Sudden death of Ministry like a `terrible bereavement'

IT'S BEEN like a slow-motion car crash for two weeks now. It began with the death of her mother-in-law, Nora Ferris, early on Saturday, June 7th. As early as 9.30 a.m. on the same day, Niamh Bhreathnach knew the game was up on her charmed political career.

The woman who presided over one of the most important ministries in the State, with a budget of £2 billion, 40,000 teachers, a million children and 850 civil servants; who worked harder, spent more money, raised more ire and spearheaded more painful and courageous reform in a few years than almost anyone before her, felt it all slipping away.

"The most serious and notorious loser of all," as she put it, the only Cabinet Minister to lose her seat.

Even while a visibly upset John Bruton, the leader of another party, mourned her loss on television, she knew what she was to her own party this day: not a devastated colleague, nor even a human being in distress. Just a major embarrassment.

At five o'clock, she turned up at the count centre, her formulaic responses jotted on a yellow sticker. It's still in her diary: "Analyse...rationalise . . . will fight again..." Predictable, hard-necked political claptrap, maybe, to the casual listener. But her director of elections had to ask her beforehand if she honestly felt able to say the bit about going on to "fight again".

She said it even while entertaining visions of leaping on the ferry for Holyhead and merciful anonymity. The media still wanted her. "I was feeling a bit battered. Then I looked at Tom, my husband, making arrangements to bury his mother..."

The cinema was a refuge, as it had been all through her ministry. "You can sit in the dark and no one knows you." On Monday, they went to the Ormonde to see Absolute Power (yes, she noted the irony). "When I came out, I sat in the car-park and said, "Why can't I stay here for the rest of my life?"

But as she crossed the road for a Chinese takeaway with her daughter, a motorist rolled down his window and sympathised. Others followed. "And something like that really does make a difference," she says, as though this might be surprising.

MEANWHILE, even while power trickled away, affairs of State had to be pursued.

That first Monday, she was in her office before 9.30 a.m. for meetings with officials. Tuesday morning, she was answering the phone herself to all comers, before heading in to the Department to clear official submissions.

In the afternoon, there would be the removal of Tom's mother. But the practical problems were starting to bite, such as where in her pretty but modest three-bedroom, semi-detached home she would find room for more than 7,000 of her constituency files; or how she'd manage without an office or secretary; or whether she could justify keeping on the cleaning woman (she couldn't).

With rueful humour, she pondered the almost total absence of casual clothes from her wardrobe after more than four years of dressing up to go to work and, by the by, wondered just what to do with her life. "Maybe I'll do a degree. I never got a degree, you know. I trained as a national teacher. The Senate? Oh. . . I just don't know."

Her diary was cleared for Wednesday. That was the day they buried Nora Ferris. "She would have been one proud Kerrywoman," a friend said.

"There were five Ministers there, including her own daughter-in-law." She went to bed in dread of the following day. The Cabinet meeting would mark her first appearance in Leinster House since her defeat.

"That was difficult, oh yes. It's that people get embarrassed. I remember that from the time my father died. They wanted to talk to my mother and she knew they wanted to sympathise, but they also wanted to be reassured that you're going to move on.

We meet for lunch after the Cabinet meeting. Even in a sparsely-populated Leinster House, it's clear that the mantle of power is already shifting and the scene resembles a replay of old television footage: Ray Burke and John O'Donoghue ebulliently greeting well-wishers at the gate, Willie O'Dea striding purposefully down a corridor... The embarrassment is plain as we walk to the members' restaurant; not hers but other people's. They look sheepish, diffident, poised for flight.

Another of those rueful laughs: "It's like someone has died and they don't know what to say to you. They'd prefer to send a Mass card." Even the waitresses seem at a loss as they show us to a reserved table in the bright, pretty restaurant.

We dine on salmon and strawberries while she refuses to whinge. Instead, there's a kind of stoical curiosity: "It'll be interesting to see who will still want to see me. But there's a barely-suppressed bewilderment, too, interspersed with a defiant pride in her considerable achievements.

It's like a mantra: the targeting of resources to disadvantaged areas via the Early Start and Breaking the Cycle programmes for young children; the "ring-fencing" of money saved by the abolition of the education covenant for free third-level education; the abolition of entrance tests; the 60 per cent increase in the primary schools budget; the stalwart commitment to relationships and sex education.

