TD Watch: I want to be Taoiseach

He's been publicly rebuked by Martin Cullen and got in trouble over remarks he made about refugees, but junior Minister Ivor Callely still plans to be Taoiseach. Why so confident? Because a soothsayer once said he was destined for high office. Interview by Katie Hannon

Ivor Callely is shrinking. As he pours the coffee in his spacious office in the Department of Transport, the trademark pinstripe suit is definitely hanging a little looser.

He is delighted that Village has noticed. A major health kick has knocked-off a stone and a quarter. He confides that it was a family snap of his overweight former self that jolted him into action. That and his stint as junior minister in the Department of Health, which, he says, pricked his conscience.

"You would be encouraging people to look at their weight and look at their dietary habits – you know there was a big programme on obesity and exercise. I was saying, 'How can I go out and say this and not do it myself?'".

"So I started bringing my dog for a run every morning and I still do it today. I go out five days a week on the Clontarf promenade and take a thirty-five minute jog. I find it very refreshing, I find it gives me an opportunity to think about what I want to achieve as my targets and goals that day."

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.

"As we were disembarking from the bus, I gather the woman called my mother and said, 'You know you have a politician in that child ?' and my mum made some pleasantries and said, 'He is a great chatterbox,' or something to that effect and she said, 'No, I can see into the future and I can see this man being the President of Ireland'."

But actually that little boy now has his eye set firmly on a different job. "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."

"Now, you know if I can be seen to achieve that … I would like to think the incumbent in the office of Taoiseach would say 'give Callely another challenge and give him a more daunting or serious challenge'. And maybe having proved myself in that, should the parliamentary party ever be faced with picking somebody to lead them, that my name might be considered and that I would be fortunate to have that opportunity at some stage in the future."

Callely left school in 1975 and worked in the insurance industry while studying accountancy and marketing at night before landing a job as a medical rep. "I always had a bit of a flare for sales and marketing. It suited my personality. I like chatting, wanted to be out and about, wanted to do a deal, wanted to achieve, wanted to see deals going down."

He joined Ogra Fianna Fáil and found himself in friendly competition with Sean Haughey. "From my point of view, he was there and yet I was sort of the balance to him at Ogra. I hadn't got that sort of lift that he had. Everybody was lifting Sean you know."

Lift or no lift, he carved out a constituency base in Dublin North Central where he consistently gets a very impressive vote. By 1994 he believes he was being considered for better things.

"It was widely known that I was hotly tipped to fill a (junior minister) vacancy just prior to the collapse of the '94 Dáil."

The next time a Fianna Fáil Taoiseach was likely to be picking a team would be after the '97 election. When Bertie passed over him he was, he admits, disappointed.

"I think there might have been a perception about me in Fianna Fáil: look at this guy, (he) came from nowhere, commandeering a seat in general elections, increasing his vote continually, is he a party man or is he a me féiner?"

He also believes that another matter may have hampered his promotion prospects. As he delicately puts it: "I spoke on certain issues that I think may not have been helpful at that time."

Ah, yes. Those alleged racist remarks. The Irish Times reported in 1997 that he said that "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". The last remark was said to be in reference to begging from neighbours and the "bleeding of lambs in the back garden".

He staunchly defends his position. "I made some comments in relation to my concerns about what I saw first-hand as some abuses in relation to the asylum procedures. I was conscious that there was benefit out of a multicultural society, there was benefit out of accommodating asylum seekers and refugees … but I was now witnessing a wee bit of chaos that I think most people started to see in relation to large numbers of people not being appropriately accommodated, being inappropriately placed and not being properly integrated into society."

"I think I was probably, with respect, ahead of my time in what I said because many other people have subsequently indicated that they weren't happy with the system. I wasn't giving out about the numbers coming or the people coming, even though I was charged with being racist and charged with saying certain things, a lot of them, and I am not going to go over all that ground, a lot of it I did not say. I certainly was not in any way racist and my record would prove that."

What of the current debate on the deportation of failed asylum seekers? "I would like to think that there is a humane response to individuals who have settled and I think this is part of the difficulty that I again highlighted, but it wasn't accepted when I was highlighting it."

When Bertie was picking his squad after the 2002 election, Callely at first feared that he had been by-passed again. "The call didn't come when I was expecting the call to come and if I recall correctly, I went for a brisk walk with my dog thinking about things and how it was going to pan out."

The call eventually came at about 7pm and Callely was appointed a junior minister in the Department of Health with responsibility for services for older people.

He insists that his area of responsibility "would have included the service of long-stay care but not necessarily covered say new build or planning or revenue or issues of that nature. That would be with the Minister."

