Brian Murphy and John Mullen offer insights into two significant by-elections in Brian Lenihan’s life and his undoubted talents for electioneering.
The various contributions draw a series of pictures of Brian in different times and places: a bright and curious young student sharing coffee in the Trinity Commons; a strong college debater, who later became a strong parliamentary performer; an ambitious young politician; a hardworking and innovative Minister for Children and then Minister for Justice and then an initially rattled, but ultimately fearless Minister for Finance.
For my own part, I didn’t actually get to know Brian Lenihan until about a year after he entered Dáil Éireann. It was at a point when I was easing out of politics and he was easing out of the Law Library. Our paths had never really crossed in Leinster House or the Four Courts, but, from a distance, he seemed a jovial, able, bright barrister turned politician. My first ever extended conversation with him happened by chance when he offered me a lift back to Dublin from a by-election campaign in Cork in October 1998. Over the two-and-a-half hour journey, we covered a range of political topics, including the merits of various government and opposition politicians and long-term political trends in Ireland, England and the United States. We then covered a range of historical topics. All of this was interspersed with commentary from Brian on the social and political geography of various towns we were passing through or by-passing en route.
Having worked in politics since college, I had met many senior politicians and, indeed, had become cynical about most of them. It was clear, however, that Brian Lenihan was unique. The man’s intellectual capacity was extraordinary and impossible to understate. The depth and breadth of his reading was phenomenal. He also had an impressive capacity to assess political nuances and shifts. One only had to engage with him for a short period to see that he also had a passionate commitment to politics and a yearning to apply his undoubted intellectual talents and political skills to improving the country.
I lived in Carpenterstown at this time and Brian developed an occasional habit of calling at the end of the day to reflect on the current political events, which often led to long, late night discussions.
In conversation, Brian could sometimes seem distracted, but only because his mind was like a computer with too many windows open simultaneously, such was his urgency in conversation and appetite for discourse. When talking to him, you might get a sense from his facial expression that he was no longer interested or engaged only to realise from some later reference that he had been following every detail.
A few years later, my wife moved to work in Belfast and the house in Carpenterstown became no more than a dormitory for me midweek. When Lenihan would telephone to say that he was dropping over, I would offer to shop or dial something to eat. He always declined and would again decline any offer of food on arrival. However, he would then proceed to spend much of his time in the house walking in and out to the kitchen scouring the fridge or presses for nibbles. During one such sequence of talking perambulation, I heard a shriek from the kitchen – he had stuck his hand into the under-used bread bin and found only green mouldy bread!
At this early stage in his political career, Brian was excited, active, engaged but impatient. Brian clearly, and in my view correctly, felt Bertie Ahern was thwarting his political advancement. Most politicians and commentators recognised Brian as cabinet material from the outset, but Ahern delayed appointing him even to junior ministerial office. Chairing the Oireachtas Committee on the Constitution certainly interested him and played to his strengths as a lawyer and consensus builder, particularly when the committee was tasked with dealing with the abortion issue, but he was impatient to have the direct impact on policy, which being a minister would bring.
He was also, at times, overwhelmed by the response he attracted from the Fianna Fáil grassroots or members of the public. Although a mere backbencher, he was often mobbed by well-wishers at Ard Fheiseanna or other events. He himself wondered whether this was merely a residue of the affection in which his late father had been held. The rest of us could see that it flowed from his own regular competent media performances and because he himself was seen as a rising star in the party, and even then as a future party leader.
Like all politicians, of course, he enjoyed this attention, but he was also nervous around it. He was a surprisingly shy man. This – and his occasional demeanour of intellectual distraction – sometimes gave rise to lazy suggestions that he was somehow remote or detached. This was simply nonsense. Brian had a passionate interest in people, their views, their concerns and their opinions. Above all, he had genuine empathy and never in a contrived sense that some politicians mastered.
When finally appointed a Minster of State with responsibility for Children in 2002, Brian quickly got stuck into a range of issues about which he was passionate, the details of which have been well chronicled by Jillian van Turnhout in her essay in this book. He continued as Minister for Children in 2005 when the portfolio was upgraded to a cross-departmental role enabling him, although not a member of the Cabinet, to attend cabinet meetings.
The day that Brian Lenihan was appointed Minister for Justice was, perhaps, the happiest of his political life. He thrived in the role; he loved the department, its officials, and working with the Garda Síochána. As well as implementing a programme of law reform, he viewed as an important part of his brief the need to make the right appointments at senior and middle-management level in the department, in the prison services, in the Garda Síochána and to the judiciary. He gave careful consideration to each recommendation made to him.
His time in Justice was too short to have an enduring impact and he would have loved to stay there. He resented, in part, being yanked out of his comfort zone to Finance. He once recounted how, in the days before he became Taoiseach, Brian Cowen summoned him to his office then in the Department of Finance: ‘What’s this I hear about you wanting to stay in Justice? I want my best minister next door,’ Cowen said. The two Brians then had an intense conversation about some of the challenges he was likely to face in Finance, where fiscal contraction was inevitable. It seems that neither appreciated then the scale of the banking problems with which they would also have to deal. Lenihan actually took a private moment, as he walked back to his own office on St. Stephen’s Green, to reflect on the magnitude of the task he had just agreed to take on. The task demanded all of his extraordinary intellectual, political and communications skills, day and night, for the remainder of his too short life.
Caught up in pre-Christmas travel and other arrangements in December 2009, I missed a hint from Cathy Herbert on Christmas Eve that I should give Brian a call. On the afternoon of St. Stephen’s Day, TV3 began to run promos flagging a significant news bulletin and I started getting phone calls from Dublin saying there was growing speculation that it related to Lenihan.
Appreciating that something significant was happening, I rang him to let him know what the talk was. He answered the phone, no doubt fielding a series of calls, jokingly saying: ‘The Minister for Finance is enjoying Christmas at home with his family and will be making no comment.’ His upbeat demeanour, however, quickly fell away. It was clear that he was distressed at the situation in which he had been put, deprived of the space and time to enjoy a family Christmas and to tell those closest to him the details of a diagnosis he, himself, had only had days to absorb. It was just devastating news and devastating to watch it play out within hours on national television.
Many of us close to him had a sense that dealing with the illness was easier for him because he stayed working, but who can judge what really operates in the mind of a person living under the shadow of a fatal cancer. Brian had interrogated the best doctors in the field on the nature and inevitable consequences of the diagnosis. He had accepted that outcome intellectually. Emotionally, of course, at least for another year or so, he could not resist holding on to some hope.
Several of those who worked closely with him confirmed then – and go out of their way in their contributions to this book to confirm again – that he suffered no diminution in his intellectual capacity as a minister during his remaining two years in office. I concur with that assessment, but it is also clear that the diagnosis, while it did not impact on his capacity, certainly impacted on his frame of mind.
There