PROFILE:Her return to a central role is a startling comeback, writes
DEAGLÁN DE BRÉADÚN
IF A week is a long time in politics, then 12 years is an eternity. That's how long it is since Máire Geoghegan-Quinn announced she was stepping down as a TD for the Galway West constituency.
Now she is back with a vengeance. The nomination as Ireland's European commissioner is one of the biggest prizes in contemporary politics, and yesterday Taoiseach Brian Cowen confirmed that the former justice minister was his choice.
Political memories are notoriously short and, with so many new faces on the scene since 1997, Geoghegan-Quinn is little more than a name to many, and a largely forgotten one at that. All that will change in short order.
The first quality that stands out in any assessment of Máire Geoghegan-Quinn is her toughness. She is the woman who told the formidable Charles J Haughey at a crisis meeting in November 1991 that the people of Galway West never wanted to see his face on an election poster again.
Three months later, due to the efforts of Geoghegan-Quinn and other members of the so-called "Country and Western Alliance", Haughey was gone from the position of taoiseach, to be replaced by Albert Reynolds.
A native-speaker of Irish from Carna in the Connemara Gaeltacht, Geoghegan-Quinn qualified as a primary teacher at the colleges in Tourmakeady and Carysfort. Her father, Johnny, was a Fianna Fáil TD for Galway West from 1954 until his death in January 1975, including a stint as parliamentary secretary (now minister of state) for social welfare from 1970 to 1973.
She won the subsequent byelection and when Haughey took over as taoiseach in 1979, he appointed her minister for the Gaeltacht, the first woman to serve in cabinet since the days of the First Dáil in 1919, when Countess Markiewicz was minister for labour.
She later served as a minister of state in the departments of education and of the Taoiseach. Disillusioned with Haughey, she resigned that position in 1991.
Reflecting on the experience of working with (and eventually against) her party leader, she told the party faithful in a speech that year: "There will never be a time like it again: never such excitement, never such achievement, never such heartache, never such happiness, as the time they will talk of as 'the Haughey Era'."
When Reynolds succeeded Haughey, he appointed her as minister for tourism and later gave her the justice portfolio. In a case taken by Senator David Norris, the European Court of Human Rights ruled against the criminalisation of homosexual acts in Ireland and in 1993, Geoghegan-Quinn brought in a Bill to liberalise the law.
She was caught up in the destructive internal row over the appointment of attorney general Harry Whelehan as president of the High Court which brought down the Reynolds coalition with Dick Spring's Labour Party.
This gave her another chance to demonstrate her blunt speaking: as the Government was in its dying moments in November 1994, she rounded on the hapless AG and said, according to press secretary Seán Duignan: "When I'm out in the snow, on the election trail in Galway and people on the doorsteps ask me, 'What about Harry Whelehan?' I'm going to reply 'To hell with Harry Whelehan'."
She ran for the party leadership in succession to Reynolds but never really had a chance against Bertie Ahern and withdrew before it went to a vote. Still deeply upset by the collapse of the Reynolds administration, she turned to writing and produced her first novel, a page-turner called Green Diamond, in May 1996.
She quit electoral politics in 1997, citing invasion of privacy in the form of newspaper reports on one of her children.
Two years later, Ahern appointed her to the European Court of Auditors, generally seen as a lucrative but low-key end to a political career. Now she is back in the limelight and will be angling forcefully for a good portfolio: we are going to hear a lot more of Máire Geoghegan-Quinn.