Travellers' champion to quit the Dail for voluntary sector work

Although hardly known nationally, Chris Flood is one of the best TDs around: serious, committed, courageous. Now aged 54, he has decided to quit, not because of disillusionment - although he has a lot to be disillusioned about - but because of his health and a sense of balance in his life.

After the next election he will return to private life, but not to directorships or public relations or political lobbying. He intends working in the voluntary sector, probably with Travellers, on whose behalf he has been one of the few champions in politics.

He was first elected to the Dail in 1987 and was appointed minister of state for health in 1990 by Charlie Haughey, whom he found decisive. Haughey gave him responsibility for childcare. His first personal contact with Haughey was in 1986 when Flood contacted him over being blocked as a general election candidate for Dublin South West by the sitting TD, Sean Walsh. Later he encountered Haughey when all Fianna Fail councillors were called together and told that the rezoning mania had to stop. (He had been elected to Dublin County Council in 1985.)

In 1990 he was appointed chairman of the National Co-Ordinating Committee on Drug Abuse. This published a report in May 1991 which made several recommendations: the establishment of a national drug misuse database; the involvement of GPs at community level in the treatment of drug abuse; legislation to provide for the confiscation of the proceeds of drug trafficking, etc.

Almost every one of the 18 recommendations was repeated in a report published five years later by a task force chaired by Pat Rabbitte (nothing had been done in the meantime) and one of them, on the confiscation of the proceeds of drug trafficking, was implemented only in the wake of Veronica Guerin's murder. Indeed several of the recommendations had been made in a report of a committee chaired by Dr Karl Mullen some 20 years previously (this was a committee set up by Erskine Childers in 1969).

Chris Flood was born and reared in Fore, Co Westmeath (near Castlepollard). His father, Sean Flood, was the local national school principal and all nine of the family went to their father's school. Afterwards he went to Kilnacrott secondary school in Co Cavan, and then to UCD for a year before dropping out and going to London, where he worked for several years in an advertising agency.

He returned to Dublin in 1970 and got a job in a company called Firefighters' Products. He established his own company in 1976. He got married in 1974 and in 1976 he and his wife, Carmel, bought a house in Tallaght, where they had never been before. He became chairman of the local residents' association and joined a Fianna Fail cumann (his father had been in Fianna Fail and a member of Westmeath County Council for 16 years).

He sought a nomination in each of the three election campaigns in the early 1980s but could not make his way past Sean Walsh, Senator Richard Conroy and Mary Harney, who was then in Fianna Fail. It was Mary Harney's defection to the PDs that opened the way for him.

He was finally elected in 1987 and has held the seat comfortably since in Dublin South West, one of the poorest constituencies in the State. The other TDs in the constituency are Brian Hayes (Fine Gael), Pat Rabbitte (Labour), Mary Harney (PDs) and Conor Lenihan (Fianna Fail). It is obvious from his conversation that he has a high opinion of Mary Harney and Pat Rabbitte.

Incongruously, although given responsibility for drugs policy and policy on social exclusion, it was to the Department of Tourism, Sport and Recreation that he was appointed minister of state by Bertie Ahern in 1997. He resigned as minister last year when he decided that for health reasons he would have to leave politics after the next election.

He and his wife Carmel have four children, three daughters and a son, all now grown up.

VB: At a very early stage in your ministerial career you became chairman of a task force on drugs, which produced a report in 1991. Almost nothing was done about the recommendations in that report. Why?

CF: Resources simply were not allocated. Remember, at the same time, the Childcare Act was passed, a massive piece of legislation, and we got the sum of just £1 million to implement it.

VB: In the task force report done by Pat Rabbitte in 1996, it contained almost word for word the same recommendations that you made in a task force on drugs report in 1991. You wonder what is the point of being in politics if proposals such as this are simply ignored?

CF: Yeah, you would. I was pretty critical on that issue in terms of any report brought forward. I've considered them to be next to useless unless the government of the day puts the resources on the table to implement them. Because other than that, they're left on the shelf. That is what happened with too many reports, including the one you speak about.

