Only a comedian could straight-facedly ask any Irish politician how he or she currently feels about their profession. The surest way to attempt an understanding of the increasingly surreal political present lies in looking at the past. Former Fine Gael backbencher and current leader of the Opposition in the Seanad, Maurice Manning, does that with a much-needed, newly published biography of the legendary parliamentarian James Dillon.
It's Sunday and Manning has just returned home from a morning's canvassing for the Dublin South Central by-election. One of the less sharp-tongued members of his party, he admits the public are angry "and strong feelings of betrayal" have been roused by the ongoing disclosures of Tribunal Ireland and the lopsided bounty of a tiger economy in which the middle-classes continue borrowing with an obscene abandon while the exasperated nurses have felt forced to strike. Is a righteous Fine Gael therefore delighting in its rival's sins? "No we're not smug, I'd say we're disgusted. We all knew a lot wasn't right, but no one thought it could be this bad."
Manning describes himself as an academic and politician, in that order, committed to both roles. Home for the past 10 years has been a modest modern house discreetly hidden in a Ballsbridge cul de sac surrounded by schools and a patch of wasteland where a couple of foxes reside, although a house will shortly be built on the site. He is a mild-mannered character, approachable, fair and as popular with students as he is in political circles. The tone of his Dillon book, a solid political biography, is also true of Manning himself. There is no easy rhetoric, no slick put-downs, no smirk; he is civilised and interested. Neither opportunistic, nor flamboyant, nor intense, he is reassuring in his ordinariness.
"I would say I'm idealistic, I've never been cynical. I'm not cynical now." At 56 he is still open-faced and wide-eyed, if finally looking close to his age. This is not a man who gives the impression he holds all the answers and makes no claims to. Above all, he is obviously clever without parading his intelligence or his learning, although he can recite by-election results the way others do verse.
"I've always been interested in politics. I remember when I was five being brought to hear de Valera speak and I said, `Up Dev' - it was my first political utterance." Though never an admirer of that enigmatic and contradictory icon, Manning seems pleased he once voiced his support if only in the context of making an historical acknowledgement. The son of a furniture factory owner and eldest of 10, Manning, was born in Bagnelstown, Co Carlow, in June 1943. He was educated locally and later at Rockwell College in Co Tipperary. Politically the household was mixed, rather than divided, between Fianna Fail and Fine Gael and his was an ordinary small town boyhood. While Carlow continues to mean "home and family" to him, Manning is regarded as a Dubliner. "I love living in Dublin, I've been here for so long. This is a great place to live, I'm only 15 minutes' walk from the Dail."
Not particularly academic as a schoolboy, he says "as I wasn't good at games, I became involved in debating. I liked essay writing and English and history." Boarding school was tough rather than privileged. At Rockwell he was more concerned about the cold water and the physical rigours than he was about politics. Not for the first time, he says, "I was lazy" and he leaves no doubt that at no time in his life has he been prepared to clamber over his peers in order to succeed. At one stage he had considered the priesthood.
"I was interested in a contemplative order, the Benedictines. I thought it would be a nice life and visited Glenstal. When I was leaving I was told I wasn't ready and I should try again. So I asked should I wait a year before getting in touch again? `No, leave it 10'." He remains grateful for the advice.
When he arrived at University College Dublin in 1961, he seemed to have found a second home. Almost 40 years later, he's still there, a career academic with a second job in politics, true to a Fine Gael tradition.
"College was very exciting. In those days it was in Earlsfort Terrace and everyone was there. A lot less segregated than it is now. There was a great mix of students doing all subjects. It was far smaller - 5,000 students. Now there are 17,000." He chose history: "I did modern history but I particularly enjoyed a course in medieval monasticism given by F.X. Martin, so I still had hankerings after the quiet life in Glenstal." He also joined Young Fine Gael.
