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— June - July 2010
, dinghies bob-
bing on sparkling blue water, people in short
sleeves taking a leisurely look at the shops. Dun
Laoghaire is like another world in the surprise
heat wave. The function rooms of the Royal
Marine Hotel are tall and cool. The bar looks
out over a generous green lawn. Éamon Gilmore,
however, makes no concessions to the relaxed
mood, with full suit and tie, a busy man man on
a lazy Friday afternoon.
He has just come from speaking at a local
rally. ‘There’s been a strike for over six weeks
now in the main street. It’s a difficult dispute. I
previously made an attempt to mediate, to see if
we could at least find a basis for talks”.
He emphasises the human side to the dis-
pute. “There’s a lot of stress for the people
involved, their families, and for the employer
too. Ultimately it will have to be settled and I
hope the event will cause the employer to reflect
on where he is at and to go to the table. There is
no dishonour in talking”.
There is a function to attend later. On
Saturday morning he will be out canvassing. “I
get a group of Party members and we do a dif-
ferent housing estate every Saturday morning”.
He breaks into laughter. ”It’s a service we pro-
vide to get people out of their beds if they’re not
up by eleven thirty”. He emphasises “for me it’s
the best focus group there is, to hear the take of
my constituents on the issues of the day and to
talk to people about their difficulties or issues
or problems”. On Sunday he will be launching
a Labour Party policy document on tourism.
Monday then is the day for his constituency
clinic. “As leader of the Labour Party it is now a
seven day commitment”.
He is animated by the events of the moment:
“This week, the Fianna Fáil-Green Government
poured another € billion of taxpayers’ money
into the hole in Anglo Irish Bank, despite not
knowing either how big the hole is, or whether
it is in anyone’s interest to bring Anglo back to
life. Last week the taxpayer became the majority
owner of EBS, at a cost of at least an extra €
million, and nobody batted an eyelid.
In the same fortnight, we hear about the
chaos in the HSE, that had someone as at risk
as Daniel McAnaspie wandering from Garda sta-
tion to Garda station, looking for a bed for the
night. Even more chaotic, is that they did not
even know how many children had died in care
over the past ten years”.
And he believes the hangover from the boom,
and the need to rescue the banks, is |”going to be
used by Fianna Fáil as an excuse for not deliver-
ing the kind of services that could be effective
in cases like Daniel McAnaspie’s and others like
him. Frankly, those excuses are ten years too
late, and coming from a Government that seems
incapable of managing their filing cabinets, let
alone the vital organs of the State and the finan-
cial sector”.
Gilmore sees hunger for change everywhere,
”across all groups. There is much more discus-
sion now about wider political and social issues.
There are some who yearn for things to go back
to where they were. They can’t and they won’t.
Obviously the type of change people want reflects
the kind of lives they are leading”. He is optimis-
tic that “the future can and will be better for our
children. But it won’t be measured only by mate-
rial things. It will be about the kind of society we
live in, how we relate with one another and the
values that underpin that”.
He was recently reminded of Pat Rabbitte’s
poster campaign in , in the run in to the
election. The posters asked “But Are You
Happy?” He laughs that ‘the big debate was
should there be a comma’. However, “looking
back on it, it was at the height of the boom, it
hit the nail on the head. It was raising the val-
ues question”.
►
What priority does the Labour Party accord
to the value of equality?
“Equality is part of the DNA of Labour. It is what
you expect the Labour Party to do, to drive
equality”.
‘”We have to pursue an active policy of pro-
moting equality. There is an equality agenda that
has to be pursued that is not dependent on leg-
islation and that is more to do with how we do
our business and our practice. We have to pur-
sue the idea, that more equal societies are bet-
ter societies, are better economies. It is not an
accident that the five countries that are most at
risk of economic failure are the most unequal
countries in the European Union”.
What are the possibilities for a new depar-
ture on equality with a new Government?
“I see it much more now around issues and poli-
cies rather than necessarily around institutions.
The agenda for Government will be much more
around issues that have to do with socio eco-
nomic equality”.
“Employment is a starting point. It has to be
at the heart of it. Labour’s economic policy is
interview
Éamon Gilmore
Equality for the Majority
interview niall crowley illustration peter hanan
“It is not an
accident that the
five countries that
are most at risk of
economic failure
are the most
unequal countries
in the European
Union”.
Also in this section
Joan Burton
Joanna Tuffy
— June - July 2010
about jobs and getting people back into work.
