The best Minister for Finance we've had, or arrogant and out of touch? Moving to the European Commission means Charlie McCreevy can now leave such questions behind, writes Mark Brennock, Chief Political Correspondent
As he sat in the political correspondents' room in Leinster House last Tuesday evening announcing his departure from national politics, there was a fragility apparent in Charlie McCreevy's body language and demeanour.
Asked how his seven-year term as Minister for Finance would be seen in the future, he said people had a right to differ over his view of how society should best be run, but he asked that they acknowledge that at least he had held a view, and had acted on it.
He spoke wistfully about how he had spent half his life as a TD, about how it had always been important to him to choose the best time to quit, and about deciding this was that time.
The reporters wanted to know whether he had been pushed. He said he hadn't, and that the Taoiseach, with whom he had become a "close personal friend", would not have done that to him. However, there was now "a confluence of interests" - a move was in his own best interests as well as those of the Government and Fianna Fáil (FF). He said he had "oscillated" over the past year as to whether he would or wouldn't go now. Indeed, earlier that day, some of those who often know his mind thought he would take the job, others thought he would not.
Now he was announcing that he was about to take up a powerful, challenging and well-paid post at the heart of the enlarged European Union in a Commission led by an ideological soul mate, José Manuel Durão Barroso.
But on Tuesday McCreevy spoke like a man who was walking off a big stage with melancholy in his soul, rather than on to a larger one with a spring in his step.
Last September he discussed the idea of becoming Commissioner with the Taoiseach. He had often thought about the best time and manner in which to quit national politics, and wondered whether the job might present just the opportunity he was looking for. However, earlier this year he decided he did not want to take the job after all.
FF was bracing itself for bad local government and European Parliament election results. After that there would be a review of strategy to decide how to fight back in the two to three years before the attempt to win a third consecutive term. By deciding to stay, McCreevy decided he was going to be part of that.
But since the poor results he has been the object of considerable behind-the-scenes criticism within his party. The issue for many backbenchers is not that McCreevy is right-wing - some don't bother with that sort of analysis, while others say the record shows that his right-wing rhetoric was accompanied by a lot of pragmatic FF populism. What they do talk about is the voters' perception that he is arrogant, and it was on doorsteps during the recent election campaigns that backbenchers became alarmed at the strength of this perception. Many were convinced that he should go.
The public complaints about McCreevy were mainly in relation to two issues. According to one party figure, voters did not dwell on the dramatic change of policy direction straight after the 2002 election but on the fact that McCreevy scoffed at what they were seeing with their own eyes, insisting that there was no change of direction at all.
"You have gone out and voted one, two, three for Fianna Fáil and you can see what they did after the election. And there's McCreevy saying these are adjustments, and not cuts, and that anybody who saw them as cuts was stupid. People knew exactly what they were, and believed they were being taken for fools," the party figure says.
The second issue did not relate to anything as grand as his philosophy of society but to Punchestown. "Here he has given €15 million to the owners of a horsey centre in his constituency without following proper procedures. Meanwhile, we were trying to tell people why they can't have medical cards," says the same source.
It was style and arrogance, not economic philosophy, that the backbenchers saw as the liability.
The Taoiseach knew this too when he went to McCreevy last Tuesday week to offer him the European Commission job. Bertie Ahern has taken grave exception to reports that he told McCreevy that he would have to get out of the Department of Finance. He says he gave no such ultimatum, while McCreevy said this week that he believes he could have stayed in the department if he'd wanted to.
However, both men have stressed repeatedly the closeness of their friendship. In this light, it is possible that if Ahern wanted McCreevy to move from Finance he would not even have had to say it. McCreevy would have known what was wanted by his close friend, who had given him seven years in the most important ministry.
There is evidence now that a new, possibly important, political factor has entered the equation since the elections. The results have led to a lot of talk from FF sources of repositioning the party and shedding the accusation of being dominated by a "right-wing PD ideology". Some talk of "loosening the purse strings". The Taoiseach last week made a pointed jibe at "right-wing economists" who don't understand the realities of life.
The repositioning OF the party, which is likely to start in the autumn, might not have been to McCreevy's liking. The Taoiseach might have allowed him to remain as Minister for Finance, but McCreevy might then have faced up to three years under siege from other elements of his party, resisting their demands for populist measures.
The party could have lost the next election anyway, with McCreevy not being hailed - as he is by some now - as the best finance minister in Europe and in the history of the State, but as part of an administration chucked out of office despite a decade of unprecedented economic prosperity. He said on Tuesday that he had been "trying to think for some time: when does one go? You never know when the best time is to go". He decided this week that the best time was now.
It annoyed him that reports based on private remarks from FF figures in the days before he announced his decision gave the impression that he was being pushed. He made his own decision he says, and the Taoiseach agrees.
