Colourful career: doctor who could have been a contender

Like Marlon Brando's prizefighter in On the Waterfront, Jim McDaid could have been a contender for several terms in high office and become a political force in the land. He had intelligence, good looks and charm, as well as the cachet that goes with being a relatively young doctor, but his career was an ill-starred one and now, finally he has walked away from it all.

In terms of its immediate timing, his resignation announcement came as a shock, with a four-year plan and hairshirt budget looming, but it had been clear for some time that his political trajectory was essentially downward.

He first came to attention in the course of another crisis, namely, the Troubles. It was difficult for any politician based in Letterkenny to avoid some form of entanglement with events across the Border and a photograph was to prove McDaid’s undoing.

A republican who escaped from the Maze Prison, James Pius Clarke from Letterkenny, was the subject of an unsuccessful attempt in the Four Courts to have him extradited to the United Kingdom.

A smiling McDaid was pictured clapping his constituent on the back outside the Four Courts on March 13th, 1990.

In November 1991, the taoiseach of the day, Charles J Haughey, nominated McDaid as minister for defence in the Fianna Fáil-PDs coalition government.

Had Haughey sought to install him in some other, less-sensitive, post it is unlikely there would have been a problem. But the Opposition, especially Fine Gael frontbencher and former justice minister Michael Noonan, highlighted McDaid’s association with Clarke and eventually forced him to turn down the nomination. Noonan said McDaid was “a Provo fellow-traveller”, a charge he strongly rejected, but it soon became clear the PDs could not accept McDaid’s presence in Cabinet.

The attention he attracted in the media would in time shift focus to his personal life, including the breakdown of his marriage and the publication of a book by his ex-wife.

When Fianna Fáil returned to office in 1997, Bertie Ahern appointed McDaid minister for tourism, sport and recreation. It was a position where he could do neither himself nor anyone else much damage and his tenure was comparatively uncontroversial.

He was dropped from the cabinet when Fianna Fáil got back for a second consecutive period in office at the 2002 election. He served as a minister of state at the Department of Transport, only to be replaced in 2004 by Dublin North-Central TD Ivor Callely.

The rest of the time was spent in the political shadows although the media never ceased to take an interest, especially when he was arrested in April 2005 for driving in the wrong direction on the Naas dual carriageway while drunk after the Punchestown races. Three years earlier, as junior transport minister, he had promoted the government’s campaign against drink-driving.

Dr McDaid lost the Fianna Fáil whip when he abstained in a Dáil vote on the cervical cancer vaccination programme in November 2008. From time to time since then he has made threatening and/or dissident noises, his main theme being the need for an early general election.

Born in 1949 and educated at St Eunan’s College Letterkenny and University College Galway, James McDaid was elected to the Dáil on his first attempt in 1989.