Married to the job

NOT long ago, Hillary Clinton was the beacon, the woman who epitomised the ideal of partnership in power for the modern era. The yin and the yang. Her ideas chimed with Bill's and the Democrats. Her ferocious intellect, legal expertise, tenacity and courage promised only blessings for husband, party and nation. With her health reform package, she blitzed her way through the critics and onto the floor of Congress itself, winning over many of the sceptics and dinosaurs with her charm and intellectual rigour.

It wasn't enough. The vested interests and Whitewater saw to that - as well as a certain breed of white American male. But the point is that for one, brief, shining moment, this woman, an unelected spouse, became such a potent symbol that her presence or absence became a real issue in Bill's re-election campaign. Could it happen here?

A while back, there was a glimmer. Finola Bruton grabbed her opportunity in the National Gallery and went for broke. She had things to get off her chest and that's what she damn well did. And what woman or campaigner of any colour would be fool enough to quarrel with that? The fact that many of her audience left the gallery shaking with rage, is an issue for another day. Ah. But is it?

The problem for some people was that, unlike Hillary Clinton, publicly at least, she then withdrew. While all hell broke loose, woman set upon woman and parties everywhere were breaking up in murderous disarray over her comments, the woman at the source of it all withdrew to the shelter accorded to the Taoiseach's spouse.

"And as far as I know," says one (friendly) woman politician, "there were no interviews, no appearances on Questions And Answers. I'm not saying that I necessarily disagreed with what she said but I wish she'd finished what she started. I'm telling you now that I wouldn't have got away with that."

On the other hand, Joan Burton, a Rainbow Minister, defends Ms Bruton's entitlement, as "a political person in her own right", to talk about things that interest her and leave her words to speak for themselves. So can a modern political spouse ever get it right? Where once the adornment of a bright, attractive wife was any political handler's dream, now John Bruton seems to feel the need to defend Finola's constant presence. "What do the press expect me to do, keep my wife in a cardboard box for the next three weeks?"

Cherie Blair, another political person and career high-flyer to boot, has been advised by some quarters to place a picture of Hillary Rod ham Clinton on her desk to look at whenever tempted to speak out on an issue, however seemingly uncontentious. Maybe Denis Thatcher (now a Sir for his troubles) was the one who got it right - "always present, never there". He, after all, got the ultimate feminist imprimatur - being praised by Germaine Greer (of all unlikely champions) for standing back and allowing his wife to appear alone as a dignified leader on the world stage and not as half of a married couple.

The answer is that in Ireland, at least, it hardly matters, not any more anyway. Lucky spouses rarely come under that degree of scrutiny here. They are not expected to fit any particular stereotype. The choice is theirs as to what they do with their role. Bertie Ahern's public image has hardly been blighted by the fact that he is separated from his wife.

Nor has Mary Harney's by the fact that she never had a spouse in the first place. Proinsias De Rossa's wife is virtually unknown to the public while Kristi Spring, and more so Finola Bruton, are frequent fixtures at their husbands' sides.

In fact, in post-divorce Ireland, there are some who might say that the cross-section of our leaders' marital or non-marital status is a fair reflection of society. And isn't that how it should be?