This is the key foundation for equality. Education
is another important focus. This means first of
all increasing and enhancing educational oppor-
tunities. We need to move to universal third-level
or further education. This is about equality in
outcomes from our educational system”.
“Health and medical care need to be availa-
ble to people based on need rather than income.
We have to forge ahead with the introduction
of a system of universal health insurance. This
is a health reform agenda which is essentially
about equality”.
”In social welfare we need a different deal
between the state and the individual which pro-
vides for support in different ways and at differ-
ent points in the life cycle. Education, childcare,
care of older people, care of people with disa-
bilities and lifelong learning would all be a part
of that. The assumption now has to be that you
will change employment and career a number of
times over the course of your life. Therefore we
need to re-invent the welfare system”.
“One of the concepts we have been looking at
is flexicurity. So we look at the welfare system
not as a subsistence income you fall back on in
hard times but rather as a platform from which
to move onto the next phase of your life. Part of
this will be addressing the issues of chronic pov-
erty and chronic disadvantage”.
Does this suggest the territory of positive
duties that have been developed in Northern
Ireland and Britain where the public sector
is required to have due regard to equality in
carrying out its functions?
“Yes indeed - I think that is part of it. But let
me issue a word of caution. We have to do more
than legislate for it. Poverty-proofing for exam-
ple became an exercise in getting somebody who
knew the language to write up the evaluation of
the policy. It has to be more. It has to be politi-
cally driven”.
“I am an outcomes guy. I’ll measure my time in
Government by what we have actually achieved
in outcomes rather than what we have put in to
legislation.
The thinking that has dominated the world
of politics and public discourse is that the mar-
ket was supreme, you minimised regulation, you
kept the state small, you reduced tax and you
maximised individual economic freedom. That
thinking has to be replaced by a different culture
that reflects that we are interdependent, that we
need to strengthen the bonds between us and
that we make a more equal society because that
is a better society. One way of doing that is leg-
islation but it must also become part of the way
in which we think. Now obviously in doing that
it has to be done in a way that rewards effort and
enterprise as well”.
►
Éamon Gilmore has previously highlighted
the importance of looking again at how we
are governed. What might this involve?
He takes an historical perspective. “I see three
phases. The phase of independence, that period
from right up to the end of the fifties That
whole early period was about the bedding down
of independence, of democracy and of the insti-
tutions of the state. It ended in economic fail-
ure. You then had Whitaker. You had the whole
period of another fifty years of economic
growth, liberalisation of our laws, modernisa-
tion of the country. This reaches its climax with
the ‘Celtic tiger’ and then, of course, it ends
again in economic crisis”.
”Now we have the third phase. This idea of a
new republic. It coincides with the centenary
of the foundation of the state. There is going
to be something new. It is hugely exciting. You
have to locate it in a global context. There is a
shifting of the tectonic plates of economics, pol-
itics and governance. It is the logic of being a
globalised society, of being in the information
age. There are consequences to this in terms of
governance”.
Dáil reform is one focus in meeting this
challenge. “First of all we need to look at our
parliamentary system again. It has to become
a real parliament. For example, this idea that
every piece of legislation has to be introduced
by the Government in office, I think that’s the
past. Individual TDs should have the opportu-
nity of introducing their own legislation. There
should be a possibility of it being passed where it
is reforming legislation and it makes sense”.
“We also need to change the system of
accountability. The very rigid parliamentary
questions system has to be changed. There has
to be much more opportunity for state agencies,
and indeed private organisations that operate
under licence from the state, to come before
Oireachtas committees and to state what they
are doing and answer questions”.
Éamon Gilmore recently proposed a
Constitutional Convention to construct the pro-
posal for a new constitution. “The constitution
belongs to the people. The changing of the con-
stitution should therefore be a people process. I
have suggested a process involving a forum made
up of one third public representatives, one third
civic society and one third jury type selection
from the public”.
Does he see this approach as having a rele-
vance to other issues?
“I do. There are difficult social issues that we
are not dealing with which could benefit from
a forum or formula of engagement like this”.
He mentions issues relating to integration in a
multi-cultural Ireland and to inter-generational
poverty. .
“This is just a formula, and I am not wedded to
it, where there would be public debate and con-
sidered discussion of issues which sometimes
are not easy. The formula I have proposed is like
extending the existing all-party committee idea
in a way so that you have this wider engagement.
It is a participative formula”.
