Just Mary

by Mary O'Rourke

  However, grim reality was to set in very soon. In the period that followed, we had a series of further Cabinet meetings, day after day, each one laden with what seemed like increasingly dire financial news. Ray MacSharry of Sligo (‘Mac the Knife’, as he would soon become known) had been appointed Minister for Finance and it was clear from the off that he meant serious business. Each Minister was issued with a file containing details of the cuts which the Department of Finance wished to impose upon their respective Departments, along with more dire forecasts. Over a period of two to three weeks thereafter, a series of strong cutbacks were to be imposed immediately, over which really and truly we didn’t have much choice: they were presented to us as a fait accompli. Of course you made your case against them as you could, but because the task was so huge and the time so short, neither Ray MacSharry nor Charlie Haughey listened to my bleatings or indeed to the bleatings of any of the other Ministers around the Cabinet table. I remember as a comic interlude one occasion on which Finance put forward the proposal that all trains for the West of Ireland should cease at Athlone!

  During that time as Ministers for Health and Education, Dr Rory O’Hanlon and I were soldiers-in-arms together. We were in charge of two of the biggest spending Ministries and we were left in no doubt that these were where the financial axe was going to fall. Anyone who remembers Ireland in the late 1980s will recall that what is happening in cutbacks these days is mild compared to the hair shirts imposed upon all of us as Ministers by Mac the Knife. Intellectually, I knew that what we were embarking on was proper and correct if the country was to be saved from financial ruin, but another part of me registered that these cuts were going to be in my Department and that I as Minister would be held responsible for them, so you can imagine how I felt. As a former teacher, I knew the lingo and was all too aware of what these strictures from the Department of Finance would really mean in terms of teacher numbers, curriculum choices and overcrowded classrooms. So it was too for my colleague Rory O’Hanlon in Health. In a way, perhaps it wasn’t such a good idea, putting a doctor in charge of the Department of Health and a teacher in charge of the Department of Education. We knew what the outcome would be. We could see only too well the forthcoming social, trade union, patient and parental unrest and what would unfold for us from this. But we had no choice but to put our noses to the grindstone and focus on day-to-day efforts at Cabinet to make our respective cases.

  As regards Education and Health, it was clear that the main spending area was staff — teachers and doctors and nurses — and that inevitably, this was where cuts would somehow have to be made. Education costs could be cut by increasing the Pupil/Teacher Ratio (the PTR) and yet, despite all of the cutbacks my predecessor Gemma Hussey had imposed, she had steered clear of this one — and with good reason. My own teaching background informed me that this was a measure that would just not be worn by the teachers’ unions. I knew in fact that parents wouldn’t initially attach that much significance to the issue, until prodded to do so by the INTO, the Association of Secondary Teachers, Ireland (ASTI) and the Teachers’ Union of Ireland (TUI), because to parents, if their child was in a classroom and being well taught, that was all that really mattered.

  In April 1987, before the true implications of Ray MacSharry’s proposed budget had become clear, I had to undertake my obligatory tour of the teachers’ unions’ Easter conferences. As a former teacher, I knew already that these conferences were like enormous bear pits, where the Minister was treated like a strange animal in a zoo — to be gazed at, pilloried, baited and in the end to be just plain put up with, until he or she went off to his or her next stop on the Via Dolorosa. Fortunately, I went along knowing that, if I had one strong thing going for me, it was that I had actual teaching experience myself and that I genuinely believed that teachers work hard and contribute much to society by their careful nurturing of a young person — particularly at primary level, I felt (even though my own professional experience had been at secondary level), when one takes over in loco parentis, so to speak. Also to my great advantage, I had my valued confidante, Margaret Walsh, who was a secondary school teacher in Dublin and an ex-president of ASTI, and whom, shortly after my appointment as Minister, I had asked to be my Advisor in the Department. To my delight, Margaret had accepted the position and there is no doubt that her presence and wise counsel greatly helped my passage through the ASTI conference and those of the other unions that Easter and in fact throughout my years in Education. Also of huge benefit was the good relationship I had built up during my time as a teacher with my own trade union, the ASTI, and with their then General Secretary, Kieran Mulvey. Kieran, whilst berating me as Minister as good as the next, was always careful to keep things cordial and courteous.

