The combative commissioner

THE SATURDAY INTERVIEW: CHARLIE McCREEVY:He says he is in the departure lounge of politics, but as he finishes his term at the EU Commission, the former minister for finance has no regrets about his record

IT’S FREEZING IN Brussels. High up in the iconic Berlaymont building, there are cardboard boxes in the corridor of Charlie McCreevy’s office suite. Glassy mementos are corralled together in a display cabinet, ready for packing. The man himself, who will soon finish his mandate on the EU executive, is full of cheer. He’s going home.

A strong-willed fellow who insists he is unperturbed by his "thousands" of enemies, McCreevy divides opinion like few others in the Irish political scene. When he was chief steward of a booming economy, some hailed him as one of Ireland's finest finance ministers. But he became persona non gratafor many Fianna Fáil backbenchers, who took umbrage at his perceived arrogance and "right-wing" budgets.

Although the onset of deep recession has renewed scrutiny of his tax-cutting approach in finance, McCreevy says he remains particularly proud of his achievements in Merrion Street. His critics are prone to lazy cliche with little regard for the facts, he argues.

“Everybody seems to have become an economics commentator in Ireland, people who don’t know the first thing about economics, public finances or anything else,” he says.

Bertie Ahern, the former taoiseach, always denied he deposed McCreevy to Brussels in 2004 to recast the Government’s image in a more “caring” light. McCreevy is in reflective mode, but he won’t revisit that particular question. “I’ve tried to explain this on many occasions and I’m wasting my time, so I’m not going to bother going into it now.”

Even though the sense persists that he was something of a reluctant commissioner, McCreevy says he found the experience thoroughly fulfilling professionally and personally. Nevertheless, he expresses frustration over the three-month delay in the arrival of the new commission, whose appointment was held back by the second Irish referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. “It’s dragged on a bit now.”

He will retire from public life once he leaves Brussels, ending an engagement in the political maelstrom that stretches back to the early 1970s. He claims he won’t miss the trappings of office, drivers and the like.

“I was 60 a few months ago,” he says. “I think there’s a good many years left in me yet and I want to try and do other things, whatever that may be.” Not that he’ll say what he has in mind. “I know what I’m not going to do, and it’s not going to be politics, and that’s what I’ve stuck with. I’ve been 36 years in politics, that’s well over half my life.”

McCreevy’s professional background as an accountant and his political experience in Ireland and Brussels, where he oversaw the expansion of the EU’s single market, could well bring lucrative business directorships his way. So has he been approached?

“Anyone,” he says, “who has ever, over the last couple of years, ever hinted at me . . . I used to say, look there’s no point in talking with me about these things until I’m out of this particular job, and wait until that happens and then we’ll see.”

McCreevy, a home bird whose affinity for his Co Kildare heartland is renowned, frequently refers to Brussels as “out here”. Although he was never an enthusiastic traveller, he says living abroad for the first time was hugely enriching. He stayed in an apartment in Brussels, travelling home to his family at weekends. He split his choice of airline 50:50 between “Mr O’Leary” and Aer Lingus “to keep the both of them honest”.

Of his frequent speech-making in Ireland on Fridays, he dismisses suggestions he would turn up at any old event in Dublin as an excuse to come home. “Not at all. I’d say I spent more time in the office than each of the other commissioners.”

From his time as a minister, McCreevy had a technical feel for the bureaucratic machinations of the EU system. Without hesitation, however, he says the essential raison d’etre of the entire European project was in a sense lost on him until soon before he made the big move. He refers here to the tragic legacy of the two world wars.

“Not having been involved, most Irish people are looking to Europe somewhat differently from the people of Germany, France and Italy . . . We weren’t able to refer back to our grandfathers and say ‘what a terrible thing’. So that personally was a big thing for me.”

Two things reinforced this perception: his friendship with former German finance minister Hans Eichel; and a visit to the Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz and neighbouring Birkenau, a grim and dispiriting reminder of Europe’s bloody history.

He met Eichel six or seven years ago when he was still in finance. “I got to know him quite well – he’s a man in his late 60s now – and Hans explained to me that, for his generation, Europe was all about keeping the peace,” he says. “All these other things were vitally important, but for his generation of political life, everything else was secondary to that. Now, we don’t look at that, coming from Ireland . . . That struck me.”

It was only by chance, almost a year ago, that he went to Auschwitz-Birkenau during free time after an official visit to Katowice, Poland. “We did the whole lot of it, some of it guided, some of it not, and we walked in the desolation,” he says.

