Golfgate? I can smile about it now, says Sean O’Rourke

Forty-two years before last weekend’s swapping of the role of Taoiseach between a Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael leader within a Coalition Government, broadcaster Sean O’Rourke witnessed a premonition of just how comfortable the two parties could be together decades before they shared power.

In 1980, O’Rourke, then a political reporter with the Sunday Press, was sent to Mayo to cover then-taoiseach Charlie Haughey’s visit to his birth county and report on the unveiling of “tablets” on the Castlebar house marking where the Fianna Fáil leader was born. Making a surprise appearance at the unveiling that day was a local Fine Gael TD named Enda Kenny.

“He would have been in his late 20s and he explained his presence by virtue of the fact that ‘the Taoiseach is in town and I show respect to the office by showing up,’” recalled O’Rourke.

“But he looked utterly at home among all the Fianna Fáilers.”

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The former RTÉ presenter notes that it was Kenny as Fine Gael leader who first floated the idea of a rotating Taoiseach with Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin in 2016.

“Ever since, I have struggled to find the differences between them,” said O’Rourke of that curious moment in Castlebar.

Exploring that struggle in more detail, the veteran journalist is presenting a two-part RTÉ television series next week examining the history and legacy of Civil War politics and the relationship between the two parties that grew out of that conflict 100 years ago.

It is a conflict that is long settled, as proven by the rotation of the role of Taoiseach from Martin to Fine Gael leader Leo Varadkar.

[ Real politics is on the way back and it is not going to be pretty ]

[ Read our profile of Leo Varadkar ]

O’Rourke’s programme, Two Tribes, digs into what differentiates Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael and it features some revealing interviews with several big names from Irish politics past and present, including Varadkar and Martin, and former taoisigh John Bruton, Bertie Ahern and Brian Cowen.

O’Rourke also convinced two former senior politicians who are rarely seen in front of a camera these days – former Progressive Democrats Tánaiste Mary Harney and former Fianna Fáil Minister for Finance Charlie McCreevy – to be interviewed.

“I won’t call them big reveals but we have interesting stuff in there,” said O’Rourke.

In addition to the programmes, there are 12 one-to-one interviews conducted for the series that are being broadcast separately in the Two Tribes podcast series.

While the differences between the two parties are hard to tell, the loyalties to each are clear from the programme. Harney told O’Rourke that her father was “so strongly Fianna Fáil” that it took her five attempts before she could break the news to him that she was leaving the party.

“A lot of the people would struggle to explain the differences between the parties and anybody would because it’s not an easy thing to do. History is really what defines them,” said O’Rourke.

The thread running through the parties, as O’Rourke see it, is that Fine Gael were more defined by support for the institutions of the State, law and order and fiscal rectitude, where Fianna Fáil were “more for the gnáthdhaoine, as you would say in Irish, the ordinary folks; they built up a sense and a reputation for that left of centre thing”.

Looking at the present Government set-up, O’Rourke is not surprised that this unusual Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael-Green arrangement has been so stable and lasted so long.

“They are largely of a similar outlook. What was their alternative?” he said.

As he sees it, these kind of “three-legged stools” can be stable, pointing to the Fine Gael-Labour-Democratic Left rainbow Coalition of the mid-1990s. In the longer term, O’Rourke believes that either Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael will eventually “coalesce” and agree some arrangement with Sinn Féin but that it might not happen after the next general election.

“I do feel that there is a softening of Fianna Fáil resistance to it,” he said.

As for a potential Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael merger, O’Rourke put this question to his interviewees in the programmes. Cowen, Ahern and Fianna Fáil’s Mary Hanafin all rule it out whereas former Fine Gael leader Alan Dukes said he can see it happening at some point.

“Any talk of a merger is at least 10 years away, if not more,” said O’Rourke.

The former newsman is happy to be in front of a camera again after his planned return to RTÉ, as the presenter of a new radio show, was cancelled after he became embroiled in the Golfgate controversy of 2020, with his attendance at the Oireachtas Golf Society dinner in Clifden during Covid-19 restrictions.

“I hadn’t done any interviews for two years before I set out on this last April. I was wondering how I would feel. It was kind of reassuring that I could still ask questions,” said O’Rourke.

He files the Golfgate business under “s**t happens”, he says. He looks back on it as an event that he wishes had not taken place. He also wishes that he had not been there, paraphrasing the late Queen Elizabeth from her appearance in Dublin Castle in 2011.

“To borrow a phrase from her late majesty: there are some things we wish had been done differently or perhaps not at all. I can smile about it now,” he said.

Personally, it was a “bruising experience,” he says, and whatever about the legality of the event being confirmed in court, O’Rourke believes people should have thought more about their attendance and the event itself.

“The whole thing came down to what the country was going through and how people were collectively traumatised. It just didn’t sit well with an awful lot of people who were making sacrifices,” he said.

[ Miriam Lord: And just like that, Golfgate is brought to a swift and sudden end ]

While the controversy deprived O’Rourke of one opportunity, it opened up others. He was able to spend time with his daughter, her husband and their newborn, his first grandchild, in the US later in 2020. And it also brought along the Two Tribes project, which he clearly relished.

O’Rourke and his wife Caroline Murphy, a former media adviser to ministers, work together through their company Avondale Media on moderating events and chairing conferences. O’Rourke does the odd speaking engagement and is on the board of Druid Theatre in Galway, where he was reared and educated. He is also helping the Jesuits on an educational project.

O’Rourke retired as an RTÉ employee in May 2020. Right to the end he had the news bug. When a Hollywood star was holed up in O’Rourke’s neighbourhood during lockdown in south Co Dublin, he tried to land an exclusive interview. He asked the guy who filled Matt Damon’s grocery order at Caviston’s shop in Glasthule to slip a letter requesting an interview into his bag.

O’Rourke loved his time in RTÉ, particularly on the News At One radio programme.

“There’s nothing like a day when something blows up and you have to tear up the running order at 12 o’clock because a minister resigns or somebody gets fired,” he said.

He says he had “a fantastic run” in daily broadcasting. He lists off the six general elections that he anchored on Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ) over the years. Now he prefers the long-form interview and the type of podcasting behind Two Tribes and the time he can give a particular individual or issue.

“What we’re looking at now could really be the best of all worlds, right?” he said.

The two-part Two Tribes series will be broadcast at 9.30pm on Wednesday and 10.05pm on Thursday on RTÉ One.