  I cannot over-emphasise here the extent to which Ireland was not just in the financial doldrums, but in a financial wasteland. We found ourselves directionless in a vast tundra of national debt, over which the previous government had presided apparently helplessly for more than four-and-a-half years. Alan Dukes and John Bruton, as the two successive Ministers for Finance, had no doubt tried to rein in spending but because of the influence of Labour, were just not able to do so with any kind of effectiveness.

  As I have said, the really big cuts Mac the Knife had in mind had not yet been formalised, and so that Easter at the conferences of the teachers’ unions, I was given a fool’s pardon, so to speak. I distinctly remember going to the INTO’s Annual Congress in Ennis that year. As a school principal in a small rural school in County Clare, my paternal grandfather had been a firebrand union adherent, noted for his radical views and his sterling espousal of the INTO. In true Lenihan fashion, he had fallen out with the hierarchy and had had various spats with authority, so there was nothing new in the spark of antiauthoritarianism which was to re-emerge in our family in the following generations. All of this was mentioned in speeches at the conference and I felt a glow of fondness for my grandfather, who had in his own way blazed a trail, allowing me a safe entry to this, my first teachers’ union conference. Luckily for me too, the ASTI were hospitable as well and politeness prevailed. The TUI, under the direction of Jim Dorney, were more watchful and wary, but the proceedings at their conference also passed off without difficulty that Easter.

  This was all before the really bad news broke, of course. For me, the most painful financial decision endorsed by Cabinet in 1987 to 1988 was the proposal to change the PTR, leaving each teacher responsible for more pupils than heretofore. This proposed measure became known as the infamous ‘20/87’ — a term which has never left my mind and still provokes a degree of dread in me to this day. (Circular number 20 was issued by the Department of Education in 1987, detailing changes in PTR.) It was announced that these strictures were to be imposed at primary, secondary and vocational level, and immediately huge uproar ensued. Of course I could not justify it on educational grounds, only on financial ones and that was proving very difficult. Even now, 25 years later, the present government is finding it difficult to explain to people why there have to be financial cutbacks. It was extremely sore indeed in 1987/88, and there were numerous talks and walks and a huge teacher gathering in Dublin, when the union members and others turned out in force to protest against the proposed change in the PTR.

  A more vehement protest against the ‘20/87’ proposals developed back in my home town. One particular Saturday, over 12,000 parents, teachers and children marched up to my very ordinary bungalow on my very ordinary road in Athlone, with banners and shouting and general clamour. As I watched, bemused, I found myself wondering whether this was to become a habitual Saturday occurrence. At one point, Enda and my two sons suggested that they could give expression to their entrepreneurial spirit by setting up a homemade burger bar on the open green opposite the house, but I quickly knocked that idea on the head!

  As well as the crowds of protestors, present on that occasion too were the then national reporters on education: Christina Murphy of The Irish Times, John Walshe o
f the Irish Independent and Pat Holmes of the Irish Press as was. They were three great people on whom I would come to rely more and more, and who had always an unbiased, objective view of all that was going on in the field of education. I remember how, on the evening of that day, when the marchers had dispersed, Enda cooked a big roast of pork with crackling in our house. Christina Murphy and Pat Holmes had gone back to Dublin, but John Walshe was able to stay for a while to partake of the pork. The headline for the piece he ran following the protest was, ‘Mary is a cut above the rest’, which of course was a reference to the cuts in education and to what had gone on under previous Ministers — but I always privately took this too as a sign that John had enjoyed Enda’s cooking! The same John Walshe is now Special Advisor to Ruairi Quinn, Minister for Education.