It was a bitter day, snowing intermittently, with the temperature at minus eight or nine, the cold emphasising his sense of the devastation wrought by the genocide that took place there.

“We can fight about whether we’re effective about doing this in Europe in the last 10 years or five years. But jaysus, look what we done,” he says. “The two worst wars in mankind’s history, I’d say. Inside 60 years, these people are all sitting around the table squabbling about, say, whether they should have this directive or that directive, systemic risk board or a something-else board.

“Isn’t it a marvellous step forward, what has been achieved? I think I went to at the right time, when it was bleak and desolate and cold. I’d say if you went in the middle of the summer, you wouldn’t feel the same. It was eerie, it was awful, it was wet underfoot and it was miserable and it was awful.”

This, he says, was the most telling experience of his time in Europe.

TWICE HIS MOBILE phone rings as we talk, twice he lets it go without answering. “I won’t bother, no, I’ll lose me train of thought.”

Although he is reluctant to intervene in the present debate on Ireland’s economic malaise, he is at one with the European Commission’s assessment that the swingeing Budget measures introduced last month are but the first step on the long path to rectitude. “This was a very important first step, a very, very important first step . . . But as Brian Lenihan himself has said, this is one of a series of steps.”

So how crucial is it for the Government to continue down that path? “It has to be gotten into line,” he says of the huge disparity between Government income and expenditure. “You’re not going to get it into line by doing it one year and then forgetting about it. That’s all I want to comment about it because that’s self-evident.”

McCreevy has plenty to say, however, about his time at the Department of Finance. His voice rising at times, he rejects outright the contention that Ireland’s precipitous economic decline has its roots in the tax-cutting policy he enthusiastically deployed after Ahern took power in 1997. “You have to look back on what the record was up to 2004. I’m not responsible for what went on in ’05, ’06, ’07, ’08 and ’09,” he says. “Am I responsible? I can only be responsible for what I did. My last budget was in December 2003. We’re now going on over six years. I suppose it’s something flattering still for me that I’m remembered, but I haven’t been there.”

His personal economic outlook is still very much in tune with that of the now-defunct Progressive Democrats. He claims that his policies helped to galvanise the Irish economy.

“Get the figures,” he says. “From the time I was minister for finance to the time I left, I think at least 800,000 people joined the workforce. You can check the figures yourself – what was the workforce in 1997 and what was the workforce in 2004? – but you’re somewhere in the order of 800,000 joined the workforce, a lot of these being women, plus immigration played a role as well.

“We had unemployment down below 4 per cent, which is full employment. It was 10.4 per cent when I became minister for finance in ’97. I was down as low as 3.9 at the end of ’03-’04.

“A lot of that was the result of the policies I pursued, which made it attractive to work. The economy has regressed in ’09, ’08 – hopefully this year won’t be as big – but still the numbers at work would be monumentally greater than they were at the start of ’97.”

He is steadfast in his defiance of his critics. “I’ll give you a small example about cliche over the years. In all the years I was minister for finance it was always said I favoured the rich rather than the poor . . . whereas the facts are deadly the opposite, as has been proved time and time again over the last decade.”

Is he referring here to the strategy of taking low-paid people out of the tax net? “Sure that’s the problem now, right? But it wasn’t . . . All the international studies showed things like Ireland had the lowest tax wedge of all the OECD countries.”

But could more have been done to prevent the creation of a bubble in the Irish economy? “I’m only prepared to defend what I did – after the end of 2005, that’s someone else’s responsibility.”

Builders and developers weren’t responsible for interest rates, he says. “The European Central Bank has been since 1999, right?”

But people say we got it wrong in Ireland, that the State was too exposed to the property sector. “That’s a matter for economic policy decided at various stages. I’m quite satisfied that the period that I was there for, the balance wasn’t too bad.”

What of those who say things might have been different if Fianna Fáil wasn’t so close to the property sector? “Is the property sector close to the government of Spain? We’ve gone from centre-right government in Spain to a centre-left government, but there’s been a fair old property boom in Spain.”

Yet the question was about Ireland. Again, what of the argument that Fianna Fáil was simply too close to the property business? “Are they saying we should have brought in a law to prevent people building houses?”

People aren’t saying that, I reply. “Well what are they saying?”

What of Fianna Fáil’s tent at the Galway Races, a major fundraising initiative? “I used to have to attend it every single year. I’m a punter, a race-goer. As I said one time, I found it a terrible pain having to go there because most of the people we actually met there were journalists and hangers-on, with respect to your profession, who were there to see other people eating and drinking at the expense of somebody else.

