Sitting outside a hotel in afternoon sunshine near Cobh, Co. Cork, Simon Coveney, who is stepping down from a political career after 25 years that saw him occupy some of the State’s highest offices, remembers his days dealing with Liz Truss.
Today, Truss is best known for her disastrous 45 days as UK prime minister, and her subsequent incarnation as a beloved of the US alt-right movement, but Coveney got to know her when they were both agriculture ministers a decade ago.
“I would have known Liz very well. She’s the kind of person who you get to know personally because her politics and her personality are very much intertwined. She is fun behind all of the craziness, sometimes,” says the Cork man, sitting outside a hotel in afternoon sunshine near Cobh.
Walking through the House of Commons one day in the summer of 2022 as she prepared to challenge for the Conservative leadership, Coveney spied Truss sitting at one of the tables in the Portcullis House atrium.
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“I saw Liz in the corner. I went over to her and I could see her smiling as I was coming over. I said: ‘If you’re not careful now, Liz, I I’ll come back and endorse you in the Tory leadership race.’”
“She went a little pale, before declaring with a laugh: ‘Nothing I’ve done to you in the past justifies you doing that,’” says Coveney about a politician whom he disagreed with on nearly every occasion they met, but one who could share a joke.
The story – and Coveney is not comfortable telling stories about others, on or off the record – reflects much about the 52-year-old, who served as minister for foreign affairs for more than five years between 2017 and 2022.
Politics, he believes, is about building links, even when there is little to bind people together.
“You had to build relationships, with Boris Johnson, with Liz Truss, with Theresa May, with people like Jeremy Hunt and Philip Hammond,” he says.
“And I did, I tried to build a relationship that was based on respect. It didn’t mean we agreed. It meant sometimes that we had difficult conversations. Sometimes very difficult conversations.”
He has regard for Theresa May, another former UK prime minister, over her attempts to find a deal following Britain’s vote to exit the EU.
“Her efforts to respond to the complexity of the Irish question should always be acknowledged and recognised, particularly in Ireland. To be blunt about it, she ended her political career trying to solve it,” he says.
“She was taken out by many in her own party for trying to do it. We should appreciate the extraordinary political risks and ultimate political sacrifice that she made. She was very genuine. It came from a very good place in somebody who recognised that Britain’s decision over Brexit had consequences for their closest neighbour and that she had an obligation to address that in a way that was reasonable for Britain, but Ireland, too.”
Coveney thinks carefully before his next sentence: “I don’t believe that her successors shared that same feeling of obligation to try to address the Irish question.”
However, May’s understanding came after a series of “miscalculations” by figures in London that were based on a belief that Ireland “wouldn’t really matter” in the negotiations when they got down to the final calls.
“That was the view that some people had – not everyone in London, by the way, and not everyone in the Conservative Party. But it certainly was the view of some. Some even said to me, ‘Surely, Ireland will leave now, too.”
From the beginning the Irish government “spent time” talking to London and trying to understand its next moves, but equally it was made “very clear that this was not a bilateral negotiation”. This point was often not understood in London.
Equally, he says, the direct stands taken by “a new generation of politicians”, including himself, then taoiseach Leo Varadkar and others who did not “see Britain as in any way superior to Ireland”.
“I have been in university in the UK, have lots of friends there. Leo has a lot of friends, connections and family in London. So does Paschal Donohoe. We all respect and like Britain, but we see them as an equal partner,” he says.
“We don’t see it as a country that if they threaten us, that we will kowtow to them. Taking that position wasn’t without risk, you know, and that risk was outlined to us by senior civil servants on more than one occasion.”
However, a hard border with Northern Ireland was never going to be acceptable in Dublin. “We were damned if we were going to be the people that were going to allow that to happen, no matter what the consequence was.” The government would have collapsed if such a deal had been accepted.
Even today, Coveney is still taken by the solidarity shown by other European Union states when London still believed the EU would “talk about the importance of the Irish problem for a while” and then abandon it.
He remembers a meeting in Paris with the then French prime minister, Édouard Philippe: “He said: ‘Simon, stop selling the Irish issue to me. I know it, I understand it. We will be there for you, no matter what.’”
Sometimes the human connection matters in politics. The EU’s chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, came to Dublin in 2019 for an Ireland-France rugby international at Lansdowne Road.
“We walked down to the match. He was amazed that he could walk on the main streets without any security or anything, because senior political figures in France just can’t do that,” he says.