  The following week, I got a call from the Chairperson of Athlone Chamber of Commerce, who asked if they could please have another march soon, as the shops had done really well that day. Many of the teachers were women, of course, and what would women do when they are in a strange town but go shopping! On a more serious note, the 12,000-strong crowd which invaded the streets of Athlone that day was an indication of how high feelings were running at the time.

  But I held tough, as indeed we all did. I knew that my travails paled beside those of Rory O’Hanlon. Whatever the damage caused by cramming more pupils in under the tutelage of one teacher, it would be an even more serious matter if patients could not get access to hospitals. Yet it was clear that drastic cutbacks were necessary. Of course as time went on and as I got to know the Department better, I began to see where some cutbacks could have been made — not in an easier fashion — no cutback is ever easy — but perhaps more judiciously. Hindsight and experience are great things. But for now, it was the rí rá, the ruaille buaille and the constant deputations and the continual talks.

  Fortunately, fate was to intervene in the shape of a mutual recognition by the unions and the government that the only way out of the dire financial circumstances in which we found ourselves was by working together, rather than against each other. Only through talks and continuing cooperation could a plan be determined, which would put the country on a more even keel financially now and for the future. Luckily, Peter Cassells, who was head of the trade union movement, was a very astute man — and steady, sane and sensible with it. Bertie Ahern was the then Minister for Labour, and he and the Taoiseach and the unions began in a tentative way to talk together to see if they could come up with a plan — a Programme for National Recovery (or PNR). There followed an endless series of talks between the trade unions and the government, known as the Social Partnership Talks. Later, in relation to various programmes, other key players were brought into the talks but in the beginning it was just the trade unions and the government, both sides fully convinced of the need to plan ahead in a realistic, problem-solving way and both going into it wholeheartedly. It was clear to all that there was no way out of the current situation other than a coming together of the various interests, a pay pause and a determination to work together to clear the miasma of Ireland’s debt.

  And so began the PNR, the first social partnership which highlighted among many other things the importance of Education and Health as the key tenets for a healthy future for the country. Of course, during these talks and consultations, the teaching unions along with all of the other various trade unions of the day seized their opportunity, and put forward that the proposed Pupil/Teacher Ratio cutbacks should not take place. However, Education and I were saved by the bell, so to speak, in that when the school year began that autumn, the cuts were not as first envisaged and gradually the suggested PTR changes fell by the wayside, first in disadvantaged schools and then all over. The main capital cutbacks and all of the other attendant strictures on spending were to be held to, however, and Mac the Knife got ready to introduce a lethal second budget.

  It was in the run-up to Easter 1988 that the Taoiseach and the trade unions, along with Padraig O’hUiginn, Secretary General to the Department of An Taoiseach, and Declan Brennan, Secretary to my Department of Education, prepared to finally formalise the various measures to be taken under the PNR, which would relieve a degree of the pressure on many interest groups and introduce a sense of coordination in how the way forward could be charted. After a difficult and at times very fraught week, it was Good Friday before all was signed and sealed.

  I was due to embark the following Easter week on my second tour of the teacher conferences. This time, I was to have a far more difficult ride than the previous year. As the details of the new PNR arrangement had not yet been fully worked out, let alone made public, most members at the conferences thought that the changes to the Pupil/Teacher Ratio, with its draconian effects, were still to be implemented. My first conference was with the INTO on Easter Tuesday in Salthill, and there I got the silent treatment. The INTO Secretary, Joe O’Toole — later Senator Joe O’Toole — was a formidable foe but a decent guy. Prior to the event, he had phoned me and Margaret Walsh, to tell us what kind of reception we should be expecting at the forthcoming meeting — the members had agreed that there was to be no booing, but there would be absolutely no clapping and no welcome either — just total silence.