Declan Costello impressed him as an idealist but many of his friends were also busily deciding to change Ireland if not the world. In 1965, the year before the young Maurice Manning joined "too young, too soon" the newly established politics department, the then Fine Gael leader James Dillon found political timing against him. Lacking the coalition option which would be open to his successors, Dillon, instead of becoming Taoiseach, resigned the party leadership and spent his last four years in the Dail as a backbencher, which, Manning stresses, "he enjoyed to the fullest. He adored parliament".
James Dillon's story - his 37-year parliamentary career during which he was an Independent as well as a party member, his gentleman's style, courageous opposition to neutrality, his baroque wit and orator's skills, as well as his political legacy as the son of John Dillon and grandson of Young Irelander, John Blake Dillon - should ensure his immortality. But, as Manning says, he has become one of the forgotten men of Irish history, juxtaposed as his career was alongside those of de Valera and Lemass.
It seems unfair that Dillon, the cosmopolitan from a background which was mercantile as well as political, and who both understood and idealised rural life, is more often described as a parliamentarian than as the nationalist he assuredly was. In so many ways he is a victim of the black and white confusions of post-Treaty Irish politics and history. His opposition to neutrality, and to compulsory Irish, and later policies as Minister for Agriculture, were seen as pro-English while his flair for speech-making and jibes directed at de Valera's reputation as a scholar, caused many to dismiss him as more performer than man of substance.
Most of all, the personal qualities which set him apart also led to him being classified as a 19th-century statesman at large in the tough world of 1930s Irish politics, which by the 1960s would be determinedly aggressive. "He was born old," says Manning, "he was always out of his time."
This is true. Yet while the ageing Dillon became increasingly old world and inclined to rely on the repetition of great phrases, he never lost his instinctive judgment of people.
"He correctly foresaw the Haughey generation," says Manning. "He could see what would happen to Jack Lynch, whom he saw as a good man, in the fight for the control of Fianna Fail." James Dillon "like the rest of the country," writes Manning, "looked on with fascination, disbelief and a certain distaste as the Fianna Fail succession race developed. He liked Jack Lynch, whom he called `a young man of integrity', and respected George Colley as `an honest, upright man'. But he had no doubt both were expendable in the eye of the group he called the Camorra - Haughey, Brian Lenihan, Neil Blaney, Kevin Boland and Donogh O'Malley - who would `relentlessly pursue their leadership ambitions' whatever the outcome of the contest between Lynch and Colley. The battle, he said, had started already: `There is not an hour, or a day, or a week until they break his (Lynch's) heart, that the clash of knives will not be heard in the corridors of Fianna Fail . . . I do not despair that our people will recoil with loathing from the prospect of replacing a man of integrity, as I believe Deputy Jack Lynch to be, with one of the Camorra who are sharpening their knives and whirling their tomahawks, not only for their enemies but for one another'."
Manning spent six years working on this book. The genesis of it lies partly in his first, The Blueshirts, which was born of his masters degree. The Blueshirt era also features strongly in this book. While researching Dillon's life and career, Manning discovered more material about O'Duffy and his party. Manning is fair to the Blueshirt leader.
"He had good qualities; he did good work with the Guards. I don't think he was crazy but power went to his head. He certainly did lose the run of himself. The Blueshirt story needs to be updated now, but I don't want to do it. Someone else should."
Manning does not approach Dillon as a hero but says that during the course of writing the book: "I came to appreciate and admire his core qualities." Manning praises the integrity and commitment of Dillon who was one of the few full-time politicians in a party which had always attracted part-timers.
Manning presents his subject as aloof and formal, perhaps understating his famous wit in the process, and attributes Dillon's remoteness to his being the son of a distant widower father who treated his children as adults.
Manning hopes the book crosses the divide between history and political science. "I am a political scientist but I'm also a parliamentarian and I bring my own insider's experience of the workings of parliament to the book."
