Malone looks back in anger at Euro polls

Her posters bore the slogan "A Fair Deal for a Fair City". A fair deal is not what Bernie Malone thinks she has received. Last Sunday she became unemployed overnight when she lost her seat in Europe to Proinsias De Rossa, who had been added to the ticket as part of the Labour/Democratic Left merger deal.

Malone cried bitter tears (she can't stop once she has started, she says) at the count centre last week. "I know I sound like a broken record, but I knew there was only one seat for Labour. When I hear people saying there are definitely two seats, I just get really angry at that sort of intransigence and stonewalling and it just annoys me." Sipping mineral water in a Dublin hotel, she rests her head on her hands and looks at the wall, the table, anywhere, in fact, other than at you when she talks about the events that led to her losing her seat.

Later she mentions hormones and going through a mid-life stage as partly responsible for how she feels at the moment.

She had already been selected to run in Dublin again - she was elected a Labour MEP in 1994 - when the merger between the two left parties began to take shape. That Proinsias De Rossa would run as a Labour candidate in the European elections was always a threat and when she had it confirmed, "through my own sources", she went to Labour leader Ruairi Quinn.

"I pleaded my case emotionally, I don't mind telling you I am an emotional person . . . but he said De Rossa was insisting on it as part of the deal . . . Maybe, looking back on it now, I should have pulled out. I felt on balance, no, I will battle on because I had been picked by the members and, secondly, I had done the work and I was well positioned for the job." She had a meeting with De Rossa and asked him if he would step down. "He said `no', that he thought there were two seats." She sips her water and smiles through gritted teeth.

It is not the first time she has felt disappointed with a party decision. In 1994, when she had already completed 10 months as a substitute MEP for Barry Desmond (who did not serve his full term), she was selected as the only Labour candidate in Dublin for Europe. Then RTE journalist Orla Guerin was added to the ticket.

That time, she says, the media took the collective view that Guerin was the interloper. It helped her campaign and she went on to win. This time, she says, "the spin was that I was a whinger, that I was a cry-baby, that I was trying to portray myself as a wronged woman and all this sort of shite. I use colourful language, and I don't apologise for it". It is, she adds, the way Dublin people talk. She regrets that both campaigns were media-driven and based on personalities and not the issues. Asked why she thinks De Rossa and Guerin happened to her, she says it is probably because she "must look dumb" or "soft". There is also a gender issue at play, she believes. "They probably wouldn't do it to a man. I have never seen a man treated like that . . . it is probably something to do with being a woman, I suppose."

She feels that the Labour Party has not treated women very well over the years. "They were trying so hard to get another Mary Robinson in terms of Orla Guerin or Adi Roche. They were trying to reinvent, reinvent, reinvent . . ."

"As far as I'm concerned, people like Rois in Shortall, Eithne Fitzgerald, myself, people who have been in the Labour Party a long time, who have worked our way up, don't get the same, em . . . I suppose you are never a prophet in your own land," she says.

By all accounts, Malone was hard-working as a county councillor in her time (she was first elected in 1979) and later as an MEP. She becomes animated when outlining her work in Europe. She ran seminars, she says, was the first Irish MEP to have a website, she did a report on the enlargement of the EU, and ran an information campaign.

"I was continually mentioned by the serious EU journalists as one of the top three MEPS in terms of work and performance." Something else that rankles is the money she has given to the Labour Party during her term. There were "occasional discussions" about the £70,000 that as a member of the parliamentary party she was obliged to pay to Labour HQ during her time in Europe. She would have preferred to spend it on her campaign but was "told in no uncertain terms that if I didn't give it I would be turfed out". The party regards it as a political levy. She describes it as a donation. The headline for the money transfer could be "Mad Woman Gives over Savings in Bid to be Victim", she says ruefully.

THE future stretches before her and "you never know what will happen". The only thing she is ruling out is a return to law - she was a solicitor for 20 years. Her husband Frank, also a solicitor, and other members of her family (the couple have no children) were "shattered" by the loss. She says she will go on holiday to France and take time to do gardening and cooking at her home in Malahide. She might write a book, "but I think people would be afraid of what I might say because I will tell it as it was". "The Wars of the Roses" is a possible title for her memoirs.

"I suppose the best way to put it is here I am, open to new opportunities and new challenges. With my background in law and in parliament, there are loads of areas I would be interested in," she says. " . . . I am young, I have my health, nobody died."

How would she describe herself at the moment? "Multi-talented, giz a job," she exclaims heartily, and despite the raucous laughter there is no reason to suspect she doesn't mean it. Interested employers form an orderly queue.