THE VINCENT BROWNE INTERVIEW/Dick Spring: "There's a lot to be done at local level. We have enormous social problems which have to be addressed."
Dick Spring is learning to play the piano nowadays. He is also learning Spanish. Sounds like "smelling the roses" but Dick Spring hasn't gone away you know, although the electorate of Kerry North might have had reason to think that up to recently.
Were it not for his high-profile embarrassment over Eircom, he would have hardly registered on the public awareness Richter-scale since he left the leadership of the Labour Party.
Over the last four years he has lectured at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and done some courses himself there (while at Harvard he stayed in the same room that John F Kennedy occupied when he was a Harvard student in the 1940s). He has had an involvement in several international projects, such as assisting the Finnish government prepare for its presidency of the European Union. He has also taken on directorship of several companies, apart from Eircom, including an aircraft maintenance company in Cork, a financial consultancy company, a software company.
The location of his Dáil office underscores his withdrawal. It is in the old part of the building, an office that Éamon de Valera used in the 1930s and was later the office of the Labour leader for years. When the Labour Party TDs moved out to the gleaming new wing on the opposite side of Leinster House, Dick Spring moved into these offices, with his redoubtable secretary/sentinel, Sally Clarke, and they remain there in isolation.
It's a magnificent office, by far the finest I have seen in Leinster House. Splendid paintings on the wall, several the property of the State, fine high windows and lots of space. Also around the office are photographs of his wife and children (a daughter in university, a son playing rugby in New Zealand and a younger son still at school) and of himself and Bill Clinton.
He was more relaxed than I have seem him in years, no personal barbs, almost cordial.
Without question he is the most successful leader the Labour Party has had; arguably he has been the most successful politician of his generation.
If Labour do not get back into government after the election, there could be a vacancy in the Labour leadership and the party might want to look to a younger man.
Dick Spring is 51, four years younger than Ruairí Quinn.
VB: Why are you bothering to stand in the election, you've seen it all before politically. Why not pursue other interests?
DS: My decision to step down from the leadership in 1997 was because I didn't think I could face up to the trips around the country again and building up the party all over again. Being leader of the party means being away from home four or five days a week and I had had 15 years of that, so I decided to do other things. If you had asked me five years ago (would I remain in politics) I probably would have said I don't know or I'm considering other options. My sister probably would have been a candidate this time but she had her own personal tragedy: her husband died and she got very ill - she is recovering now. I had a loyalty to the Labour Party in North Kerry and anyway I am now re-energised.
VB: What other options did you consider?
DS: There were a number of international possibilities, which I considered. At one stage, in the early days, there was a possibility of the European job which Javier Solana does now. I had serious negotiations with the Austrian presidency at that time but personally I didn't believe that a small country would get that job. And since, there have been a number of offers from the UN in relation to the Bosnia. But I'd have to say to you that I enjoy living in Kerry and I want to stay in Kerry.
VB: Did you consider business options?
DS: Not in any full-time sense.
VB: What do you think of the Fine Gael proposal to compensate Eircom shareholders [Spring was a member of the Eircom board]?
DS: I don't think it has a great deal of credibility. Some people made money out of the stock market, those who got out early made money after the initial flotation. I think a lot of people wanted to stay there for the long-term, they are now dependent on their Vodaphone shares, if they will get value back from that.
VB: Why did you not buy shares yourself?
DS: At the time, I didn't consider buying shares. I had certain other commitments which I think are well known. In retrospect, vis à vis the Eircom AGM (at which he was challenged on why he did not buy shares), it obviously would have been far better had I bought shares.
VB: How do you think Ruairí Quinn has fared as Leader of the Labour Party?
DS: I think Ruairí has done a good job, he's doing a good job. Ruairí has an enormous passion for politics and for values in Irish life and I think he is very well poised to do very well in this election.
VB: People talked of the Spring tide in 1992, there isn't even a Quinn trickle nowadays?
DS: I wouldn't know. I have been out canvassing in North Kerry for the last number of weeks and whereas people are very polite and cordial, there isn't the election concentration or focus and I think that when it comes down to the hard choices like the election, I think the Labour Party will do well.
VB: Going back to your time as leader of the party and as Tánaiste, is there anything you regret from the time that you were in Government from 1992 to 1997?
DS: Two regrets, I suppose, over the 15 years of leadership. One was that the '97 election was very bad for the Labour Party. I mean, we were poised at one stage with 33 seats, I thought that at that stage we were poised to possibly at least sustain that, possibly increase that.
If we had done that, I think it would have changed the dynamics of Irish politics in terms of the other two parties. That would be one regret and I suppose the other regret of the '90s period was the tax amnesty.
