.
But somehow this compassionate, erudite, reflective man seems to have lost his way, to the extent that there seems to be no appreciation on his part that he had done so. Maybe it was a reaction to the eccentricities and self-centredness of Noel Browne, which he chronicles well and which, clearly, he found distasteful. Did he, as a reaction to Browne, simply find himself in the camp of Noel Browne's adversaries in the Labour Party, thereby losing sight of what he had set out to achieve?
His early preoccupation on being appointed Minister for Enterprise and Employment in early 1993 was to find an adviser "who would be acceptable to the business community". Hardly surprising, perhaps, since he opted to call his department not "Employment and Enterprise" but the other way around, to signal his focus on enterprise. He justifies this on the grounds that there can be no employment without enterprise but if the priority is enterprise, necessarily employment comes second, at best.
He describes life as a cabinet minister in familiar terms, being overwhelmed by the weight of issues and official paper, the urgency of decision making, the calculation of party-political outcomes. One can understand how strategic policy-making gets lost in the helter-skelter of day-to-day crises, but would you not have thought a reflective mind would note, even in retrospect, how easily one can be distracted from what matters? Take the crisis that led to the fall of the Albert Reynolds government in November 1994. What was that about? He recalls everything was patched up between Dick Spring and Albert Reynolds after the row over the appointment of Harry Whelehan as President of the High Court, solely on the basis of an abject apology. But if there was an issue there in the first place justifying Labour walking out of government, what was it, and if it meant so little as to be settled by a piece of public relations, how could it have amounted to anything?
In fact there was an issue: the appointment of Liam Hamilton as chief justice. Liam Hamilton had been chairman of the Beef Tribunal and he had produced a report that was cop-out on all the major issues that had arisen – for instance it didn't bother addressing whether any money had changed hands between the main actors. There was a clear conflict of interest involved in Liam Hamilton's candidature for the highest judicial office in the context of his publication of a report affecting crucially the fortunes of those who were to decide on the appointment of a new chief justice. Labour was right to object to his appointment and yet capitulated for reasons entirely unknown and unaddressed by Ruairi Quinn.
He devotes two chapters to his time as Minister for Finance from December 1994 to June 1997. He was then in a position to affect vitally the issues that drove him into politics, inequality and disadvantage. And yet he hardly addresses these issues in that part of his book dealing with his time in Finance; he offers no explanation why his three budgets favoured the rich rather than the disadvantaged (as annually revealed by CORI's critiques on budgets). Instead he tells us how he instituted regular meetings with business leaders to get their views on the management of the economy, never adverting to the irony of a "socialist" seeking their advice while never (according to the book, or at least by inference) seeking the views of disadvantaged people.
He takes great pride in his role as the presiding minister in the Finance Council during Ireland's Presidency of the EU in 1996 and his success in getting agreement on a single currency. That was a significant accomplishment but how does it rate in terms of the priorities as he saw them when he went into politics in the first place?
Neither does his own account of his period as leader of the Labour Party – from 1997 to 2002 – convey any messianic sense of using his position to advocate ideas, mobilise support, pursue democratic power and implement change, aside from marginal change.
Ruairi Quinn is reflective enough, clever enough, erudite enough, well read enough to write another book that would be much more fascinating and instructive: how the pressures of modern politics and government office distract one from the pursuit of those goals that inspired on to enter politics in the first place. He could write another very good book on modern architecture in Ireland.