THE VINCENT BROWNE INTERVIEW/Maurice Hayes: He looks a bit like Seamus Heaney, jowly with the thick shock of greying hair. He has a little of Heaney's humour and nonchalance as well, but the voice is very different: his is very much more guttural.
Our paths had never crossed previously, apart for a brief encounter in the Shelbourne Hotel when I was interviewing Chris Patten.
We met in Dublin Castle on Tuesday, the day Gorbachev was in town. He has an office in the area known as the State Apartments but there isn't much stately about his office, which is more like an elongated cell. It is beside those occupied by the Moriarty tribunal team.
Wally Kirwan, a long-standing and distinguished civil servant of the Taoiseach's Office, found me wandering around Castle Yard and brought me to the chairman of the Forum for Europe - Wally has been seconded to the Forum for its duration. Maurice Hayes started talking about Europe straight away, complaining about the impenetrability of Euro-speak, the toppling acronyms and how this was all new to him when he was asked to become forum chairman.
He has been more a career chairman than was Mao Zedong and has been on more bodies than George Best.
He was chairman of the Community Relations Commission in Northern Ireland (resigning after Bloody Sunday), then a senior civil servant in Stormont for years - while there he was head of personnel and later head of the Department of Health. He was Ombudsman in Northern Ireland, he was head of the commission that led to the setting up of the position of Police Ombudsman, he was head of a review body on local government, he served on the Patten commission on policing, he did a review of the hospital services in Northern Ireland and he is now a Senator down here.
He was born over 74 years ago (he doesn't look it) in Killough, Co Down. He went to the local primary school there and then to De La Salle Brothers in Downpatrick, then to Queen's where he read English. After Queen's he taught for seven years in Downpatrick and became town clerk there, then went to the Community Relations Commission and into the civil service in the brief heady days of "post-Sunningdale" in 1974. He was the senior Stormont castle-Catholic, working alongside the renowned Northern Ireland mandarin, Ken Bloomfield.
He was around when the power-sharing executive fell in May 1974 - Brian Faulkner came into their office with a bottle of whiskey and they drank it at "the wake of Sunningdale", as John Hume described it. He stuck around expecting a restoration, biding his time in the Department of Health before moving on to other things.
Bertie Ahern asked him to be one of his nominees to the Seanad after the 1997 general election, he agreed on condition that he would be an independent senator. He has voted a few times against the government, one of these occasions being on the abortion referendum - he doesn't think there should be a referendum.
He is on the board of Independent News and Media and I thought he might have had a part in the lobbying that went on to get Tony O'Reilly a knighthood. He said he had nothing to do with it and didn't even know about it until it became public knowledge.
We started the formal interview on the issue of the new policing arrangements for Northern Ireland.
VB: Do you think it is a pity that the Patten Commission recommendations haven't been adopted in full?
MH: Yes. I thought the simplest thing for a [British] government to do was to say, we've got these independent people [on the Patten commission], come from all over the world and they were people of considerable standing actually in their own fields. They've gone around, they've talked to everybody and they've come up with this and we just say "snap" and implement it. I thought [Peter] Mandelson [the former Northern Ireland Secretary] played it too politically really. I know what he was trying to do. He was trying to throw a lifebelt to Trimble, but they're back at roughly where Patten had recommended, so that Trimble in that sense is no better off and in the meantime, they actually lost the goodwill and the confidence really of the nationalists and republicans and I thought there was a huge opportunity lost there.
VB: Asking all members of the new force to declare that they would respect human rights is not something that is very much to ask [of existing police members], is it?
MH: No. I think there were technical difficulties about re-swearing people who had been sworn, but the other side of the coin was that there was a declaration of ethics which was to incorporate that. The human rights requirements were to be and are, I think, included in the Disciplinary Code so that they were doing it in another way. I think it would have been probably handier just for everybody to do it but it got stuck in the mud.
VB: Another issue has to do with the Special Branch and the perception that the Special Branch within the old RUC was a force within a force. Again the Patten recommendations on that seemed to be relatively straightforward. I don't understand why they were not implemented.
MH: Nor do I. I mean this is a thing that occurs in most forces. It was interesting that when we were doing that [hearing representations in the course of the Patten Commission's work], the main representations regarding the Special Branch came actually from uniformed policemen. They said, look these guys are coming in, they're searching 100 houses when two would do, we're left to pick up the pieces and what have you.
What we were concerned about was two things. One was that they should be bracketed along with the ordinary crime branch under the same assistant chief constable and secondly, that there shouldn't be endless tenure that nobody should be left so long [in the Special Branch] that the organisation would take on a personality of its own, separate from the rest of the force. I didn't think that we were asking for anything that was out of the way or outlandish or out of keeping with this practice elsewhere.
VB: The policing reforms were a unique opportunity to resolve the Northern Ireland issue completely, because if you solve the police problem in Northern Ireland, you solve everything. It was an opportunity to tie in the republicans on the policing issue. It would have been "it" really. Such a pity that they didn't just do it, isn't it?
MH: I think by and large the Patten report got a fairly good reception across the board. I think the republicans would have bought into it if it had been quickly implemented at the time.
VB: Can it be rescued now?
MH: Yes, I think it can but a lot will depend on the sort of leadership that the new police board gives and a lot will depend, crucially I think, on whoever is appointed to succeed Ronnie Flanagan, and where they get that person from.
VB: Where do you think they should get this person from?
MH: Well, I would look maybe to Canada. They should look abroad anyway.
