INTERVIEW:Is the Government intent on nuturing a 'them and us' mentality? Lucy Gaffneyof the National Action Plan Against Racism wants to know.
LUCY IS GIDDY, the teachers used to write in her reports. Lucy could do well if she concentrated. Well, Lucy Gaffney has been concentrating for quite some time now, and she's done pretty well for herself. It has given her the freedom to be outspoken and the Media and Multicultural Awards (MAMAs) last week, she declared that the Government had "effectively emasculated" its policy on integration.
Gaffney would see no incongruity in a woman using such a metaphor. She probably wouldn't mind it being said of her that she has balls. If her criticism bothers the Government, then, she says: "Frankly, I don't give a damn. I had a job to do and I've done it as best I can." She is chairwoman of the National Action Plan Against Racism (NPAR), which finishes a four-year term at the end of this month. She also chaired the judging panel of the MAMA which gave a special award to Phillip Watt, director of the National Consultative Committee on Racism and Interculturalism, one of the bodies that was axed in the recent budget.
Whatever about its testicles, of course, the Government has a brass neck, and has shown no sign of being embarrassed by Gaffney's critique. Continuing her healthcheck, she says it is " very short-sighted" for doing this damage to save less than €3 million. "If we don't integrate all our new communities, we'll have social problems that will cost a lot more," she says. "People seem to assume that now that we have an economic downturn, those who have come here in the boom years will just leave. But many of them are settled here now with families, and certainly the most disadvantaged won't be able to move. They may well be seen by some as a burden. There will be a 'them and us' mentality and very probably an increase in racist incidents."
Gaffney had already been scathing about the Government's performance in implementing NPAR's proposals. "The time for real action is here," she said last month, adding, as official smiles froze around her: "We do not need more policy statements, more photos with children of different backgrounds in various school poses . . ." She was speaking at a seminar hosted by the Department of Education and the Office of Integration, and she was particularly critical of the slow implementation of changes in education.
She has been like a tiger in defence of NPAR but she seems, in many ways, an unlikely crusader for social justice. A businesswoman, she admits she had little in common with many of those with whom she served. "We were an eclectic crowd," she says. "Here I was in the world of civil servants and people from the voluntary sector. I thought some of the people I met in the Irish Presswere bad - the [Irish Print Union] and the NUJ [National Union of Journalists] - God rest its soul." (She was advertising and marketing manager at the Irish Pressin the 1980s.) "I felt very much out of my depth. There was a vocabulary I didn't know, with words such as 'inclusion' and 'protection' and 'mainstreaming' and 'service provision'. There were minefields, the difference between multiculturalism and interculturalism, the fact that you don't say non-national any more," she says. She has described her job with NPAR as being "more like running a country than a company". In the end, though, she decided her views, about civil servants in particular, had been jaundiced, and those she worked with were "wonderful people."
None as wonderful, though, as Michael McDowell. It was he, who, as minister for justice, asked her to take the NPAR chair. She is effusive in her praise for the man. He is "incredible . . . focused . . . has an innate sense of right and wrong and fairness and equality".
There is another man about whom Gaffney is even more immoderate, and that is the man who has been her mentor for more than two decades.
"Denis O'Brien was saying, 'yes you can' long before Barack Obama," she says. "He is unbelievably generous. He's high energy and it is infectious - he stretches people. He's tough, no point in saying he is Santa Claus . . . His work ethic is extraordinary . . . he has a great sense of right and wrong . . . he's created so much wealth and he does a huge amount of charity work . . ."
I interrupt to ask her what she thinks of the view that O'Brien might more responsibly stay in Ireland and pay his taxes rather than distributing largesse as a tax exile. She is perplexed by the question.
"There is a lot of begrudgery in Ireland," she says. "I would say it is jealousy. There is a certain amount of the Irish psyche that resents people who are successful. It is the same right-wing people who say Denis is a tax exile who'll make racist comments such as, 'why are these people here?' It is about ignorance."
Gaffney admires people who are fiercely driven, but says she isn't like that herself. "Can you plot backwards?" she says. She says she's had sleepless nights since I rang to ask whether she would agree to this interview. "I'm really not very interesting," she keeps telling me. "You'll never be able to make a story out of me. I've just been exceptionally lucky in the people I've met."
An only child from the comfortable south Dublin suburb of Blackrock, she still lives near her parents, and is very close to them. Her father was a pharmacist, and her mother is "the longest living kidney transplant patient in the British Isles." Gaffney is on the phone to her several times a day. "She rings up and says: 'this is your head of information'. She is up to speed on everything I'm involved in."
