On January 12th, 1993, the day the ill-starred coalition deal between Fianna
Fail and Labour was done, Charlie McCreevy was surprised to find himself back in the Cabinet. According to Sean Duignan's One Spin on the Merry-Go-Round, McCreevy teased his Taoiseach: "You couldn't bring yourself to drop me - the [Reynolds] girls wouldn't let you." Reynolds flashed back: "At least I've got you out of Social Welfare."
Sean Duignan, who was, of course, Albert Reynolds's press secretary, also gives a poignant description of McCreevy trudging up the long central corridor leading to the Taoiseach's office in the Chas Mahal "to be ticked off for some Social Welfare indiscretion or other." The nature of what awaited poor Charlie inside the office can be judged from his reported description of the corridor leading to it as "the longest plank in the world".
The qualities that must, nevertheless, have recommended McCreevy for a position in the much-reduced ranks of Fianna Fail ministers are now becoming clear. For whatever his other deficiencies may be, Charlie McCreevy is certainly not lacking in the greatest political asset of them all - hard neck.
Having been such a disastrous Minister for Social Welfare that even his own party leader considered it a triumph to have moved him to a job - Trade and Tourism - where he would do less damage, he has now decided to wear the scars as "a badge of honour". For there was Charlie in the Sunday Independent last Sunday, telling us all about what a great Minister for Social Welfare he had been and how he now stands, to dust off a phrase much beloved of his former master, "totally vindicated".
"Even the PC brigade", wrote Charlie, "could hardly deny me a little pleasure in witnessing the agony of the broad left. .. I can well recall the pillorying of me as Minister for Social Welfare from Democratic Left, the Labour Party and that very influential segment of the Irish media who in broad terms have the same agenda.
"In my short period as Minister for Social Welfare, I attempted to bring some reality into the whole debate. I made some changes, and given time, would have tried to put in place a system in which it would have been very difficult to defraud (sic) - because, it would have been simple and straightforward and thus not as easy to mess with by those who want to abuse it."
WHEN I started to read Charlie's article, I thought that it must be a veiled attack on his former leader. In the first sentence he managed to get in the cliche about not being "politically correct" and then he went on, as above, to attack the "PC - brigade".
Now usually, when you see someone boasting about not being politically correct or posing as the victim of persecution by the "PC brigade", it is a sure sign of panic and intellectual bankruptcy. But in Charlie McCreevy's case, he is perfectly justified in presenting himself a man under attack for his lack of political correctness.
And what whingeing pinko, what contemptible lefty, what self-appointed guardian of political correctness launched the attack? Why none other than that paragon of PC, Albert "That's women for you" Reynolds. According to One Spin on the Merry-Go-Round, Albert Reynolds "regarded McCreevy's `right-wing' tendencies with his Social Welfare portfolio as politically (whatever about fiscally) incorrect." How oafish do you have to be before Albert Reynolds regards you as right-wing and non-PC?
Yet, funnily enough, the "PC brigade" to whom Charlie now regards himself as a martyr, is made up not of his fellow members of Fianna Fail's country and western alliance but of two categories of miscreants. One is "columnists - social and political - of The Irish Times". And the other is "a couple of thousand people who attend seminars, workshops, present papers, and reports... the poverty industry".
The first of these categories is easy enough to identify: the black cloaks, blood-stained daggers, red-rimmed eyes, and copies of Chairman Mao's little red book clutched in hairy palms are a dead giveaway. But what about the second? Does he mean Combat Poverty? Does he mean Sean Healy and 13 rigid Reynolds of the Conference of Religious in Ireland who organise most of the seminars on poverty in Ireland and issue many of the best reports on the subject?
Or perhaps his thoughts were turned closer to home. How about the Athy Community Development Project in his own constituency? It has two full-time staff definite suspects. It targets lone parents, unemployed people, disadvantaged youth and women - the usual modus operandi. It gets money from Combat Poverty - highly incriminating.
I trust that Charlie McCreevy, who has made such a virtue of frankness and of telling it like it is, will, at the next election, have the guts to campaign on the doorsteps of Athy for the closure of this enclave of the poverty industry.
ALL of this is what Charlie means by bringing "some reality into the debate" about social welfare. The inconvenient fact that his handling of the job gave his own leader nightmares by making it look like his famous promise to "dehumanise the social welfare system" was not in fact a slip of the tongue is forgotten.
So Is the even more awkward fact that the reason his period as Minister for Social Welfare was short was that his party leader didn't reappoint him. Social Welfare remained, in that Cabinet, a Fianna Fail ministry - Charlie's great reforms were cut off in their prime not by Irish Times columnists or rampaging lefties but by his own party.
And for that Fianna Fail deserves credit. For what Charlie McCreevy actually did in office was not to restore the "incentive to work" but to further erode it, and not to reform the social welfare system but to discredit the very idea of reform by making it an excuse for a mean-spirited assault on the very poor.
Far from combating fraud, he attacked one of the most fraud-proof aspects of the system - the supplementary allowances where money is given only for very specific needs, and only after a means test - by directing community welfare officers not to help people with gas and ESB bills more than once a year and not to give them more than £100.
But his most brilliant idea was to change the position of someone on the dole who gets the odd day's work. Previously, such a person signed off for the day and lost that day's dole money.
Charlie changed this so that for every pound earned for the day's work, a pound was taken off the week's dole. In other words, the only way that anyone on the dole could hope to come out with a few pounds extra at the end of the week was to cheat. And the genius who came up with this idea now has the gall to tell us that if only he had been left in office a little longer, he would have come up with a virtually fraud-proof system.