VB: What are you proud of in terms of the achievements of those Governments from '92 to '97?
DS: The peace process, obviously, and the ceasefire in '94 obviously was a big factor. Negotiating the framework documents subsequently, which was extremely difficult because John Major was in a very weak position to bring that about.
I think the framework documents were the foundation to the Good Friday agreement. That was I think, a remarkable success. Our European presidency I think, was second to none.
VB: CORI has said that all the budgets of that period (1992-1997), all favoured the rich rather than the poor. That surely must have been a disappointment from a Labour perspective?
DS: I have enormous respect for Father Sean Healy (of CORI) and the work that he has done over the years. I would also say to you that we did try over those years to make sure that any improvements that were taking place were aimed at the less well off. That was the motivating factor. I think we now realise that to achieve some of these things takes longer than people realise and I think the anti-poverty strategy put in place originally by that government I think is now being seen to bear fruit.
VB: There were also controversies about party funding. After the European elections in 1994 a proposal was made internally in the Labour Party to seek funding from corporations but you took a principled stand against this, even though the party was in serious debt at the time.
Then, without telling party officers, you yourself organised contributions from a number of corporations, including the Smurfit group and a bank, and instead of putting this money into the party coffers, you used it to relieve a liability which you and a few others had incurred personally in relation to those elections. How to you explain that?
DS: I would love to see a situation where there was no corporate sponsorship of politics and if you look back at the development of Irish politics, I think, when TACA (a Fianna Fáil fund-raising organisation established in the early 1960s) was allowed to be set up, I think it was a very, very low point for Irish politics.
That probably was the starting point of the process of business meeting with politics.
I probably resented the fact that the big parties were getting money left, right and centre and that we were not getting money to any extent (from business). Fundamentally, I have always said that I would prefer to see a situation where political parties are funded from the public purse.
VB: You stated as a matter of principle that there should be no contributions sought from corporations and then you yourself went off and organised contributions from corporations and used these contributions to relieve a personal liability (this was a bank guarantee which he and three others had given for a loan to fund the ill-fated Orla Guerin European election campaign in 1994).
DS: Which four of us had guaranteed, yes.
VB: Shouldn't the money have gone into party coffers?
DS: Well, I mean the guarantee, if you like, was for party funding, for party purposes and again, at the time, money was scarce and we needed to organise money, we needed to fight election campaigns.
VB: Your father (Dan Spring who was Labour TD for Kerry North from 1943 to 1981) was a very different politician to you, he was much more a local politician, more conservative.
DS: It was a very different era. He was one of 14 children who fought his way up through hard work, and was very loyal to his people in North Kerry.
At times I think he found it an intrusion having to come up to Dublin to worry about the Labour Party and things that were happening in Dublin. I'd also say that he made an enormous contribution to North Kerry between the 40s and 70s.
VB: He was uncomfortable with the "intellectual wing" of the Labour Party that arrived in 1969 (Conor Cruise O'Brien, Justin Keating, David Thornley, John O'Donovan)
DS: Yes he was very uncomfortable with the parachute brigade which came in to save the Labour Party intellectually.
VB: Your father would also have been uncomfortable with what he would have perceived as Conor Cruise O'Brien's pro-unionist stance.
DS: Oh absolutely. The attitude was quite simple: we want our Six Counties back. Nobody ever told us that there was a million people up there who had different ideas.
VB: Did you discuss politics much with him.
DS: Every day; if I didn't discuss it with him my mother made sure we did. I took an interest in politics I would say when I was 15, 16 years of age, I wanted to be in politics, I wanted to be with him, I wanted tobe working with him. I went to meetings with him. As soon as I got my licence, I would drive anywhere for him, with him. He was a very big man in the landscape of North Kerry and it was very easy to be proud and comfortable when you were with him in the political gatherings or for that matter in the sporting gatherings.
VB: Your mother was also very political?
DS: She was, and I think it came from her background. She had gone to Mount Sackville in Dublin and would have wanted to go on to be a doctor but her family, small farmers in north Kerry, could not afford university education for her. I think that influenced her all her life.
She became a psychiatric nurse and spent a lot of her time working with young people. She was a good woman, a strong woman.
VB: What more is there to achieve in politics for you?
DS: There's an awful lot to be done at local level, I still think that we have enormous social problems which have to be addressed. One area of worry in Irish society at the present time is the drift that's taking place in young people which is leading to violence on our streets at night time all over this country and I think that we have to renew what I would describe as a social contract with young people to bring them in from the cold where they are at the moment.
On other levels, I think it's about ensuring that Ireland remains a successful economy and spreading the fruits of that success evenly to make sure that we bring people out of the poverty trap and enhance people's lives, empower people.