“I don’t think we are good at consultation
in Ireland. I feel very strongly about this. We
have invented a process of consultation. Public
bodies are fabulous at it. They put notices in
the paper, invite the submissions and hold the
required number of public meetings. Then they
just ignore what people are saying. I was very
struck by the process of consultation when I was
in Canada looking at waste-management facili-
ties. There the whole thing is a mediated thing
where there is much more of a problem-solving
approach”.
Where do groups who are powerless fit into
this political reform?
“Any society has to have a healthy civic soci-
ety. This participation is one of the essential
requirements for good democracy. Dissent is
part of our democratic life. The challenging of
accepted wisdom and the status quo simply has
to be encouraged and welcomed. I have seen over
the years where organisations in civic society
have been quieted. They know that they have
to get the money and that therefore they have
to be onside with the present government. It is
a form of political patronage. That inevitably
means that they watch their step in terms of
being critical”.
►
Do NAMA, the recapitalisation of the banks,
the bank guarantee and growing indebted-
ness not suggest limited room for hope in the
future?
“Let’s park NAMA and all of that for one
moment. Hope comes from the fact that every
economic recession comes to an end. We are
going to have a growing economy again. We
are probably saddled for decades with the con-
sequences of what was going on in the last ten
years. I don’t think we have to go under. We are
going to have a big debt that we are going to be
carrying. What we have to do is reassess where
we are in both the European economy and the
world economy”.
‘If we say the future is the knowledge economy
then that means that we have to invest in people,
in education and training. There are industries
we took our eye off the ball on over recent times.
This is a food producing country. The world has a
growing population that has to be fed. The reform
of the Common Agricultural Policy provides us
with an opportunity to become a food basket for
Europe and the wider world. We have to redis-
cover our capacity to produce food and to develop
the added value products and industries. We also
have to look afresh at our tourism product”.
“We need to look at things like services. There
are issues, which if we can solve for ourselves, that
could be developed as business opportunities as
well For example, the technology is being devel-
oped which will assist people to live independ-
ently for longer. If we can develop solutions to
personal care issues, care of older people issues,
care of people with disabilities issues and to the
challenge of independent living, we are not just
solving a social or health issue for ourselves but
creating the possibility for doing business”.
How would this innovation contribute to a
context of greater economic equality?
“One of the things that has emerged from the
economic crisis is a much bigger focus on
income inequality. Two or three years ago, the
idea of chief executives of major corporations
being paid in millions and their staff being paid
the minimum wage wasn’t on the radar. It is
now. The Japanese approach to equality where it
becomes an issue of being socially unacceptable
to have these inequalities has started to appear
into our discourse and our thinking a lot more.
Labour would progress this in Government”.
“People have to have a living wage and a living
income. There is no easy answer to the issue of
income inequality. The social partnership proc-
ess that we had has ended. But there is going to
have to be a process put in its place that deals with
issues of incomes and inequality. Taxation is one
of the ways of dealing with income inequality. The
Labour Party has proposed a third rate of tax for
those portions of anyone’s income that are over
one hundred thousand Euro. However I am very
attracted to the Japanese approach that says top
management need to be moderate and those at
the top need to moderate their incomes”.
►
What is the source of your political values?
“It comes from experience. My father died when
I was fourteen months old. I grew up in diffi-
cult circumstances. I got educational opportu-
nities which enabled me to work my own way
out of poverty. We were the first group that ben-
efited from free education and grants. We were
the first in our families to go to university. The
thinking that was around was partly influenced
by the civil rights movement in the US and in
the north”.
A shy hesitancy and reluctance replaces the
previous fluid responses. “I have experienced
disadvantage. I consider myself fortunate to
have had the opportunity of coming out of that.
I just think that everyone else should have the
same opportunity. I believe in it”.
What sustains your energy and enthusiasm
for the work?
“I like the work whether as a trade union officer
or as a public representative. I like advocating.
I love to share in the joy people get out of crack-
ing it, getting the job or getting some right they
should have. I get huge satisfaction out of work-
ing for improvements and seeing those come
through”.
“Right now we are looking at where we are at,
post-recession. The challenge is there but also
the opportunity to carve out a different, more
equal, fairer and better society. We have made
huge progress on equality in this country. There
is a long way to go. We’ve tended to think about
equality as an issue about minorities. Equality
is about the majority.
“I’ll measure
my time in
Government by
what we have
actually achieved
in outcomes
rather than what
we have put in to
legislation”
