ANALYSIS:He spent less than eight months as a TD, but what did George Lee do in that time - as a Dáil contributor, constituency worker and party player? And did he leave because our political system had failed him, or because he failed it? asks HARRY McGEE
ON A WEDNESDAY in late January, Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny stood up to make two announcements at the weekly meeting of the parliamentary party in its meeting rooms in the basement of Leinster House.
Firstly, he told deputies and senators that he was appointing Lucinda Creighton to the party’s policy committee. Then he said that the party’s economic team of Richard Bruton, Leo Varadkar, Simon Coveney and Kieran O’Donnell would be meeting the board of governors of Ibec that week. Kenny rattled out this workaday news as quickly as a priest finishing off the last decade of the rosary. Few of those present paid much heed.
Except for one TD. When George Lee heard the roll-call of names, he was cut to the quick. First, he was being ignored as a policy-maker. Second, he was being sidelined from the economic team of which he was a part.
“Here I was in the room and there was no mention of me,” Lee says. “I realised then I was not a core part of the economic team and would never be. I also realised that I would never be involved in policy formation.”
Lee says there was no particular moment which decided his political fate but that, if there was a straw that broke the camel’s back, that meeting came close. During the Dáil Christmas recess in January, Lee had reflected on the most tumultuous eight months of his life, since his dramatic announcement on May 5th 2009 that he was leaving RTÉ to seek the Fine Gael nomination for the Dublin South byelection.
Sitting in a coffee shop days after his resignation, the national broadcaster’s former economics editor cannot conceal his bitterness about his experience of the Dáil. “I had been busy. You can be busy but be a busy fool,” he snorts. “That was what Fine Gael was making me into: a busy show pony and a busy fool.”
The die had been cast. The Tuesday after last month’s party meeting, Lee sought out Kenny and told him he wanted to resign. Kenny’s offer of a front-bench position could not dissuade him. “They wanted me as celebrity foam, no more,” he says.
What had happened in the space of eight months to disenchant the man who monsooned Dublin South, won 27,000 votes and vowed to “tell my children and grandchildren that I had done something to help in the greatest economic crisis in the history of the State”? Had Lee been excluded, cold- shouldered, misunderstood by Fine Gael? Or was the problem his own vanity, naivety, money-greed, laziness or ambition?
Opinion seems to be divided, between those inside the political beltway who believe Lee has failed politics, and those outside it who believe politics has failed Lee.
To explore these competing views and to determine who was to blame for the debacle, it is worth examining what Lee actually did (or failed to do) during his time in politics, as against what he aspired to do.
Looked at through the prism of parliamentary politics, Lee’s record as a TD was not remarkable. But there was always an obvious added dimension. He was an immediately recognisable celebrity, box office wherever he appeared, be it on the airwaves, in the streets or travelling the country.
As one of three Fine Gael TDs in a five-seater, Lee could not ignore his constituency, no matter how famous he was. The evidence is that he did busy himself in his constituency and dealt with a heavy workload. In particular, he got credit for a campaign against private clamping there.
After his maiden speech in the Dáil on June 10th last year, Lee made 15 contributions in the chamber. A few were no more than short interjections, asking about promised legislation or requesting an emergency debate on the economy. His more substantial speeches were all, unsurprisingly, economic in theme – on the banking crisis, on the Budget, on the economy and on Nama. They touched on familiar Lee themes: opposition to tax individualisation; the need for job creation; opposition to cuts in welfare; and the defence of universal child benefit.
Lee’s political views revolved around the economy and a particular point of view he had that stimulus was as important as cutbacks. He thought the economy needed to find money and investment (even more loans from the EU) in order to create jobs.
The reason, he said, was that Ireland’s recession was too severe. Membership of the euro had deprived Ireland of the use of fiscal instruments such as currency devaluation or interest rate adjustments. He was aware of the mistakes of the 1980s but believed an aggressive slashing of the public service pay bill and severe hikes in taxes would cause damage if global recovery was slower than expected.
He further contended that the bank bail-out was much too big, that not all Irish banks should be saved, and that it was unfair to lumber the taxpayer with punitive taxes to allow this.
On the banking crisis and on Nama, he toed the Fine Gael line, arguing in favour of Richard Bruton’s complex good-bank/bad-bank solution. But in debates before and after the Budget, the tenor of his argument was his own and diverged sharply from Bruton’s views. He railed against the proposed €4 billion of cuts and the target of getting the Government deficit back to 3 per cent of GDP in 2013 and 2014.
“What Europe is asking us to do has never been asked of any other economy,” he told the Dáil in November.“Jobs should be at the centre of our economic adjustment so that we can have employment, not the long-term consequences of following a blind mantra on cutting everything because someone else says so.”
