You don't have to be mad to work here but ...

This week Minister for the Environment John Gormley told the Dáil of the sleepless nights, non-stop criticism and ‘asylum’ conditions of government today. Has politics become an unappealing career option or is it still a noble calling?

A ROUGH BEAST of an election slouches towards Kildare Street and privileged perches. The loss of power, privilege and those platoons of workers with the daily mission of straightening out the wrinkles in senior politicians’ lives will be keenly felt. Some of these politicians will have spent 20 of the past 23 years in government, long enough to develop an armour-plated, flak-repelling carapace. But stuff happens.

Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern, who this week announced his decision to retire from politics, said it was related to a painful systemic medical condition, rheumatoid arthritis. Much of the commentary surrounded his bonanza-style pay-off and the fact that his €128,300 pension would exceed anything he would have earned had he chosen to stay on as a backbencher, not to mention the €320,000 he will get in the first 12 months after retirement.

But there are other downsides to a life in poltics. Children are the Achilles heel of all politicians who are parents, and a recent tabloid article about one of Ahern’s children was a reminder that politicians sometimes pay a high personal price for their privileges.

Thirteen years ago the current Irish EU commissioner, Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, stood down at the general election after newspapers reported that a son had been expelled from school. “When politics demands – and wrongly demands – that a TD’s family members serve as expendable extensions of the elected members, I will not serve,” she said in her resignation statement.

Tom Kitt, who served as minister of state in three government departments, and remains scorched by Brian Cowen’s decision not to promote him to the Cabinet, feels even more keenly the suggestions that he performed some political magic to further the career of his singer-songwriter son, David.

Kitt, whose stomach churns at the memory of a colleague returning from the country boasting of having “had three great funerals at the weekend”, will also be standing down, and despite some intensive urgings to reconsider he is very likely to stay down.

So is politics an increasingly unattractive option? The feverish rumour bubble of Leinster House suggests that Ahern’s resignation may prompt many more. Yet only three Fianna Fáilers have declared their intention to stand down so far, compared with 12 before the 2007 election.

Still, even the most cynical observers were slack-jawed this week at the outburst from Minister for the Environment John Gormley, who told the Dáil that, yes, being in government was like being in an asylum. Or, to quote directly from the statement as it appeared on the Green Party’s website: “It has been stated by Deputies on the other side that the Opposition has been placed in a straightjacket [sic]. That is an apt analogy in more ways than one. I warn those other parties that they should know when they enter government during this crisis, they will be entering an asylum. They will have to endure the sleepless nights, the no-win situation and the non-stop criticism . . . There is nothing worse in a democracy when a politician must act in a way because his or her choices are limited. Deputy Gilmore will be faced with that lack of choice which will eat him up inside. I wish him well but there is much awaiting him.”

This was no unintentional blather from a minister who describes himself as "not a hugely open person". Amid much black humour from the public about the Dáil and men in white coats, he stresses that he was merely responding to repeated claims from Pat Rabbitte (notably on Prime Time) that his government's legacy would place the next in a straitjacket on policy decisions.

David McCullagh, RTÉ’s political correspondent, dismissed it as a much-needed laugh for the country. A forthright Richard Bruton, who has had tough times in government and in Fine Gael, said: “Do I have sympathy for him? I feel sympathy for the country . . . If you don’t like the heat, stay out of the kitchen.”

But Gormley is indignant at the suggestion that he might have been looking for sympathy or feeling sorry for himself. "Not even remotely . . . To say I'm looking for sympathy – no, not at all. What triggered it for me was a gestation period when Pat Rabbitte got really, really annoyed on Prime Timeand he used the word 'straitjacket'. When they started all the grandstanding again, I said: ' You know.' What I was saying [to the Opposition] was: ' You'regoing to have the sleepless nights, you'regoing to have them, you, the Opposition . . . Youwill have those exact same things . . . Welcome to the straitjacket, lads, because we've been there for the last two years.' "

It is reminiscent of a maddened parent who yearns for the day when that brattish teenager has children of his own, and then he’ll know. Except that the Opposition’s comeuppance will come in weeks rather than years.

Gormley is most appalled by the perception that he might be looking for sympathy, with the talk of sleepless nights – he managed to sleep through the night of the bank guarantee and had to be woken by his Garda driver, snipe the critics – and non-stop criticism.

“I hardly think now I’d be going to the Opposition for sympathy, nor would you expect it. That’s just the nature of the job . . . We’ve got into the kitchen. We’ve taken the hardest decisions that any government has ever taken. And we’re going to do so again. That’s the bottom line.”