He produces a raft of parliamentary questions to prove that any questions raised about people with medical cards being charged for long-stay care were not directed to him.

"That was not seen to be my area of responsibility, even though it was long-stay and it was older people." Whose area was it then? "That was Micheal Martin's."

He admits that the issue did come up in briefings with his officials. "I would have probably raised it with my officials on a probing basis when I would be trying to get improvements in service. And again the department (officials) were very cautious in that they didn't want me to overlap in another man's area."

But he says his officials never brought the issue to him. "I never got any brief whatsoever by my department to indicate to me that there was an issue, that there was a problem and that there was known over-charging." And he insists that when he raised it "the line that was always given to me was that there was different advices in relation to eligibility or entitlement."

Is he not now horrified to learn from the Travers Report that all the available advice on file indicated that the charges were illegal? "Of course, yes, and it probably is helping me address some of the issues that I would be now dealing with in my current department in as far as ensuring that things are probed a tiny bit more, or you have a better communication network with your department and everything you have been told, you get on paper."

"I am equally saying, I don't think anybody misled the ministers purposely…but I think from my own point of view, I am somewhat pleased that the Government appointee has vindicated my position and indeed that of my colleagues who worked in the Department at that time."

"I wouldn't say I'm going to change anything greatly, but you have to learn a lesson from my experience. You do of course trouble yourself with the question, 'Why did I not? Why did I not?'

And indeed, having attended a meeting where he was told that advice was being sought from the Attorney General, why did he not check what that advice had turned out to be?

"Again, in retrospect, hindsight is brilliant and I would trouble myself in asking myself that question at the moment. But again it wasn't quite in my area so you know, I'd enough of problems and worries to be sorting and particularly in the early months of the New Year… and the other issue was a matter for Micheál Martin so it wasn't on my agenda. It wasn't on my desk. So, it wasn't something that I would revisit."

He's now settling in to his new role as junior minister in the Department of Transport. He professes himself to be "delighted" with the job. "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 recent run-in with his senior minister – where Martin Cullen caustically accused him in the Dáil of being over-enthusiastic and of making announcements in relation to a metro plan for Dublin on the basis of guesswork – appears to have left him bruised but unbowed.

"I met Martin Cullen coming out of the Chamber and I spoke to him in a very friendly way because my understanding was that Martin Cullen had been through a fairly difficult period for the weeks prior to that session in the chamber…"

Could he be suggesting that the Minister was out of sorts? "I decided that there are times when you raise issues and there's times when you help people over other issues and I was of the view that I was happy to hear Minister Cullen agreeing with some of the sentiments of what I had said. My priority is to get what I want in place. I'm not going to have a row with somebody who might be able to get those things in place, and if he had used one or two words that maybe I'd prefer him not to have used, I wasn't going to give him a dig in the nose over that one and draw blood."

"Maybe sometime in the future when there's a heat out of a lot of things, and maybe when Martin Cullen and myself were having a cup of tea and a sandwich, which we often have together, we might talk about other things that I might want to put on the agenda and clarify and seek to have corrected. Because I think Minister Cullen was under a lot of pressure, some of it I have to say was unfair, and as I said, the overall content of what he was saying in the chamber on the day was on the issues what were of importance to me."

His special area of responsibility in Transport is traffic management. His list of priorities is extensive, from removing bottlenecks in the national road network to co-ordinating public transport services. "I've made a clear statement that I'm 'car friendly' and that I want people to be accommodated in their private motor vehicle as much as to give them a choice, other modes of transport, should they so wish to use it."

He sees his brief in the Department of Transport as a step up from his role in the Department of Health. "It's a very interesting time to be here in this Department, just two ministers leading the charge, bringing out this ten-year programme, doing all that is required that ordinary individuals like me want to try and do while we have the opportunity, and being in the position we're in to deliver it in the best interest of the wider public good. That's really what I am about. I love it, it's a very satisfactory and rewarding position."

"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."

"I've already made a substantial contribution, a substantial contribution in the amount of time and energy and hard work that I've put into the party, that I've put into my constituency at the expense of other things.

"Like I have a great love for my wife and my kids but it is difficult when your little fella comes to you and says, 'Will you come to my football match?' and you would like to be on the sideline with him but you're not there. So you do sacrifice things, certainly relating to family."

"Equally, you are the heart of the parliamentary party and you're making a contribution to policy. You're now part of a ministerial team and you're making a contribution to the ministerial meetings and I suppose you start getting an appetite when you listen to other contributions, you know that there's more that you can give.

"Certainly where I am sitting today, having been in Health and now in Transport, I would be looking forward to moving up the ladder in the party to facing whatever the challenge is."