So far, so typical of a backbench deputy. But it was the non-Leinster House aspect of Lee’s profile that made an impression on the public and caused problems in Lee’s increasingly contradictory relationship with the Fine Gael leadership. It also exposed the gap between what Lee did and what Lee wanted to do.
His profile was high. The party’s tracking for the Budget month of December showed that Lee appeared on the national airwaves more than anybody else in the party bar Enda Kenny. His first major public policy statement had been at the MacGill Summer School in Glenties, Co Donegal, during the summer, when he delivered a long treatise on the economy, with observers noting how different his outlook was from the official Fine Gael line. Lee believed in a longer time frame. For him, jobs, not cuts, were the key to recovery.
“We needed someone to say we are not the canary in the coalmine on single currency,” he said. “We need investment , a fund that would give us room for manoeuvre. You will not recover banking until you get jobs. You will not get anyone buying houses until you get jobs.”
The party was not troubled by this, apparently. “We can accommodate an occasional dissenting view, especially from somebody as eminent as George,” says the party’s chief spokesman. Fianna Fáil exploited any signs of disharmony, with Dick Roche, Niall Collins and Billy Kelleher all issuing statements in the following months, pointing out the Lee-Bruton dichotomy. “Fine Gael Budget plans thrashed by Lee again,” thundered Kelleher in a press release in early December.
It seems Fine Gael could accommodate Lee’s dissenting views in statements and speeches but could not accommodate his views in its policy documents. There is no doubt that there was also personal antipathy between him and Bruton. “I wanted a role. I wanted an input. I did not expect to replace Richard Bruton. I did not demand to be on the front bench,” Lee says.
Bruton is a vastly experienced politician of 30 years’ service in the Dáil. He is also deputy leader of Fine Gael and seen by many TDs as a more credible leader than Kenny.
The Fine Gael leader may well be insecure about Bruton, and Bruton may have have been insecure about Lee encroaching on his territory. Bruton was assured by Kenny that finance policy would remain his responsibility, wholly. “There was never a question that [Bruton] would be moving out of finance. [Kenny] gives him space and responsibility to do the job, and he does it brilliantly,” says the party spokesman.
Lee’s expectations seem a little naive, but he expected that the economic team – Bruton, O’Donnell, Coveney, Varadkar and himself — would sit down together and thrash out policy.
“Let’s talk about it. Let’s have a heated debate and arrive at a consensus,” he says. “But it didn’t happen. There was no forum, no think-tank. I was cold-shouldered. It was all decided in the front-bench room or in Richard Bruton’s office.”
Lee argues that he had far less influence on policy than the party’s policy director Andrew McDowell, the former chief economist of Forfás, who joined Fine Gael in 2006. He says that Bruton arrived at a parliamentary party meeting to discuss the Budget and presented the policy as a fait accompli. “I talked about jobs at the meeting. But it was clear that what Richard Bruton says goes. Was there any welcome for my views? Was there any avenue for it? No. Behind the scenes it was invented by Andrew McDowell and given to Richard Bruton and then endorsed.”
This week Bruton gave a radically different version of events, also suggesting that Lee’s views on retaining child benefit went on to form party policy. “I sat down with George before the Budget to go through the response we would give to the Budget statement, and we went through that. But we are a membership of 51 TDs. Policy development has to give equal weight to everyone and listen to all their views,” he argued.
THERE WAS A DISTANCEbetween the two men. Fine Gael produced a short film for its website in December, featuring Kenny, Bruton and Lee giving their views on the Budget. The optics are terrible. Kenny looks like a moderator in a TV debate between two political opponents. There is no chemistry. Both men seem to be talking at cross-purposes.
Away from that, did Lee not have a myriad of alternative methods with which to push new policy ideas in Fine Gael? Could he not have written a policy paper, or pushed his views at parliamentary party meetings, or presented ideas to the party’s policy committee? Lee viewed all those routes as no more than talking with no influence. “They say I never produced a policy document. I joined a party to get involved. I wanted policy formation within a party. If it was just me writing policy documents, I would form my own party,” he says.
Former Labour Party leader Pat Rabbitte thinks that Lee was naive and unprepared, and that he pitched his expectations too high. “Even when you come with the lustre of George Lee, there is still an apprenticeship,” he says. “My experience is that you fight and fight and fight again. You bring it up in meeting after meeting. You persuade, you argue, you advocate, you cajole. There’s very little room for Greta Garbos in this place.”
Fine Gael argues that it did provide vehicles for Lee to promote policy. He was chairman of an economics and business committee but never convened one meeting, the party claims. It also says that Lee chaired an economics and business forum – comprising himself, Kenny, Bruton, Varadkar, O’Donnell and Coveney – that toured six major urban centres during November. It presented Fine Gael’s policies to business people and got feedback from them.
