He is driven by a sense of his own importance, but the controversy over travel expenses may mean the end of the road for Ivor the Engine, writes HARRY MCGEE, Political Correspondent
WHEN IVOR CALLELY stood up on Wednesday to read out his personal statement in the Seanad there was a sense that he could salvage his political career if he carefully chose his words and tone.
The short speech, responding to revelations that he claimed €81,000 for travel and overnight expenses to his west Cork holiday home between 2007 and 2009, evoked powerful memories of similar defences delivered by prominent Fianna Fáil personalities in the past. Unfortunately for Callely, they were all the wrong Fianna Fáil figures.
Its hubristic tone and self-referencing was reminiscent of Ray Burke in full flow. The complete side-skipping of the main issues, combined with mangled prose, was pure Bertie Ahern. And its most memorable phrase – with its refererence to multiple residences and its arrogant sense of self-importance – carried echoes of Pee Flynn’s gaffe on The Late Late Show that spelled curtains for his career.
“I have always indicated that I have a west Cork residence, a Clontarf home and a constituency office in Dublin North Central, and travel from all three depending on circumstances to fulfil my Senate duties.” All that was missing was a sprinkling of references to himself in the third person. You will find plenty of those elsewhere from him.
The most astonishing aspect of his fall from grace was the complete absence of empathy from political colleagues. Worse, the tone of assessments from political friend and foe was uniformly negative. In terms of redeeming features, his capacity for hard work was mentioned. Others remembered only the controversies, most self-inflicted, that have pockmarked his career.
There has always been something about Ivor Callely that has set him apart. He is – to employ the word that he used about the expenses system this week – an anomaly. He has been a member of Fianna Fáil for over 30 years, but you do not get a sense that he is of Fianna Fáil. His loud pinstripe suits, coiffed hair and perma-tan made him look more like an extra from the movie Goodfellas than a common or garden TD. Then there were the trappings: the Range Rover, the big house, the fancy motorboat, the famous holiday home in Kilcrohane.
He has never expressed any strong ideology that points to the party, other than a general pro-business outlook. As a point of fact, his most outspoken views were his crass denunciation of asylum seekers in the late 1990s. He accused them of a culture that was alien to Ireland, including “the bleeding of lambs in the back garden”.
To his credit, he built up his power base in Clontarf. As Tom Humphries once noted, the well-to-do seaside suburb is “a corner of the northside that will be forever southside”. Fianna Fáil had no presence there before Callely emerged.
He has never hidden his grand ambition: in an RTÉ interview in the autumn of 2005 he declared he wanted to be Taoiseach. But his ambition and ego were never accompanied by depth of thinking or any self-understanding. For Callely’s great political project was Ivor Callely.
His downfall was his failure to understand that not everybody else shared his vision. Or agreed with him that corners could be cut, abrasive tactics used, enemies made and rules broken to advance that goal.
Callely has always displayed hostility towards any political rivals, although he can be affable in company. “He was a formidable opponent. He ran big campaigns with huge resources,” says the independent Dublin North Central deputy Finian McGrath. “I have a good relationship with the other TDs, Sean Haughey and Richard Bruton. But no relationship whatsoever with Ivor. There is no love lost between us.”
According to a former Fianna Fáil offical who dealt with him in the past, “He is the greatest self-publicist I have ever seen, and this is saying something. He was obsessed with publicity. He would stop at nothing to achieve that goal. It was both entertaining and disturbing to witness.” Two of the nicknames he has collected during his career – Ivor the Engine and Ivor the Conniver – bear testament to his strongest traits: his strong work ethic and his shameless self-promotion.
CALLELY WAS BORN in Dublin in 1958 and educated at St Paul’s in Raheny and Fairview College. He graduated with a diploma in business studies and worked as a representative for a pharmaceutical company.
His political breakthrough came in 1985 when he was elected to Dublin City Council. He made his Dáil breakthrough in 1989 when Fianna Fáil won three seats out of four in the constituency. It was an impressive performance, as the then-taoiseach, Charles Haughey, was the dominant personality, and Callely’s success was a direct challenge to the Haughey regime. There has been a long-standing enmity since then between him and the Haugheys.
His graft was legendary. He devoted Michael Ring-like levels of energy to his work. He also had an eye for the gimmick. He had a caravan that he hauled around the constituency with a Day-Glo tangerine VW Beetle. “Ivor Callely is here to meet you,” read its livery.
His energy marked him out early as a ministerial prospect. But it is clear from the time he did not recognise boundaries between his political life and his personal interests. Controversies inevitably cropped up, initially when his wife, Jennifer, won the franchise to run the hairdressing salon in the new Beaumont Hospital in 1987, when Callely was chair of the Eastern Health Board. At the time too there were questions about Calley’s involvement with a company called Eurokabin, which collapsed in 1992 with debts of £7 million.
His political fundraising events were more successful. He organised golf classics and an annual dinner in the Dáil for supporters. In 2005 the €70,000 he raised at a golf classic at the K Club amounted to half of all donations declared that year by the 166 TDs in the Dáil.
He waited 13 years for promotion. Taoiseach Bertie Ahern made him a junior minister in 2002, initially with responsibility for the elderly in the Department of Health. His record was poor. Paul Murray of Age Action Ireland said of him at the time: “We never found him to be totally engaged or to understand fully the issues. He was difficult to deal with.”
Callely was no slouch on the publicity front. In his first ministry in health, he accounted for twice as much of the photographic budget as the senior minister, Micheál Martin. Later, in transport, he got referred to the Standards in Public Office Commission for putting a prominent image of himself on Operation Freeflow billboards.
There was a high attrition rate of staff in his office. During four years as a junior minister, six of his staff transferred or left. According to those who worked with him, he had Napoleonic tendencies and was unreasonably demanding. He also started to encroach on the territory of senior ministers. Martin Cullen had to pin his ears back for solo runs on matters that were Cullen’s responsibility.
THE END OF his ministerial career came in December 2005. His first difficulty was when two of his staff resigned because of difficulties with his style. When it came to light that he had offered to buy his personal assistant a car to stay in the job, an annoyed Bertie Ahern told him that he was on his last chance. Within days a new controversy broke. A big construction company, John Paul, arranged for Callely’s home in Clontarf to be painted for free in the early 1990s. The writing was on the wall.
It descended into farce. Ahern tried to force his resignation but could not locate Callely. The Budget of that year was eclipsed by the affair. The next morning a very annoyed finance minister, Brian Cowen, was left kicking his heels for half an hour waiting for his post-Budget interview with Pat Kenny on RTÉ to begin. The reason for the delay? Callely was giving a rambling defence of himself on air. The interview was long on self-justification and victimhood, and short on humility.
His career plummeted after that. He was reportedly inconsolable after losing his Dáil seat in 2007. He misery was compounded by failure to win election to the Seanad. Many were surprised to see him named as one of Bertie Ahern’s 11 nominations to the Upper House.
Callely’s work rate in the constituency fell dramatically after 2007. Those who know him said that the double blow of losing his ministry and his Dáil seat badly affected him. On a huge health kick, he now exercises daily and has lost a lot of weight. He hit the headlines briefly last summer when two boat owners in west Cork said his motor cruiser struck their boats while berthing, causing €40,000 worth of damage.
And then, in the past week, the Ivor the Driver story broke. In the world of politics, it was one controversy too far.
