Profile: The fuss about Martin Cullen's PR adviser, Monica Leech, 'won't go away' - and his enemies are sensing their opportunity, writes Kathy Sheridan.
'You'd wonder how much of this is down to jealousy," sniffed the Martin Cullen man, radiating contempt for the media "fuss" about t|he Monica Leech business. It may well be Monica Leech's misfortune that she has been cast as a fall-guy for the entire PR (public relations) industry, but the fact is there is much to be jealous about.
The woman hired as a communications consultant by the then minister for the environment, Martin Cullen, within three weeks of the 2002 general election, during which she had campaigned and carried out paid work for him, has famously clocked up €127,775 this year alone, for a three-day week. That's more per day than the Taoiseach.
So far, Leech's two-and-a-half year part-time contract with the department has yielded a handsome total of €310,000.
But it is her rocket-like ascendancy from brand-new PR company (sole operator, Monica Leech) in December 2001 to €1,000-a-day "communications specialist" seven months later, that has inspired shock and awe in media/PR circles.
Her career path - which included working as a sales rep for a Waterford radio station and as a sales manager for Jury's Hotel - led to a job as chief executive of Waterford Tourism, a period which happily coincided with then minister of state Martin Cullen's stint at the Office of Public Works (OPW).
In December 2001, at a Waterford city function to announce a €1.27 million grant and the involvement of OPW in the restoration of Christ Church Cathedral, Cullen, as minister of State at the OPW, also took the opportunity to announce the appointment of Monica Leech as project coordinator, on behalf of the OPW. Whereupon Leech immediately announced that she was setting up her own company, Monica Leech Communications.
According to the OPW, the six-month contract, worth around €2,158 a month (or standard executive officer grade), was actually for the job of information coordinator - "responding to local issues and queries" - for the OPW and the minister of State's office, and related to a number of projects locally, not merely the cathedral.
Once that ended, in June 2002, she was retained for a further 12 months on the same terms, for "event management" relating specifically to the Glen building and North Quay projects, mainly because of her local knowledge. The last payment to her was made in July 2003 and the 18-month contract was worth €42,902 in total.
In the meantime, of course, Cullen had been elevated to cabinet level as minister for the environment and in July 2002 had brought her in as his "communications specialist" on €800 a day plus 21 per cent VAT. The two contracts therefore overlapped by about a year.
A large part of the media fuss relates to the fact that in that dog-eat-dog world, she was saved the bothersome chore of tendering for the job because, as her boss has since explained: "I needed a communications specialist at the time, given the scale of the challenge that was involved in the spatial strategy, and I needed someone to assist me in that regard."
The fact that Drury Communications had been hired two years earlier, for precisely that purpose, apparently rendered the urgency of Leech's appointment no less pressing - so pressing that the minister overrode the customary tendering process (which he was officially allowed to do in cases of "extreme urgency") and awarded an immediate six-month contract to his long-time political supporter.
When the tendering process for a second, longer, contract was triggered in November 2002, Monica Leech Communications (finally incorporated as a company a month later in December 2002) managed to beat off the only other competitor, Carr Communications. This generated more media fuss, of course, given that Carr would have settled for fees of €600 to €700 a day.
AT ONE LEVEL, no one seems to dispute Leech's ability to do the job. She is described as "very capable, impressive, a great public speaker" by an independent-minded Waterford business person.
At another level, however, there is some curiosity as to what precisely it is that she does (not an uncommon conundrum in the PR business, to be fair), either within the department or on her world travels with Cullen - which have included visits to Johannesburg, New York, Singapore, Paris, Stockholm, Kiev and The Hague - when the travelling party also included a ministerial press officer. Few journalists, local or national, recall having any dealings with her.
Cullen's forceful rejection of a Sunday newspaper's suggestion that his relationship with Leech, a married mother of two, went beyond politics or business is generally accepted. But he is perceived to have yielded several hostages to fortune during his RTÉ interview, by claiming that she was hired to help with the spatial strategy report (when help was already in place) and defending her fees as appropriate for a company "of that size" (when it wouldn't even be incorporated as a company for a further six months).
Meanwhile, Monica Leech Communications has turned the classic PR advice on its head and ignored journalists' calls. Apart from telling RTÉ that the past few weeks have been "dreadful", she has refused to comment further, citing legal advice. The company answers by way of answering machine. Leech Noctor International, announced in mid-November as a new company, in partnership with Today FM's head of news, Ian Noctor, and described as "an expansion of Monica's communications consultancy", with offices in Waterford, Dublin and New York, has no listed numbers.
In the Leech Noctor press release, Leech is described as having "many years' experience in business running Leech Communications which provides communications advice to public and private clients, including the Department of the Environment, for whom she headed up the award-winning 'Race Against Waste' campaign".
For a while, it looked like a story that might flash and fade, mainly because of the intrusive style of the original reporting. But when the Taoiseach conceded in the Dáil this week that "it won't go away" and that "it would not look the way it does" had there been competing bidders for the initial contract, there was no going back. When the Taoiseach accepted Labour leader Pat Rabbitte's call for an independent review, Cullen must surely have felt his fragile support slipping away, even while publicly welcoming the investigation.
The intrusive manner and style of Ireland on Sunday's original reporting of the story might have been expected to garner cross-party sympathy for the Minister for Transport, who is separated from his wife and has young children. In his RTÉ interview, he described the invasion of his family's privacy as "entirely inappropriate and morally wrong". It included, he said, the "uninvited" entering of the home of his wife and children. Yet even Fianna Fáil backbenchers are not exactly scrambling on to the Leinster House plinth to defend him, partly because he is not perceived to have minded the backbenches.
"I can't believe the complete Horlicks he's made of this," said one. "But remember . . . he's not real Fianna Fáil. He's a PD."
He defected 10 years ago, but political memories are long. Among the things that have not been forgotten is the fact that he backed Pat Cox for the PD leadership over Mary Harney and dealt her a further critical blow by leaving the PDs at an early stage in her leadership.
Few in Fianna Fáil took kindly to his performance during a three-day stint as the Cabinet's representative during the summer holidays last year, when he garnered front-page headlines for his mockery of Micheál Martin's anti-smoking strategy, at a time when the health minister was already under sustained pressure.
Labour has also been waiting in the long grass for him since the €51 million e-voting fiasco. Cullen's extraordinary arrogance and contempt towards all who questioned the unproven system, but especially towards Labour voices and expertise, have come back to haunt him. Pat Rabbitte's Dáil onslaught this week was surgical.
MEANWHILE, ALTHOUGH HE is widely perceived to have "delivered" for his own region (including in some highly controversial cases), it failed to deliver for him in the local elections, when his right-hand man in Waterford city, Sean Dower, lost his seat.
Opponents recall with some satisfaction that it was Cullen - the man whose political receipts of €35,000 in 2003 alone were almost twice that of the next largest recipient - who refused to impose a spending cap on the local elections, saying that "shoe leather and knocking on doors" rather than money were the key to winning elections.
For the dapper-dressing, cigarette-eating man, believed to fancy his chances of some day making it to the minister for finance's seat, this week's events will have been a cruel blow.
Talk to reflective constituents, however, and the concern is not so much for Martin Cullen personally, but for a region which last had a cabinet minister in 1979, when Austin Deasy was in Agriculture, and is now in danger of losing its sole Cabinet representative. His problem is that even they concede that there are questions to be answered. There's a rocky road ahead.