for a long time: something I know she wanted. Caring for her over those years was probably the most personally rewarding work I have ever done, and it allowed me, in some sense, to repay her for the sacrifices she had made to give me the opportunities I’ve had in life.
I went from the funeral in Co. Galway to Wexford to deliver my first Leader’s speech, on Saturday, 17 November. With little time to prepare or rehearse, I was going straight onto the stage without even a chance to judge the mood of the Conference. I was emotionally very raw, and as I waited backstage I worried that I might not get through my opening words of thanks and appreciation to delegates for their sympathy and to all those who had travelled to Caltra. Somehow I managed it, and went on to deal with some of the key matters facing us as a Party. I told delegates that Labour, which had ‘led so much change in the country, must now have the courage to change itself. At every level of our organisation we need to do better,’ I declared, and the Conference accepted my motion to establish a ‘21st Century Commission’ to bring about the transformation that I felt was so urgently needed for the Party.
Over the following year, to my satisfaction, the Commission, chaired by accountant Greg Sparks, came forward with a wide range of proposals for a major overhaul of the structures and governance of the Party. Most importantly, we dealt with the out-moded way candidates were selected.
I remember before the 2004 local elections going to a mid-sized town to chair the Labour Party selection convention. There were just six members in the room. At the start of the meeting, the oldest man present stood up and declared, ‘I am the Labour man in this town!’ In effect, he was nominating himself. He had contested every local election unsuccessfully for nearly three decades, leaving Labour without a councillor to represent the people or the Party all those years. Despite my efforts at cajoling, no other candidate came forward, so ‘the Labour man’ was selected. And of course, to form, he went on to lose once again. In the course of discussions later in the meeting, I identified among the members an articulate young woman who I thought would have made a great candidate. When I asked her afterwards why she wouldn’t go forward, she confirmed my suspicions, saying that she was interested but, as she put it, ‘Sure, I couldn’t do that to him.’
Her attitude reflects the culture of decency among Labour members: reluctant to be ruthless, and respectful of service, experience and age. And while I admired it, I realised that traditional selection conventions in many constituencies were just not fit for purpose. They were not capable of bringing forward new candidates, or a candidate with some prospect of being elected! Good candidates are critical to electoral success, because in the Irish electoral system voters often express preferences for individual candidates, irrespective of party affiliation. The Commission recommended a new method, whereby the Party would interview prospective candidates; put a short-list before the selection convention, and let the local members then make the ultimate choice. This was a critical step in enabling us to bring on a new generation of candidates for the 2011 General Election.
All the Commission’s reforms would have to be approved by the Party Conference, which was planned for the end of November in Kilkenny. But after I got back from attending the US Democratic Party Convention in Denver, it became clear that the deadline would not be met. We decided to put the reforms to a subsequent Conference in Mullingar in early 2009, and to turn Kilkenny into a Conference concentrating on the economy, which by then had started to nosedive.
Ireland had become, in July 2008, the first Eurozone country to go into recession. Unemployment had increased by 80,000 in just one year. The Fianna Fáil/Green Government had brought forward the Budget to October and had introduced many unpopular cuts, including to the medical cards for over-70s. The latter had brought tens of thousands of pensioners onto the streets in protest and prefaced the difficult times that lay ahead for the country.
The Kilkenny Conference was my first televised Leader’s speech. It was very important that I do it well. I had been Leader for a year, and had, it was widely agreed, made good progress. I was making an impact in the Dáil, and the Party organisation was responding well to my reforms. However, there was still no major improvement in Party support. In fact, on the Saturday morning of my conference speech, my advisors, Mark Garrett and Colm O’Reardon, called to my hotel room to tell me there was bad news: a poll in a Sunday newspaper the next day was going to show a drop in Labour support.
We had to plough on regardless. Colm and my policy advisor, Jean O’Mahony, had worked with me to draft the speech. We decided it should be hopeful and optimistic, outlining solutions to the country’s growing problems, rather than just slamming the Government for everything. Barack Obama had just been elected President of the United States, so it was almost inevitable that some echoes of his rhetoric would find their way into the speech. I liked his now-iconic slogan, ‘Yes, we can’, which had been translated from Caesar Chavez’s ‘Sí, se puede’ among Obama’s Hispanic-American supporters. I thought about an Irish version: ‘Is féidir linn’. As in, ‘Is féidir linn daoine a chur ar ais ag obair. Is féidir linn gnóanna a mhéadú agus séirbhísí a leasú. Is féidir linn an tír a chur ar ais ar a cosa. Sea, is féidir linne freisin.’ Obama himself would later use the Irish version when he spoke in College Green during his visit in May 2011!
‘Is féidir linn’ was not the only slogan to make its debut in Kilkenny. Just before I went into the hall, my team told me that the members of Labour Youth intended to hold up posters declaring ‘Gilmore for Taoiseach’. And indeed they did.
The speech was a success. Mark Hennessy described it in the Irish Times as ‘a masterclass; the best that he has ever given and, probably, one of the finest orations given by any political leader at a party conference of any hue in Ireland for many a long year.’ It also attracted favourable comment from the public. I noticed that after Kilkenny there was a broadening in the range of people contacting my office, many of them from parts of the country that had no Labour representative. That was a good result for me, and things were starting to look better for the party.
There are times, though, when party perspectives have to be put aside. One such time had now come. It would blow all other considerations away. It was a calamity that would define Irish people’s lives for many years to follow; it would impact on the country’s viability and international standing more than any trauma since the Civil War; and determine Labour’s distinct place in Irish politics for my entire time as leader: the collapse of the banks.
At about 7 a.m. on Tuesday 30 September 2008, my phone rang and woke me from my sleep. A conversation something along these lines followed:
‘Good morning, is that you, Eamon?’
‘Yes. Hello.’
‘Brian Lenihan here. I hope I haven’t woken you too early.’
‘No, I was getting up now, anyhow.’
‘We’ve been working right through the night here with the Taoiseach and officials. We have a crisis in the banking system and the Government has made some decisions which I want to tell you about. I am also briefing Enda Kenny. We need to put legislation through the Dáil and Seanad today and we will need the cooperation of the main opposition parties, and I hope we will also have your support, as the measures are in the national interest.’
Brian went on to tell me that the Government had become aware the previous evening that there was an imminent risk to the Irish banks and immediate action was required. With the necessary legislative changes, there would be a State guarantee for all the major Irish banks and building societies.
I told him that the Labour Party would, as always, be cooperative in re-arranging the business of the Dáil to enable urgent legislation to be debated, but that I could give no commitment with regard to our support for it. The Labour Party would need to see the detail of what was being proposed and consider it. He offered to have officials brief us later in the day.
After the call, I alerted the Labour Party press office spokesperson, Tony Heffernan, readied myself for a busy day, and set out for Leinster House to meet staff and parliamentary colleagues. It was immediately clear that we first needed