“It didn’t stop them, of course, writing about it. As a fact, you can check with Fianna Fáil, it wasn’t their biggest fundraiser by a long way.”

As for a Prime Timereport on RTÉ before Christmas, claiming that a loan application to the Irish Nationwide Building Society from McCreevy in 2006 – when he was buying an expensive property at the K Club – was handled with extraordinary speed, McCreevy says he is entitled to privacy. He adds that it is not a borrower's responsibility to have any knowledge of the lender's practices.

The thrust of the Prime Timereport was that McCreevy's application was waved through on the nod. "Hold on, look, that's nothing to do with me."

Was this not illustrative of a particular culture that pertained in Irish banking? “It’s nothing to do with me,” McCreevy says. “I was the borrower.”

But the amount of the loan was greater than the price of the property? “That’s nothing to do with me either, because I’m just the borrower and that’s all I’m going to say about it.” So is the loan being serviced? “That’s nothing to do with you, but it is actually, it is actually.”

MCCREEVY, THE ELDEST son of three, says he has been a lucky man in terms of family, politics and his decision to pursue the accounting profession, an area that still fascinates him.

His father died suddenly in bed when he was aged just four – “I remember it very well” – leaving his mother, Eileen (née Mills), with a farm to run and a job in Sallins as keeper of the 14th lock on the Grand Canal, a post which had been in the family for generations. At a young age, McCreevy became his mother’s business partner and assistant, assuming essentially adult responsibilities very early in life.

He was “desperately” close to his mother, who died soon after he was first elected to the Dáil in 1977. It was from her that he got his work ethic, his Fianna Fáil indoctrination and his ambition to better himself through education.

“I was terrible lucky in the mother I had, of course, who sacrificed herself to make sure we got a good education,” he says. “She believed education was the most important thing. She used to say: ‘You’re never going to get on, get out of where you are, unless you’re educated, and the higher the qualification the better.’

“Herself and all her brothers and sisters all either worked as farm labourers or domestics or went to England. Not one of them had ever been to second-level school – second-level now, not third-level.”

McCreevy went to a Christian Brothers school in Naas and to boarding school in Gormanstown before studying commerce at UCD. To fund his studies, he took a succession of “very menial” jobs.

“In all types of what people regard as menial work and labouring work, I found the guys happier and who were best at it were the guys who tried to do their best at it,” he says. “That’s been my experience from when I was working in factories and building sites. That will stop you from getting bored – and bad humour about your work.”

Although he says the Fianna Fáil he joined as a young man had an image problem as “backwoodsmen, illiberal on social issues”, it was the anti-church doctrine of the party’s early phase in the 1930s that he grew up with.

His own anti-authoritarian streak soon manifested itself when he became an early and ardent critic of Charlie Haughey over the dire state of the economy in the 1980s. His well- documented clashes with Haughey curtailed his career. He was a backbench TD for 14 years and eight months before Haughey’s successor, Albert Reynolds, appointed him to the Cabinet.

Still, McCreevy lauds Haughey’s economic recovery programme after 1987 and his legislation on succession, contraception and numerous other issues. History will judge the good Haughey did to be “certainly greater” than the negative aspects of his life, McCreevy argues. “They were awful times, there was a big divide in the Fianna Fáil party and the awfulness went on. I don’t deny any of that, it’s a fact.

"But at least I have the right of being able to say, 'judge Mr Haughey in the round'. I did suffer, politically and every other way. I at least have the right to do that because I took him on when he was at his mighty best. Others assisted, but as the dear editor of The Irish Timeswill know, some of them have somewhat tried to rewrite history. They weren't as brave, as I remember, as they tell themselves now. Your dear editor will be able to testify to that also, but we'll leave it at that. The dear editor will know as well. I'm not referring to her."

Still combative, still argumentative and still deadly keen on horse racing, McCreevy will soon move on from politics. He says he is in the departure lounge, awaiting his exit. He has no regrets and he’s not yielding an inch.

BORNSallins, Co Kildare, September 1949

FAMILYMarried to Noeleen, they have three sons. He has one son and three daughters from a previous marriage.

CAREER HIGHLIGHTS

A conviction politician who believes strongly in the free market, McCreevy was first elected to the Dáil for the Kildare constituency in 1977. He held his seat until his move to the European Commission in 2004. He ran his own accounting practice in his years as a backbencher, stepping back from that work when he entered cabinet in 1992 as minister for social welfare in the government led by Albert Reynolds. Between 1993 and 1994 he was minister for tourism and trade. He became minister for finance in 1997 in Bertie Ahern’s first administration.