“All these Irish people kept crossing the road to come over and slap him on the back, saying: ‘Good man, Michel, keep it going,’” says Coveney. “He couldn’t get over it, that they knew him and that they wanted to make that connection.”
Reflecting on his years in the Cabinet, the memory of the first meeting as the newly appointed minister for agriculture and food in Áras an Uachtaráin on March 9th, 2011, is still imprinted on his mind, coming in the wake of the economic crash.
“I remember it vividly,” he says. “The country was in fear for what the future held. It was a dark time for many Irish people, their families, their businesses and for politics. Let’s not forget that.”
Sitting around the table, Taoiseach Enda Kenny gave each of his new ministers a single page of paper carrying the bare details of the crisis facing the country: the jobs lost, the numbers who had emigrated, the cuts made.
“He said: ‘I want everyone to read that.’ And then he said: ‘If anyone in this room thinks that we can’t turn those numbers around, there’s the door.’ And he pointed towards it. Even though we had heard the numbers, we were still shell-shocked,” he says.
Today, he is occasionally in touch with Kenny. He still believes the Mayo man was treated “very unfairly” for much of his time in office.
“There was an intellectual snobbery towards him in Dublin sometimes,” says Coveney. Kenny empowered people, he says.
“The exciting thing about Enda was that when he gave you a job to do, he let you do it and he trusted you to get it right. ‘Here’s what we need to do, these are the numbers, now go and do it’ – that was his line.”
Looking back, he believes the Labour Party suffered unfairly for the actions taken in 2011 as the government had to manage an international bailout. “Those actions were taken when the International Monetary Fund were calling the shots; people forget that,” he says.
“People expected Fine Gael to make the hard decisions. It was harder for a socialist party. I remember that time and the brave decisions [Labour leader] Eamon Gilmore made and the decisions that [Labour minister for public expenditure and reform] Brendan Howlin made as well,” he says.
“They paid the price, but the mistake Labour made was in not defending those decisions. Instead, they apologised, or semi-apologised for them. They were the right decisions at the right time and for all the right reasons, and they worked.
“People give out about Garda numbers, but the IMF required us to cut them. As soon as we were allowed, they started growing again. Then, Covid happened,” he says.
Looking on the Coalition partners he leaves behind, Coveney applauds Green Party leader Eamon Ryan.
“When history is being written, he will be seen to be one of the most influential national politicians that Ireland has had during this decade,” says Coveney. “I think he’s changed the way the political system thinks, on climate and emissions, on ecosystems and nature. The Greens are always trying to push the boundaries, and I think that’s been good.”
He decided “a few years ago” in conversation with his wife, Ruth, that he would not run again for the leadership of Fine Gael. Once he had done that, the question became when he would leave politics.
“Honestly, she has always hated politics, finds it both stressful and very distracting for me and the responsibilities I have towards my kids and family. But she’s been incredible for 26 years, so, really, I’m forever indebted to her for that,” he says.
Coveney is part of an exodus from the Fine Gael party. This week, Coveney’s party colleague Michael Ring, Fine Gael TD for Mayo, said he would not contest the next general election. This brings to 15 the number of Fine Gael deputies not running who were elected in the last election in 2020.
Once Coveney had dearly wanted the Fine Gael leadership and still remembers the detail of the 2017 result that saw him lose to Leo Varadkar.
“Leo got two-thirds of the parliamentary party; I got two-thirds the membership. We split the councillors half and half,” he says.
The decision to quit completely was prompted by Varadkar’s decision to resign. Following that, he spoke to Simon Harris, “who was always going to win the leadership – everyone in the parliamentary party knew that”.
“He wanted to refresh things. My decision made life a lot easier for him. I was comfortable with that. I could have lobbied hard to stay, making sure that Cork had a senior minister. Maybe, I would have been successful, but I didn’t want that,” he says.
The leadership change has strengthened the Coalition, not weakened it, he says.
“Fianna Fáil and Micheál Martin were remarkably patient and professional during that period, as were the Greens,” he says. “Fianna Fáil could have seen it as an opportunity, as weakness. Let’s face it, we are competitors as well as colleagues in Government at the moment.
“To his credit, Micheál didn’t do that. He gave the party space. I would say that the Government parties are probably more trusting of each other now than at any point since the Government’s formation.”
His next steps will come in the autumn. “Once I make a decision, I’m one of those people who look forward rather than looking back. I’m only talking about past stuff now because you’re asking me about it,” he says.
“I am going to take some time for the family. But I’m excited about new challenges. I’m just looking forward to challenging myself in a new arena. And I will do that. I set targets for myself – I always have.”
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