Having said that, he quotes a former Labour TD “who told me that if they’d had to handle what we’ve had to handle they’d have taken for the hills”.

The real problem with the asylum analogy is the sense of powerlessness and delusion it evokes, however politically incorrectly. “That was just carrying on the analogy which the Opposition used . . . To say it all seems out of control is, unfortunately, a misinterpretation.” Nonetheless, it sounds scarily like a Cabinet minister throwing in the towel. “Well, yes, there’s a sense of frustration there. I wouldn’t say powerlessness, because you can’t say that when you’re in government, but frustration, undoubtedly.”

Frustration, definitely. Here is a man who entered politics as an environmental campaigner and finds the “very, very worthy issues of the Green Party are now seen as completely secondary”, as he puts it.

Not to mention other issues, such as the game-playing that he suggests is 90 per cent of political engagement. The “bravado and denial” from government colleagues over the IMF’s involvement, the relentless “firefighting” either with the Opposition, Fianna Fáil, his own party or, sometimes, civil servants, he says, “who won’t have the same view as you”.

“They all know about the game-playing. For example, there was one instance involving Ciarán Lynch [Labour TD]. I’m down there in the committee room, trying to answer all the questions these guys are putting to me, then Ciarán Lynch runs from the committee room up into the Dáil chamber and demands to know where Minister Gormley is and why isn’t he in the chamber. That’s the sort of thing that goes on, and you say, oh, for God’s sake. That does bug you,” he says through gritted teeth.

“But I’ve been there [in opposition] myself,” he says wryly. “When you’re in opposition you want to be in government, and you’re going to do anything you can to destabilise the Government. Anyone who tells you otherwise is not talking reality. In a sense very often, yes, what it means is misrepresenting what the Government is doing. But, in defence of the Opposition, the way they look at it is they have little enough power – and the less power you have, the most you’ll want to undermine the Government. I know what it’s like. The problem is that the hostility and adversarial nature of it has become so acute that now, even when you try to co-operate with the Opposition and you ask for meetings or ideas, they don’t want to know because it’s gone to a whole new level.”

The media also probably play a role in what he calls his “4am moments”. People he would have regarded once as “fair and objective have at times strayed over the line, with stuff I would have regarded as gratuitous and cliched and not getting to the heart of the matter”. He will name no names. “But, as I see it, it results from the same problem: people have a visceral hatred of Fianna Fáil, and that, I think, means that a party that is in government with Fianna Fáil is going to get it – and probably get it even worse,” he says.

“We actually get it harder. It’s one of the things I come across a lot. You talk to people who say: ‘Fianna Fáil are Fianna Fáil, and they can’t help it, but you’re the Greens, and you should know better.’ I met someone, an actor, who was very cool towards myself because we’d gone into government with Fianna Fáil, but then I saw him having a bit of a joke with a Fianna Fáiler. It’s like, ‘Well, sure, the Fianna Fáilers are like that, but you shouldn’t have gone in with them.’ His anger was focused on us and not on Fianna Fáil as such. That has surprised us. It’s almost as if we’re expected to be of a different order.”

He’s well are of the irony of his position. “Of course, what arises is a deep sense of the things you warned about, and now you’re in the middle of it. We were hostile to those very policies which led to the property bubble, but we said over and over we’d keep our options open. If the people chose to vote for Fianna Fáil we’d go in, and we did: 42 per cent of people voted for them. That’s democracy.”

Yet when asked if this week’s outburst was spurred by a sense of loss, of values tarnished by association, and by the daft game playing, he trenchantly defends his party’s record. “Look at what we’ve achieved in terms of planning,” he says. “The windfall tax of 80 per cent. Civil partnership. The whole investment in renewable energy. The new standards in terms of building insulation. The fact that as part of social partnership there’s an environmental pillar for the first time. The whole question of climate change – that will be there. We protected homelessness, something that’s very close to my heart.”

Richard Bruton dismisses the notion that a new government will be as powerless as predicted. “A crisis is an opportunity to do great things,” he says. “It’s too late for people like him who’ve been around the Cabinet table to make the gear change. That’s the sense of loss. A new government is much less powerless than an old government.”

Back in 2007 Mary Harney famously sent a text to John Gormley, telling him that the worst day in government was better than the best day in opposition. Does it hold true? “I don’t really believe that. There are days in government when it could be nicer to be in opposition.”