VB: What do you think should be done about the drugs problem?

CF: Continue to develop the particular programme that began with Pat Rabbitte (when he was minister of state with responsibility for the strategy for dealing with the drugs problem). He got £10 million and started the process and I think there was no turning back from that.

Resources must continue to be available - they are earmarked over the next seven or eight years. And also the local communities must be given increasing roles in the operation of the local drugs task forces and in ensuring the statutory agencies are more accountable in areas that are affected by the serious misuse of drugs.

VB: Did you ever think that the problem would be best solved if the use of some drugs were to be decriminalised?

CF: I don't. I think that is possibly for another generation to decide. But I don't think that that is the right way because if I talk to most people currently involved in the fight against drugs at community level, they would not take that point of view. I get the impression that those who argue for the decriminalisation, and indeed going on to the next step, the making it available, etc., etc., they would talk about savings, as if that would be the reason for decriminalisation. I'm suspicious of that.

VB: You had a ministerial responsibility for ending poverty. Did you have a sense that adequate resources were being devoted to dealing with that?

CF: No. It is not just about one central issue, it is about responding to a whole series of issues that needed to be tackled in specific areas in terms where poverty was rampant. I felt, and I still feel, that opportunities are being missed because policy-makers will not make the decision to invest more into those areas. I am talking, for example, about education, I believe that there should be far greater resources going into education from pre-school and primary-school level in areas that are being identified as being areas of significant deprivation. The reason I say, in terms of education, it is only one of the issues, is that if you look at any particular school in a deprived area you will find them under enormous pressure for a variety of reasons.

I believe they should slash the pupil/ teacher ratio. I am told that in a school in part of my constituency on any one day, there could be 20 students out of 100 absent.

I am told that in a neighbouring parish that you could describe as being much more affluent, by comparison to the one I speak about, that in any one day there would be just one absent. That obviously has implications.

VB: When you pushed for more resources in education, what were you told?

CF: I have to say that I found and still find the Department of Education extremely inflexible in this whole area. They talk defensively of all they are doing in expanding the school psychological services, in putting more resources into childcare, giving special capitation grants and all that. But in my opinion the Department of Education is not doing anything like enough.

VB: When Micheal Martin was the minister for education, what was his response?

CF: Oh, he certainly defended his particular patch, in fairness, defending spending X number of pounds in his Department and all the initiatives they were taking. That is fine as far as it goes. But I am still confronted with people in Tallaght telling me that their good teachers are basically burned out and they are leaving.

They are going to schools that are more resourced, perhaps by the parents themselves, so they are not confronted in the classroom with the type of difficulties they might be confronted with in the classrooms we are talking about because of the lack of resources and so on. And that they are being replaced by untrained teachers.

If you go on into just the area of the local authority involvement. You go into a local authority housing estate and the grass is not cut, the graffiti is on the wall, the lights aren't working, the parks aren't properly kept, footpaths aren't properly kept, trees aren't replanted when they need to be replanted, all of that sort of stuff. Then you go into a private estate and you find a different scenario. You find roads swept, graffiti removed, trees planted

VB: Why was this?

CF: I honestly think that the statutory agencies simply abandoned, to a great extent, local housing authority developments. It was just abandoned. They provided the houses and they basically said, that is it. All you have to do is look at the flats in town.

VB: When you raised these issues politically, what happened?

CF: Well, I mean you would get expressions of sympathy, I suppose, and expressions of earnest endeavour and, you know, we will do this, we will do that and so on. So I took an initiative myself. I established the Integrated Services Project in Jobstown in Tallaght and in north Dublin, there was a small housing complex in north Dublin in the canal community. There were blocks of flats there and also in Cork. We brought all the agencies together with local people involved. We had the gardai involved because the gardai had a crucial role to play and, in my personal view, there were differences in their responses from one estate to another. I am absolutely convinced of that, that in my experience over the years that certain areas were basically left to themselves.