VB: Abroad, you mean not just to the UK?
MH: Yes, not to the UK. I just think particularly the Canadians [would be well suited]. The best places that we found for police training [anywhere we visited] were the Canadian police and the Garda. The Canadian police force was built on the model of the RIC as were so many police forces. But these were colonial police forces and the Canadians have been spending sometime trying to change the culture and the ethos of the force. I think somebody who has all that experience would have a lot to offer. Also I think culturally, it's maybe easier for a Canadian to deal with Northern Ireland people.
VB: Moving on to the Forum on Europe, it has attracted very little attention and hasn't really resulted in the debate on Europe that people have been calling for. What are you going to do about it?
MH: Well we are going to take it out of here [Dublin Castle] for one and take it down the country to Waterford, Limerick, Galway, Tullamore, Donegal, Monaghan, Athlone, Artane and Tallaght, in an attempt to get the debate going. That, in a sense, is borrowing from the Patten Commission technique, where we went and had these local meetings which were an amazing example, I thought, of participative democracy. Whether people react in the same way to Europe is another thing, but it does at least get the debate into the local press and into local radio.
VB: One of the big difficulties with the Nice Treaty is the complexity of it and the impenetrability of it and, in a sense, it's showing contempt to an electorate to present them with a document that, even if they read it in full, they couldn't understand it, without recourse to several other documents. So the question arises why should people approve of something they don't understand?
MH: I think that's a big part of the reason why they didn't turn out, because of the stuff that's in it and the opinion poll survey [undertaken and analysed by UCD political scientist, Richard Sinnott] said that the bulk of people who didn't vote in the referendum didn't vote because they didn't know [what was involved], nobody had explained it to them, they were confused. I agree with you, Nice is a highly technical document, it's an enabling thing more than anything else and I think it's very, very difficult to ask people to vote for Sub Section 2 of Section 4 of some impenetrable thing like that, I think they were quite well capable of making up their minds on issues like what difference does it make to me, what difference does it make to our kids and the rest of it.
VB: Would you have voted against it?
MH: No. I wouldn't, actually. But I'm not sure that I would have known what I was voting for either.
VB: One of the issues certainly involved in the Nice Treaty concerns a dilution of the veto powers of member-states and, by implication, a transfer of powers from the sovereign states to European institutions which remain unaccountable and unanswerable. On the democratic basis, shouldn't people be sceptical about voting for something such as this?
MH: Of course they should. A lot of these things that concerned people regarding Nice don't kick in actually until after enlargement or for some time ahead. Certainly the one that worries people a lot was the number of commissioners - whether every state would have a commissioner.
But there will be no change on this until there are 27 states in the Union and even then they would have to sit down and work out what they do. So, there is the opportunity, I think, to recover a lot of that ground through the convention [recently established under the chairmanship of the former French president, Giscard d'Estaing] and it's one of the things I think that would have required to have a forum, or something like a forum, whether the Nice Treaty had been ratified or not to prepare for an Irish contribution to that debate. The French have just completed a very widespread consultation on Europe rather like we're doing.
VB: Why should people vote for the Nice Treaty which leaves in abeyance all these important issues to do with democracy? Why shouldn't they say: "Well, we're not having this but if you come up with some solutions to these difficulties in the new constitution that is being drafted then we will think again"?
MH: Yes, that is an argument people will make. I was reading an article there by a couple of Swedish academics who had concerns about the Nice Treaty and voted against it but they sort of said "OK, let's take it, repair it" and that's another approach. In other words, the important thing from most people's point of view in the short term is the enlargement and let's get that done and go on.
VB: Enlargement will hardly be held up by our refusal to ratify the Nice Treaty. It should be possible to have a new constitution for Europe in place before most of the enlargement takes place, so the question arises: why shouldn't the Irish people wait to see if the new constitution deals adequately with their concerns, including concerns over the democratic nature of the European Union?
MH: Those are the things that we are hearing. Basically, what is coming through [at the forum] is that there is no strong voice expressed against enlargement per se, that there was no antipathy to any of the applicant countries but there were serious concerns and reservations about things like neutrality and governance and about accountability.
VB: Does it matter much that Fine Gael aren't taking part in the forum?
MH: Well, it would be better if they did. I would certainly much prefer that they did as a major political party and as a party which has had a deep and abiding interest in Europe for long since.
At the same time, I keep telling people that the forum has no monopoly on the debate, the forum doesn't own Europe. The more the debate goes on around the country in different venues in different places, the better.
VB: One of the ways of maximising the chances of the Nice Treaty being accepted would be to hold the referendum on the same day as the general election, which would mean a high turn-out.
MH: It is not clear that a higher turn-out the last time would have resulted in a different result - that is one of the conclusions of the Sinnott survey.
Also, there hasn't been a great record I think in relation to referendums and elections being held on the same day. I mean, people have come up with quite different answers for the two [the substantive issue in the abortion referendum in 1992, held on the same day as the general election, was defeated, as was a PR referendum defeated in 1959].
I do agree with you in a sense that it is important that if there was another vote on Europe there should be a sizeable turnout. I think that could probably be maximised if people had it on the same day as the general election. One of the worries I would have is of sort of electoral fatigue in the course of the year, because we are about to have an abortion referendum and then a general election, so fatigue may be a factor.
VB: Would you favour the referendum being held on the same day as the general election?
MH: That's if we are having a referendum, yes. I don't think it will happen.