Manning's political career did not develop conventionally. In fact his early flirtation with Young Fine Gael proved little more than that. "I lost interest. I was at UCD and went off for a year." Presented with a choice of scholarships, Notre Dame in the US versus Glasgow's Strathclyde, Manning chose the latter and went off to study what sounds an impossibly dull diet of statistics. He blushes at the memory and admits it was a mistake, influenced by its being nearer to home: "Dublin was great. I was having a good time and didn't want to be too far way. I've never been good at numbers. I was always literary."
On his return to Dublin, politics more or less forgotten, Manning enjoyed his life as a career academic. It was Garret FitzGerald who drew him back in. "He had become leader in 1977 and I found myself running for the European parliament in 1979." He didn't get a seat but enjoyed the campaign. "I was devastated to lose," he says mock theatrically, "the thing about being in a campaign is that you think you are going to win until you don't."
However, shortly after that he entered the Seanad as a cultural and educational nomination and immediately felt at ease in its open forum style of debate. In 1981 he ran again, this time for a Dail seat in Dublin North East. He did well coming within 25 votes of a seat. The next time he ran, in February 1982, he was elected.
According to Manning, FitzGerald was a great leader, he changed the face of Fine Gael. "He inspired people with his idealism, people liked him. He encouraged women to join the party and enter politics." Manning held his seat later that year when the government fell and there was a second general election. Of his five years in the Dail he says: "To be honest, being a government backbencher is very frustrating. If you praise the government you are being sycophantic, if you criticise it, you are being disloyal. You do feel powerless."
Even so, once in the Dail, to lose a seat is painful. "It was awful the way it happened. I thought I was in but then, on the 7th count I wasn't. I have never felt so alone as I did that night coming back from Artane. No one wants to know you. My phones were gone. Politics used to be a very brutal business - your desk was cleared and your papers stuffed into black plastic bags."
Returning to the Seanad pleased him. "I like it there. It's not as competitive, or as confrontational. There is a sense of working together to get things done. There's just more space." The 1980s were not happy for him. "My first marriage ended in 1981 after nine years - and to be honest, things were not going well for me." Looking back he feels he wasted a lot of time. "I regret that now. I feel I'm more productive," he points to the book. He has since remarried and has a nine-year-old son. By temperament Manning is impatient and working on the book was demanding because of the amount of research. "At times I thought there was just too much to do."
While he considers Dillon has been overlooked, Manning does not consider his biography as a patriotic gesture. "No I wrote it as a work of scholarship and hope it to be judged as such, while also of course I want it to be read." Nor does he identify with his subject, which is a relief. Manning is a disciplined writer and avoids the familiar. There are several biographies yet to be written he says: "W.T. Cosgrave the founding father - I feel he has been written out of history and Costello, Patrick McGilligan and of course de Valera."
Now that the myth has been questioned, how does he feel about de Valera? "His reputation has taken a pasting, but I think he is a great figure. He was an idealist, but I do feel his stand during the Civil War will always affect the way he is viewed."
Looking now at Dillon, who died in 1986, Manning says his career did not end in failure. In contrast, his father, when poised to take over as leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party on John Redmond's death, saw the opportunity whipped away from him by Sinn Fein's shock triumph in the 1918 general election. Dillon then lost his seat in Mayo to de Valera.
"John Dillon had sat in Westminister and had had a long career which ended abruptly." Whereas the father who died in 1927 emerges as a tragic figure, James Dillon's experience of life and politics was different.
"James died a happy man. I'm sure of that. He went when he wanted to", and he refers to a remark Dillon made to his nephew: " `It's all very well to bore other people, but when you begin to bore yourself, it is probably time to quit'."
No one could accuse Manning of gloating over today's scandals and he does not want to comment on them. "There's been enough said," and he shrugs: "What's the point?" But he does agree the statesmen of the past, the likes of W.T. Cosgrave, John A. Costello, de Valera, Lemass and James Dillon, would be shocked. "Of course they would, even though Dillon saw it coming. They would all be disgusted. Just as we all are now."
James Dillon: A Biography by Maurice Manning is published by Wolfhound Press at £25.