To suggestions from Lee that the forum was an empty marketing exercise where his only function was to introduce the others, Fine Gael produces the PowerPoint presentation, showing that Bruton was the only speaker afforded more time.
Party documents also show that a party official discussed the possibility of Lee drawing up a report based on the views of business people. The official drafted the report and forwarded it to Lee for editing. However, in spite of six further e-mails, Lee did no work on the document. In an e-mail of February 2nd, the official notes: “I still have not received any report form George Lee despite repeated assurances.”
In his defence, Lee produces his own internal Fine Gael document. The economic committee and forum were not separate, he argues. It was always just a forum, but then somebody decided to go on tour with it.
He shows the memo sent by Kenny to party members in July setting up the forum. It states that the forum is for backbenchers only, that it will be a “sounding board” for ideas and that “policy will continue to be determined by the front bench and parliamentary party”.
“You tell me that’s something other than a talking shop?” asks Lee.
According to him, it was worse when the forum went on tour. He had no intention, he says, of writing up a paper that collected business people’s views but completely excluded any ideas of his own. “Enda Kenny and the rest say I was elected because I was a celebrity,” Lee says. “They saw me as a celebrity. I saw my role differently.” Lee clearly did not like the forum. “The show-pony stuff jarred with me from the very beginning,” he says.
What irked him about the forum, he adds, is that he was expected to give an overview of the economic situation as an introduction, and then let Bruton and the others present their policies, an opportunity that was denied to him. Every media appearance he made, he claims, was about selling somebody else’s message. “I was used as Goebbels to spread the message but had no part in formulating the message. That, for me, was hollow.”
During this past week, two economic spokespeople, Simon Coveney in energy, and Leo Varadkar in Enterprise, have claimed they asked Lee to help them prepare papers on smart jobs and on youth employment but that he declined. Lee says they merely asked him to cast his eye over policies they had already prepared.
Varadkar also disclosed that he offered Lee his spot on the Joint Committee on Economic and Regulatory Affairs but Lee declined. “George didn’t want to be on any Committees,” said Varadkar.
Of the latter offer, Lee is scathing. “Leo wanted out of a committee,” he says. “I always look before I leap. There was a good reason that he wanted out. I smelled a rat immediately.” But if he felt so strongly, so excluded, why did he not let it be known? Lee maintains that the press office was aware and that Kenny should have been aware.
The party spokesman disagrees: “Did George Lee ever spell out what George Lee wanted to anybody? He kept his unhappiness to himself until he hit Enda with it last week.”
SO WHO WASto blame? According to former rugby international Jim Glennon, who served one term as a Fianna Fáil TD after being wooed by the party, "there is a lack of team spirit – if politics is a team sport, so is golf". He blames multi-seat constituencies, too many TDs and outdated party structures and practices for this lack of cohesion.
“Can a republican democracy which is monopolised by the work practices of the established parties adapt to the George Lees of the world? I don’t think so,” Glennon says. He adds, however, that Lee was naive not to nail down his terms and conditions when he joined Fine Gael.
From an insider’s perspective, Rabbitte believes that Lee did not understand the world he was entering. “The calling of intelligently interpreting economic data and relaying it successfully to the average citizen is a different one from writing a prescription for where we are going wrong and what we are doing about it,” he says. As for the exchanges and the way of doing things, “it’s hurly-burly and ground hurling, and he knew little about it”.
Fine Gael, meanwhile, takes the position that “it’s a tough transition to learn the ropes and find out how the system operates. The lesson is that politics is a very tough gig and not everybody is suited to it.”
Back in November, Lee quoted a famous American college basketball coach, John Wooden, during a debate on child benefit in the Dáil. “Wooden coined the phrase that failure to prepare is to prepare to fail. Another of his many maxims is that reputation is what others think we are but that character is what we really are,” he said.
In a strange way, those two maxims from his own speech sum up the enigma that was George Lee’s short and eventful career in politics.
George Lee
1962:George Lee is born in Templeogue, Dublin, the youngest of seven children
1980:Becomes a civil servant with the CSO
1982:Begins studying economics at UCD and later does masters in UCD
Mid-1980s:Short stint as lecturer in NUI, Galway, before moving to the Central Bank and to economic consultancy
1989:Begins writing a column for the Sunday Business Post
1992:Changes career. Recruited as a reporter for RTÉ's Marketplace programme
1995:Moves to the newsroom, where he becomes economics correspondent
1998:Lee and Charlie Bird named Journalists of the Year for investigation of tax evasion at NIB
May 6th 2009: Announces he is taking leave of absence from RTÉ to contest the Dublin South by-election for Fine Gael
June 5th 2009:Elected on the first count with over 27,000 votes, or 53 per cent
June 10th 2009:Makes maiden speech in the Dáil
February 8th 2010:Announces he is resigning from Fine Gael and from politics after only eight months
