Getting to know Gilmore

He may be the second-most powerful politician in Ireland but it’s surprising how little most of us still know about Eamon Gilmore. In a surprising new book Leading Lights, the Labour leader reveals the people who have inspired him, setting out his vision for a better Ireland in the process. By Ed O’Hare.

Sometimes the only way to get to know a politician is to read them. Newspaper interviews and television appearances tell us roughly what kind of person they are and what they stand for, but to fully appreciate the subtlety of their worldview, the rigour of their thought and the integrity of their beliefs it is necessary to encounter them on the printed page. Since he was elected President of the Union of Students of Ireland thirty years ago Eamon Gilmore has made plenty of speeches but now, in Leading Lights, he takes up his pen to reveal the sides of himself which many of us, even those who have voted for him, may be unaware.

Although he has been leader of the Labour Party since 2007 and now Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade, Gilmore remains something of a mystery. In an age when political success is so much determined by personality, he is a living contradiction: the party leader who has consistently topped the popularity polls but whom the electorate often has serious difficulties relating to. People seem to have no trouble believing in Gimore’s dedication to the Labour cause but his reluctance to be anything other than deadly serious means that they have not found it as easy to warm to him as an individual. Many said that Gilmore’s determination to keep personhood and politics strictly separate would be detrimental to Labour’s ambitions but after their spectacular success in the general election it’s perhaps all the more imperative that we get to know Gilmore better. Leading Lights is an attempt to bring us closer to the second-most powerful man in Irish politics.

In 2008 Gordon Brown wrote a book called Courage in which he explained his own political aspirations by telling readers about the men and women who for him encapsulated the very best of humanity; the greatest representatives of goodness, fortitude and honesty. Though it did not do much to rescue Brown’s career, Courage at least proved that a passionate, well-informed and unquestionably radical political mind lay behind his much-caricatured gruff and dour exterior. Eamon Gilmore shares the same problem that dogged Brown. His personality has never translated well into the frenetic domain of the modern media. He comes across as severe, tetchy, wooden and, like Enda Kenny, incapable of landing a killer punch.

What does Leading Lights tell us about the inner-life of the man who has put this handicap behind him and so dramatically turned around the fortunes of his party? The answer is a great deal, and this has much to do with the way in which Leading Lights breaks with the format of similar books. Apart from famous names Gilmore has selected many people we probably have never heard of. They include his grandmother Ellie (who ignited his interest in politics), Father Joe Cassidy (the teacher who helped him to receive a second-level education and who led him to recognize the power of words), Triona Dooney (a college friend whose intellectual companionship proved pivotal) and the environmentalist Matt Byrne. For Gilmore, these people have been as integral in shaping him as a statesman as any revolutionary icon.

This does not mean that Gilmore’s pen-portraits of the great lack the flair of his more intimate character sketches. He has assembled quite a disparate group, with surprisingly few figures coming from the realm of politics. We have Martin Luther King, hurling legend Joe Connolly, Sean O’Casey and Sean O’Riada. Sometimes Gilmore’s professional and personal admiration overlap, as in the case of his chapters on Proinsias De Rossa, whose progressive ideals brought Gilmore into the Worker’s Party, and T.K. Whitaker, whose economic reforms Gimore holds up as a model of fearless, far sighted public service. Gilmore even has the equanimity to include one person on the basis of how much he disagreed with them. This is Margaret Thatcher, whom Gilmore regards as his ideological nemesis.

In contrast to his rather staid image, the Eamon Gilmore of Leading Lights is a man who can barely contain his enthusiasm for politics, the environment, art, sport, but most of all for people. The kind of person he admires is one who sets aside all considerations of short-term gain, self-aggrandisement and personal safety because they believe they can help a better society to develop. He respects those who put the future first and hold on to their dreams despite momentous adversity. Gilmore is obviously proud to have been part of a social programme that has taken him from a life of deprivation in a small farmhouse in a remote part of Galway in the 1950s to the second-highest political office in Dáil Eireann and does not bandy words when he states that he and his colleagues have a responsibility to offer similar opportunities to the coming generations.

Change means everything to Gilmore and each profile in Leading Lights segues without excuse into an articulation of the Ireland he wants to create. At the same time, he believes that the best way forward can often be found by looking back. By reinstating some of the values of our ancestors, Gilmore argues, we can found a new, fairer and more stable society. This is a view reflected most clearly in his discussion of the old agricultural practise An meitheal, the collective harvesting of crops for the benefit of all. Gilmore considers this as perfectly showing “the way in which solidarity between individuals strengthens the entire community” and he thinks that much could be done to lift Ireland out of its current disastrous state if we saw that “we all were the solution and if we embraced that part of our heritage - the best of our national psyche - that manifested itself in An meitheal.”

Leading Lights claims to be neither a piece of hero-worship nor a polemic, neither a memoir nor a manifesto. In reality it is all of these things, but Gilmore’s book is no slick piece of spin-doctored confection. A few years ago his stilted and somewhat overly-formal style might have struck readers as dangerously old-fashioned but in the current political situation Gilmore’s heartfelt conviction and sincerity is what shines out of this book. Leading Lights is the work of an unashamed idealist with no small supply of ideas.

Leading Lights by Eamon Gilmore

Published by The Liberties Press

197pp

€16.99

Image top: The Labour Party.