VB: By the gardai?

CF: Yeah. I believe that to be the case.

VB: Did you raise these matters with Bertie for instance?

CF: In fairness, I have to say about Bertie Ahern, when I ever looked for anything I got it in my core area of responsibility. I remember as a junior minister going to cabinet. I put forward my proposals and the next thing I hear what I think the Taoiseach is saying, we go ahead. I didn't really expect that, to be honest with you. I think it was about £25 million.

VB: You were one of the few politicians who supported halting sites for Travellers. Was there much opposition in your area to the provision of halting sites?

CF: Fierce, yes. It was very bad. In the early 80s they had built the Tallaght bypass but as usual they didn't open it. So, all the bypass became an unofficial halting site for Travellers. There were probably up to 200 caravans. There probably were 150 families there. They were so long there that they were on the electoral register. It turned very vicious in the early 80s, very vicious indeed and there were marches in Tallaght, there were heavy meetings. There were awful threats made and things like that.

VB: Threats made to you?

CF: Oh, yes. At 2 o'clock in the morning, there were 200 people meeting in my own estate. The suggestion was that they should march on my house and stone it.

VB: Why?

CF: Because I was taking a pro-Traveller position. There was a halting site being provided near Kilnamanagh and I was supporting it. But there were other vicious things too. There was one particular meeting at which one of the organisers proposed if your neighbour supports a Traveller, you were to black them, and that sort of stuff went on.

VB: There are an awful lot of Travellers living in appalling conditions in Tallaght, behind the county council offices there, St Maelruans, and it's like a scene from the Third World.

CF: It is, yes. You see the council wants that site for a water leisure centre, so they want the Travellers to move. Of course, some of the Travellers have been there for 20 years so they feel rightly entitled that they ought to be there, and it is no way for the council to treat them.

The Traveller programme still remains totally unimplemented. The 1995 task force report suggested that there should be 3,100 units provided by the year 2000. To the best of my knowledge, only about 250 additional units have been provided. In my view, the only way to solve the Travellers accommodation programme is to do what they said in the agency, in the Traveller report, that was to put an accommodation agency on a statutory basis.

VB: Why are you leaving politics?

CF: About a year before I left the Department, I was walking up the street from my office to Stephen's Green and I began to get a pain in my chest and a pain in my arm but hadn't a notion what it was. So, for two weeks that kind of went on. The last time, the pain was so bad and I still didn't mention it to anybody, I didn't know what it was. The heart issue was never in my thinking. So the last day I walked up, it was so bad I had to stop in Stephen's Green and pretend to be admiring a tree but I simply was in a bad way.

I went to the doctor and ended up having the angiogram and then the angioplasty and I have been taking stress tests ever since. It's going OK but he sort of told me, you've got to sort out your life, if you don't, you won't be coming to me too often. It was always in my mind that I would not end my days in politics. I wouldn't want to grow old in politics, it's not a profession that you would want to grow old in, in my opinion.

VB: Will you miss it?

CF: I don't think so. It's been a marvellous personal adventure for me.

VB: Who have you admired in politics?

CF: I admired greatly Barry Desmond. In the early days in my position on Dublin County Council we were discussing the Traveller issue and he made what I consider to be an exceptional contribution to the debate. He was a senior politician and he spoke out about the constitutional rights of Travellers and the responsibility of elected representatives and the responsibility of our officials, etc. So that had a very significant impact on me, did Barry Desmond.

VB: Anybody else?

CF: Well, I suppose Bertie Ahern has made a big impression on me in the manner and style in which he runs the party and also for what I have perceived to be his political skill and for the evident healing that he did in the party since coming in. He did make it a very open party.

VB: What now?

CF: I am 20 years in politics and I do not have an extravagant lifestyle or anything like that. My children are grown up so therefore it gives me an opportunity basically to retire. But, I will be continuing now to involve myself in voluntary-type situations.

VB: Have you enough money to do that?

CF: Oh, I have, yes. I have a pension.