  Nevertheless, I went along as planned. I wasn’t particularly upset at the prospect of being greeted by silence — to anyone involved in political life as I was, this can seem like a reprieve: no heckling to be borne, after all! As I mounted the platform and took my place, the room was absolutely quiet. After the president had given his opening address, it was my turn to speak. I stood at the podium. Something which always stood me in great stead in public life was the fact that I have a good, strong voice. This comes mainly, I think, from my teaching days. I was also lucky to never have to rely on a script when speaking: I would read over the text of a speech a couple of times beforehand and then be able to stand up, look out at an audience, and speak fluently and without hesitation. This is a great attribute for a politician and one that is well worth cultivating.

  In any case, I stood there in front of the gathered might of the INTO members, said all I had to say and sat down to total silence — but to my mind, that was a relief rather than a penance. Then, as the session was breaking up for lunch, I stood up at the microphone once more and thanked the INTO for their invitation to join them for lunch, saying that I was delighted to accept — which led to a few gasps from the audience. I held my nerve and left the stage, determined not to be shunted out. I made sure to stop and talk to a number of the delegates on the way out. Among these were teachers from Clare and from Westmeath, who broke the taboo and talked to me, shaking my hand and wishing me luck — much to the chagrin of the top platform.

  When I got outside that hall, I breathed a huge sigh of relief that I had passed that test! This gave me the strength I needed to go on to attend the conferences of the ASTI and the TUI, and deal head on with the varying degrees of distrust, disbelief and worry with which their members confronted me. In time, as my experience as a Minister grew and the stringency of the financial situation began to ease, I would go on to forge strong working relationships and in some cases bonds of friendship with many of the union members. After all, we were all in the one boat — we all had to work together — and I was a strong believer in keeping relationships vibrant and productive with what could have been warring factions. Fortunately, this turned out not to be the case. I had a strong propensity within me for trade unions, and my ability to relate to them was consolidated by the fantastic work of Margaret Walsh, my Advisor. Margaret was also always adept at buttressing me against bad news, and all in all managed my course in such a terrific way. We became firm friends and have remained such ever since.

  The budgets of the late 1980s were truly lethal — spending for every Department was cut back ruthlessly and relentlessly, and as I said earlier, when people talk about the cutbacks being implemented these days, they are nothing to what happened then. And yet, Charlie Haughey’s popularity and that of Fiann
a Fáil continued to rise and rise. How was this possible? How did Charlie do it?

  Well, for one thing, as Taoiseach, Haughey was able to distance himself from the austerity measures. They were the cutbacks of his Ministers, not of him: somehow that was the impression which got out and held sway. It was also true that the general population at that time were just plain glad to see something being done which might save the country. Everyone was tired of the vacillation and endless feuds between Labour and Fine Gael which had dominated the four-and-half years under the previous government, and it was reassuring to see that finally, action was being taken and decisions were being made. To have someone strong in government raised a beacon of hope for many. In spite of all that has transpired since, it is my belief that in times to come, Charlie Haughey’s reputation will be burnished to a degree which is difficult to envisage now. Whatever else might be said, he knew how to lead, he knew how to talk, he knew how to behave in all situations, and you always felt somehow that the country was safe in his hands. It may sound childish to put it like that now, but looking back and analysing my emotions and the zeitgeist of those years, that is how it was.

  At that stage of course, I saw Haughey as a distant kind of figure, very much removed from me. By the time I was Minister for Education, I was almost 50 years old, but I still thought of him as a remote guy at the top. In the years that followed, sometimes I was asked, ‘Why didn’t you question where he got his money from?’ But can you honestly see me, as a rookie, a greenhorn in the Cabinet with the great weight of responsibility that was upon me and the huge demands I had to deal with every day, saying, ‘Excuse me Mr Haughey, but how did you make your money?’ It just wouldn’t have happened. Of course, at the time we would have heard gossip about his finances. And we knew that Haughey had a woman friend, a sweetie, who later turned out to be Terry Keane. There wasn’t such sense of a shock when it came out.