His political message has remained consistent for more than 20 years: cut government spending, reduce taxes, and slash the national debt. His opponents, too, use simple slogans to denounce him: right-wing, Thatcherite, arrogant. Both are simplistic and neither gives the full picture. His rhetoric and many of his actions could indeed be dubbed right-wing. However, he was willing, in 2000-2002, to let spending shoot up at a rate unprecedented in the last 15 years. He has consistently increased pensions and other welfare payments and is a strong supporter of national pay deals with unions and employers. His approach to the break-up of Aer Rianta has been pragmatic, not ideological, and he has resisted the break-up of the State airports monopoly until he can see convincing plans showing that it will work. His record, as opposed to his rhetoric, cannot be described simply as right-wing.
Adult motivation and personality are often explained by experiences in childhood. McCreevy's was more difficult than many. His mother was from a Republican family, his father was a Fine Gael man. McCreevy was aged just four and a half when he saw his father have a fatal heart attack at home.
His mother was left with three sons, a 50-acre farm and a job as a lock-keeper in Sallins on the Grand Canal, which had been in the family for generations. McCreevy said in an interview almost 20 years ago that, as the eldest son, he effectively became her partner and assistant at a young age. His relationship with his mother, his willing acceptance of adult responsibilities early in life, and the struggle to make the best of things, were critical influences on him.
"If they ever get me on the psychiatrist's couch, that's what they will discover," he said. His mother regularly used to send the young McCreevy to place bets. This might also interest a psychiatrist, in the light of his strong support for the racing industry.
He went to a Christian Brothers school in Naas, Co Kildare, and then on to Gormanstown College. He went to UCD, where he studied commerce. It was a time when he had no money, unlike, no doubt, many of those around him in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He says he got some experience of what poverty meant at that time. Despite his financial disadvantages he got his BComm degree, then qualified as an accountant, ultimately becoming a partner in a Naas accountancy firm. He worked hard to get there: his political emphasis on low taxes and reward for individual effort was surely influenced by his own experience.
He was elected to the Dáil in 1977. Initially delighted by Charles Haughey's election as party leader, he soon became a startlingly outspoken young FF backbencher, who announced to anyone who would listen that the public finances were a mess, that it was the fault of his own government, and that Haughey was a dreadful fellow.
He was aligned with Des O'Malley and Mary Harney in opposing Haughey, proposing one of the unsuccessful motions of no confidence in his leader and being expelled from the parliamentary party for outspoken criticism of his party's government. The apparently visceral struggle for the soul of FF was fought mainly on Northern Ireland and the liberal agenda on such issues as contraception. As this battle raged, mirroring divisions between traditional and modern Ireland, the fact that a coherent economic outlook also bonded much of the anti-Haughey group was rarely remarked upon.
When the Progressive Democrats were formed, the party talked a lot about cutting taxes. Initially this was seen by many as an attempt to graft a distinctive economic policy on to an identity founded simply on opposition to a style of FF government.
But the PDs meant it. McCreevy is believed to have toyed with but rejected the notion of joining the PDs. While the PDs were preaching lower taxes and debt, McCreevy's tough economic message was a minority, almost eccentric, view within FF.
In 1994, Bertie Ahern took everyone by surprise by appointing McCreevy as his finance spokesman. As the Rainbow government managed an economic boom in the mid-1990s, McCreevy - like all opposition finance spokesmen since 1997 - found it hard to criticise an administration producing spectacular economic figures on a regular basis. Never a good parliamentary performer, his speech in response to Rúairí Quinn's 1997 budget was seen as particularly slapdash and led to some speculation that he would never become minister for finance.
Ahern stuck with him, appointed him to Finance and stood by him through both the good times and the controversial decisions, such as taxing credit unions, the O'Flaherty appointment, tax individualisation, Punchestown, and decentralisation. The two men had become personally close in opposition and remained so throughout seven years in Government. On more than one occasion when the Taoiseach was asked an unwelcome question about some alleged gaffe by McCreevy he said: "Ah sure, that's Charlie for you." When they came to power in 1997 they were, of course, blessed with luck. They got to implement the tax-cutting project without the traditional downside of such actions, spending cuts. Money was literally pouring into the Exchequer by 1997.
The boom came before the tax cuts, despite the core Government message that the opposite is the case. But that's not to say that McCreevy just rode a wave of good economic news. He arrived in office with things he wanted to do. Circumstances made his task easier, but he went about it with a determination and consistency rarely seen in Irish politics.
He cut personal income tax rates from 48 and 26 per cent to 42 and 20 per cent, reduced capital gains tax from 40 per cent to 20 per cent, slashed inheritance tax, cut the national debt from 64 per cent of GDP to 32 per cent, and put away 1 per cent of GNP a year for future pension provision.
Argument will continue over his legacy in terms of the actions he took as Minister for Finance. But perhaps his most important political legacy is that nobody now argues for a significant change in the amount of tax collected, or a dramatic rise in public spending. The wide public acceptance that what he preaches is the commonsense way to run an economy, rather than what some backbenchers have called an "alien ideology", is his greatest achievement.