After the giddy years, she had mediocre Leaving Cert results, repeated, and didn't do brilliantly second time around either. She did, however, meet Gerard, also repeating, with whom she began an on-off relationship which, nine years later, would become a very happy marriage.
She got into college to do economics and politics, left the full-time course after a year, did second year at night, and then dropped out.
She left home to live in a flat, and had various jobs; taking in coats at a nightclub, waiting at tables in another, and she did a secretarial course, worked in a school, got a job in a recruitment agency, was made redundant, did a marketing course . . . It was when she got a two-week job as secretary to the director of an advertising agency that she discovered a world she loved. "It was fantastic, really creative. It was the early 1980s, a buzzy time." She was an account director by the time she left, several years later, to go to the Irish Press.
She has fond memories of the "collegiality" of the Irish Press. "I used to flirt with the guys in Burgh Quay to get them to get their copy in on time," she says. The journalists were less malleable, it seems. "They wrote to impress each other. They'd sit in Mulligan's pub congratulating each other while circulation fell. I was commercial. I wanted to sell more papers."
It was at that point she met "this upstart Denis O'Brien" who was setting up the 98FM radio station and, over lunch at the Unicorn, invited her to join as marketing director. Her parents were, briefly, worried. "It was 1990. I had a Mitsubishi Gallant, a pension and I was working for a grandson of Eamon de Valera, founder of the state," she says. "They thought 98FM was a pirate station. But I left, and that began the rollercoaster."
She was briefly estranged from O'Brien when he dashed her hopes by failing to appoint her as station head, and she left to set up her own marketing company. "But in true Denis fashion, he said: 'Okay, 98FM will be your first customer.' He was going for the mobile phone licence. I said, 'I know nothing about them.' He said, 'Nor do I. It will be an exciting journey.'" It was, and Gaffney soon wound up her own company to work full-time with O'Brien again. She had just had her second baby and recalls talking to O'Brien on the phone while expressing breast milk with an electric pump at her desk. "He'd ask me, 'what's that noise?'. "I'd say, 'what noise?'". They've laughed about it since, she says. By the time O'Brien's Esat Digifone was sold to British Telecom in 2000, she was a significant shareholder, and became a millionaire several times over.
She hates talking about her wealth. "The main thing it has given me is time," she says. "Time and ease of mind. My kids define me." Her daughters, Sara and Rachel, now 16 and 12, were still small back then, and she was able to give up full-time work to be with them. However, she has by no means retired to yummy mummyhood. There is still the small matter of her non-executive directorships of Communicorp and Digicel, which O'Brien brought her into.
"We are now in the Caribbean, Central America and the Pacific rim with Digicel," she says, with pride. "We have 5,000-plus employees and six and a half million customers. There are monthly board meetings which take three days in Miami and Jamaica and, next month, Panama." Communicorp has 44 radio stations in eight countries, including several in eastern Europe, as well as Today FM, Newstalk and Spin in this country. "We have 1,000 employees," she says. There are also various boards, and she has also found time to do voluntary work at the Vincentian Refugee Centre in Phibsboro, which led on to the NPAR position. "I can put on the potatoes and do a load of e-mails while they are cooking," she says.
Her girls are of an age to require a lot of taxi-ing. She gives me a lift to the Dart and her car is full of school project stuff. I am not allowed to say what sort of car it is. "Say it is a black car," she says. It is a very nice black car. Her reticence about money is largely, she says, to do with the fact that she wants her daughters to have a normal life and decent values. "We've had refugees in our house for Christmas two years in a row," she says. "I don't want to sound like Mother Teresa," she adds. They go on family holidays with old friends, or go skiing, surfing or boating. "I find us a house," she says. "They call me Gillian Bowler." They love France, and, after much agonising, she allows me to say that they own an apartment in Paris. Place des Vosges, as it happens, one of the most beautiful squares in the world.
She consults Gerard before agreeing that it is okay to mention the apartment. She says she is hugely influenced by him. A former garda, he retrained as a lawyer, and now runs 64 Wine in Sandycove, and lectures in wine. "We do a lot of talking, over bottles of wine, obviously," Gaffney says. "He is very strong and hugely principled."
Gaffney says she has often been the only woman in a boardroom full of men. "Sometimes one of them will make a joke about that and then say, 'Can you sue me for that?'. "But I think the glass ceiling is often of women's own making. I've never experienced any discrimination whatsoever. I think that at a certain stage the fire for business is replaced in a lot of women by the fire to have children and be with them. The corporate world doesn't really allow for that. I've just been very lucky because I could go for both. I think it has been serendipity, perhaps."