"Education is the key to people's prosperity and the key goes into the lock at the age of four. Targeting, targeting, targeting that's what I'm proudest of. Did I get my comeuppance? Not as a Minister for Education. My success will be measured in nine years' time if children in the Early Start programme opt to take the Leaving Cert."

SHE relaxes as she talks, laughing easily as she recalls how much she hated her glasses at 13 and how her friends decreed that the only way to redeem herself was to hide her legs and paint her nails. (Nearly 40 years on, the skirts are still long and the nails perfectly manicured).

Later, she became the kind of mother who made apple chutney in the autumn and bread every Sunday. She cheerfully sticks the handle of a thick dessert spoon in her mouth to demonstrate how to chop an onion without getting tears in your eyes.

But there are other ways of getting tears in your eyes. Minutes later, a party colleague, safely entrenched for another term, leans over the table and with little grace asks her can she "do something" for a couple of teachers in his constituency whose jobs have dried up. The subtext is clear; she needs his vote for the Labour Seanad nomination.

She looks uncomfortable. He charges on: "You still have the power - well, for two, three weeks anyway. You can do it. Anyway, I heard you were looking for me. I'll be in my room for another while."

For the first and only time, I see a teary look in her eyes. Can she do it, I ask, when he leaves - get the teachers "fixed up"? "There are nearly 300 of them," she says hopelessly. And, she has no need to add, the nominations are only five days away, only five nominations for maybe 20 candidates.

But surely pride alone will ensure that the party nominates its own Cabinet Minister? "I think the perception may be that I've already won the Lotto... got the goodies," she says quietly, this woman whose ministry took her to Niagara Falls and the Great Wall of China but was also pock-marked by wildcat strikes and hissing conference delegates, 18-hour days and exam papers falling into bogs.

THE next day, Friday, begins in her own constituency with a visit to a prosperous local national school, and for the first of many times over following days, she would greet her hosts with the rueful words: "I wasn't sure if you'd still want me..."

She then travels to Maynooth to sign the Universities Bill, a truly grand occasion which produces another piece of presentation crystal. Later we adjourn to her Blackrock home, bought 22 years ago for £12,000 and worth maybe 12 times that now.

There are flowers from well-wishers and already a thick file of sympathy letters from all over the State. "Blow blow thou winter wind, Thou art not so unkind as man's ingratitude," quotes one. "As the blown grass lifts after rain, shining and lovely again - so shall you," says another. Typical is the one that ends: "I'll remember you especially for your commitment to the disadvantaged.

In her high-tech office upstairs, her faxed grocery list (for delivery by Quinnsworth) includes things such as pork steaks and stew ingredients. "There'll be time for cooking now, so they're on the menu again. `Mother's home', as they say.

But things are looking up this evening. John Bruton has nominated her to the Seanad for the remaining two months of its term. Later on, as the ministerial Mercedes delivers her to open the Dun Laoghaire College of Art and Design's annual exhibition, the nomination enables her hosts to greet her with the more cheerful formula: "Commiserations and congratulations".

We become separated as the crowd yields for her after her speech. Afterwards she remarks: "Ah, yes, the waters parting before me.. I'll have to get used to that not happening any more." It's a happy visit. The restoration work on the old buildings is a monument to the largesse of the Department of Education, and soon an RTC will take root alongside. A ministerial achievement, someone says wryly, that in a rural constituency would probably have seen her top the poll for three generations.

Monday is Bloomsday and we meet as she "slips away" early from an 8 a.m. breakfast.

BACK to the Department then, to her beautiful blue and yellow ministerial office with the Francini plasterwork, visitor-friendly round table, dried flowers, squashy sofas and fresh coffee brewed up and served by herself in pottery mugs.

In between meetings with her secretary and others, serious canvassing continues. The calls are businesslike, to the point, and depressing: "There's another number one already promised to someone else," she sighs. "I'm looking at another glorious defeat."

Tuesday is Ennis, Co Clare, and the conference of the Irish Vocational Education Association. Her driver collects her in Blackrock before 7 a.m. and she always travels in front because that's where the car phone is.

Her programme manager, Pat Keating, is with her and all the way down she chats happily while working the phones (he on his mobile), pushing other Ministers with final requests, leafing through her speech, girding herself for a hostile reception.

