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50 — village july 2009
Brendan Halligan, Village elders
The Labour Party was once
determined to end civil war
politics, and Brendan Halligan
was the party’s thrusting young
General Secretary. Today, he
serves on a state authority,
appointed by the Fianna Fáil/
Green coalition.
d e r e k o w e n s
’ General Secretary dur-
ing the late s, Brendan Halligan appar-
ently got on well with the media: he helped his
party leader Brendan Corish to write a land-
mark speech, The New Republic, with two
Irish Times journalists, and the newspaper
happily predicted that the party (then enjoy-
ing strong success in general elections) would
eclipse Fine Gael and force a fundamental re-
alignment of Irish politics.
Today, however, he’s a little cagier. Village
wants to talk about those heady days when the
Labour Party (like today) had the wind at its
back and Brendan Corish announced that “the
seventies will be socialist”. We’d also like to
know why Corish was proved wrong, and Hal-
ligan’s experience at the heart of of all that.
“Is it about me or the Labour party? I’d rather
it was the Labour Party”, says Halligan, who
clearly doesn’t like to talk about his own role.
“I’ve never given an interview about it, and I
never will”.
Asking what motivated him to become La-
bour’s General Secretary in seems singu-
larly unwise in those circumstances. Thank-
fully, his definition of “never” is a flexible one.
“That’s very much related to what was hap-
pening with Brendan Corish and the Labour
Party at the time. The thing about the s
was that it was a very exciting time every-
where, and here was no different. The place
it was all happening was the Labour party – a
great extent of that was the leader, who want-
ed those things to happen, and was terribly
open”, says Halligan, who also credits Corish
with a novel long-term strategy for the party.
“He wanted to end the old civil war division
and recast Irish politics by making Fianna Fáil
and Fine Gael redundant”. By publicly refusing
to enter a coalition with Fine Gael through the
decade, Halligan explains, the Labour leader
was hoping to force the civil war parties into
government with each other (or drive one into
interview
—
51
extinction) and emerge as the main opposition
party, creating a real left-right divide. The ap-
proach, coupled with a shift towards a much
more explicit socialist identity, was yielding
Labour an increase in seats at successive gen-
eral elections and an increased share of the
vote, adding to the party’s optimism.
As the Labour Party today enjoys increas-
ing support – particularly at the local and Eu-
ropean elections of June – after years of fail-
ing to make progress, Halligan claims to see
the optimism that infused the party in the late
s. “No two eras are the same, but there
are uncanny similarities. There is that feel-
ing inside the party at the moment,” he says.
“Gilmore has a personality that is different [to
Corish], but it is attractive.” Labour’s leader
also has adopted a strategy of independence
from Fine Gael, insisting that he won’t commit
to coalescing with them before the next elec-
tion. Adding to the déjà vu, he’s cheered on in
the Irish Times by Fintan O’Toole, who wrote
in May that Labour should “kill off Coke and
Pepsi politics”, staying independent of both
Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil and liberating a po-
litical system still enslaved in a two-and-a-half
party standoff by a civil war years ago.
Halligan is reluctant to support O’Toole or
refute him sticking to the safe line that “the
party leader is pursuing the right policy”. He’s
insistent, however, that Labour’s independent
course during the late s was the right
strategy – with one caveat. “What you can’t
take account of is what history is going to drop
into your lap, and what dropped into our lap
was the Arms Crisis of ”, he says. Rather
than a disappointing election result, Hal-
ligan says that learning that Fianna Fáil min-
isters were involved in a plot to send weapons
to nationalist communities in Northern Ire-
land – and a disappointing meeting with then-
Taoiseach Jack Lynch – changed the Labour
leader’s mind abruptly. “It was an epiphany”,
he remarks today. By the next general election
in , Corish and Labour had committed to
a coalition with Fine Gael, even negotiating a
programme for government in advance with
the larger party. Halligan, who says the u-turn
caused Corish “great anguish”, insists that the
national interest – getting Fianna Fáil out of
power – trumped the long-term health of the
Labour Party. “They thought in terms of the
country”, he adds. “There’s no question but
that to get rid of Fianna Fáil was good for de-
mocracy”.
It was also, briefly, good for Halligan too.
Appointed to the Seanad by new Fine Gael Tao-
iseach Liam Cosgrave, he went on to enter the
Dáil via a by-election, only to lose his seat
in a general election the following year. Af-
ter two more unsuccessful attempts to claim
a Dáil seat and a year-long stint as an MEP,
he retired from front-line politics. It’s been a
busy retirement, though, balancing academia,
public affairs consulting, a self-founded think-
tank (the Institute of International and Euro-
pean Affairs) and work on state authorities: he
served as Chairman of the Irish Peat Develop-
ment Authority from to before be-
ing appointed as chair of Sustainable Energy
Ireland by the Fianna Fáil/Green Coalition in
. He’s since become a non-executive di-
rector of private company Mainstream Renew-
able Power. Nestled in a top-floor office in a
row of Georgian buildings, he seems oddly like
a declawed tiger, still combative but distinctly
more comfortable than in his days as the or-
ganisational driver of a Labour party that was
avowedly socialist and determined to usurp
the political status quo. He also seems vaguely
irritated by a lot of our questions, but Village
gets in an important one before he makes us
leave: is the state body chairman and company
director still a socialist? “I don’t know what
that means”, he replies after a lengthy pause.
“It’s a very big word, many definitions of it.
Which one do you want”?
“There’s no
question but
that to get rid
of Fianna Fáil
was good for
democracy”.
Brendan Halligan then general secretary of the Labour party, outside the Gaiety theatre in Dublin
where the party was holding a conference on the issue of forming a government with Fine Gael. 1981
CV - BRENDAN HALLIGAN
1967 Appointed General Secretary of the Labour Party (retires 1980)
1973 Appointed to the Seanad by Liam Cosgrave
1976 Elected as TD for the constituency of Dublin South West
1977 Unsuccessfully stands for the Dáil in the Dublin Finglas constituency
1982 Co-opted to the European Parliament (replacing Frank Cluskey)
1985 Appointed as Chairman of the Irish Peat Development Authority (retires 1995)
1990 Founds the Institute of European Affairs (later renamed to the Institute of International and Euro-
pean Affairs)
2007 Appointed Chairman of Sustainable Energy Ireland
2009 Lead strategist in the four man team heading up the Yes campaign for Lisbon.
Most likely to say Yes
Least likely to say Have a look at the books of the Institute for International and European Affairs (of
which he is chairman).