Her plan to abolish more than a third of the vocational committees has damned her in advance, she knows. The president's speech is predictably cutting but at least there's no hissing at hers. "Slan libh," she says, winding up her speech at what is probably the last of her official national functions.

Afterwards, she works the room, responding to the sympathy with voluble chuckles: "Yeah, you're very sorry for me but you're delighted to be back," she chortles at one grinning Fianna Fail man. This will be a hunting ground for the Seanad canvass proper if she gets the nomination.

The road is bumpy and she feels unwell on the return journey, but the phones are still going, the canvassing has to go on, there are details to be finalised. It's been a long day - 12 hours since she left the house and still calls to be returned, deals to be done. Seanad selection nominations close today. The General Council meets tomorrow. The sense of dread is back.

Wednesday. The slow-motion car crash finally hits the wall. The three defeated Labour Ministers - all women by some strange coincidence - fail to be nominated by their own party council. Bumped by the electorate, now rejected by their own.

Thursday. She arrives into the Dail bar after the Cabinet lunch, externally immaculate as usual, her linen separates perfectly laundered, not a hair out of place. Internally is something else. "I'm an embarrassment to my party," she says baldly.

For the first time, she admits to being "stunned" - too shocked to feel the pain. I'm like an ice cube inside. I need to defrost at my own temperature, in my own time. I need time to recover." But will she go on? "I need time. I'm not really Attila the Hen [sic]" she says, with a mirthless laugh.

Then again, even the original Attila didn't have to contend with the Labour Party. Far from losing the nomination by a fluke, there was intense pressure on her to withdraw her candidacy in the first place. "Maybe it was intended for the best but the pressure came from quite important colleagues, who I really don't believe would have made the same suggestions to men."

Was there any support from the senior league, any attempt to be helpful? She shrugs and there's a long pause: "Can they afford to be kind?"

Is it possible that there are different attitudes in different parties to fallen comrades? Fianna Fail, for example, is perceived to be more philosophical in defeat. "We'll rise again," is the confident attitude. In others, she reckons, there may be more of a blame culture, which she sums up as follows: "You should have done this or that. You shouldn't have been so pure. You could have left that legislation. Who needs sex education anyway? No wonder you lost your seat..

These are tough times, indeed. The public rejection is like a "terrible bereavement". The drawn-out nature of Irish political defeat is maybe less kind, she thinks, than the Downing Street system where office terminates instantly.

Just now, even the much-vaunted pay-off is scant consolation after such a dramatic fall from grace. "In every job, there are redundancy packages negotiated," she shrugs. "It's not as simple as reported, but I haven't had time to look at the details. It shouldn't be forgotten that I was a member of a Government that took the decision not to accept a pay rise.

NEXT Wednesday she will gaze at Countess Markievicz's portrait in the Cabinet room for the last time. Afterwards she will say goodbye to her Department with a drinks party. On Thursday, as the new Dail convenes, the ministerial car will appear at her home for the last time. Her seal of office (which never actually leaves the Aras) will be handed to another jubilant politician.

After that - with the exception of a Seanad seat for a couple of months - she is nothing, not even a minor party official. The once-frantic diary yawns emptily through next week and into the summer. It now translates into time and space she has promised her family before decision day, ringed as October 1st.

Where did it all go wrong? Was it that she "forgot to mind the drains of Dun Laoghaire" as one friend put it, in order to take "a wild, exciting ride through the world of education"? Was she too upfront with constituents, telling them frankly when they weren't entitled to something or arguing too robustly when they accused her, say, of cutting the primary school budget ("Are you calling me a liar?" she'd respond alarmingly, not a bit like your average politician). Should she have courted the media more, taken them out to lunch, as Nell McCafferty suggested last week?

She's thinking about all that, but will begin by listening. Labour generally, she says, has a lot of listening to do. What sort of listening? "Well, I wonder," she asks slowly, meaningfully, "are we a bit preachy?" But wasn't that one of their main attractions to the voters in 1992? "But they didn't want us to go in with Fianna Fail. Were we listening in 1992? Will we be listening in 1997? Or 1998?"

The ice cube is cracking. Already there's a glint of a comeback about Niamh Bhreathnach.