Pat Magner, one of the most effective behind-the-scenes operators in Irish politics, is retiring, writes Mark Hennessy, Political Correspondent
Short of cash and told to organise a crowd for one of Frank Cluskey's first visits to Cork, Labour Party handler Pat Magner took the unusual step of hiring a camera crew knowing they had no film in their camera.
Following Cluskey's succession to Brendan Corish as Labour leader, Magner was to organise a party rally in Cork city's Imperial Hotel. Labour was in the doldrums after Fianna Fáil's sweeping 1977 election triumph, and Cluskey, though a TD since 1965, was not well known outside the capital.
"He was very decent, very gruff, but he was much happier in Leinster House - not just Dublin, but Leinster House. But he wasn't hugely known nationally," he recalls.
How to generate a crowd scene in Cork for his virtually unknown leader? Hamstrung by the party's empty coffers, Magner hired a commercial cameraman, who was just then developing a business recording weddings, to attend the walkabout and rally. "The cameraman, who had a lighting operator with him, offered a price, including film. I told him I didn't want film. I just wanted him to turn up," Magner says.
Attracted by camera lights, a large crowd "all thinking that they were going to be on the news" had gathered by the time Cluskey's entourage had reached Patrick Street. "When you didn't have money, you had to try and box clever, which was something that we had to remember more than once over the years in Labour," he says jokingly.
Magner this week retires as Labour's national organiser, (although he will remain on the party's election planning committee). Having joined Labour in 1959, Magner has been a national figure within it from the late 1970s, when he first joined the party's ruling Administrative Council. Since then, he has been a senator and the one who knocked heads together to sort out election tickets - which is never a job for the weak-kneed.
Through it all, Magner has been popular with most, tough and a pragmatist.
Raised in Cork's Gerald Griffin Street, he joined the merchant navy at 14: "I spent my sixteenth birthday in Venezuela in the same place where Dick Spring later spent his honeymoon."
Aged 11, he joined the republican boy scouts, Fianna Éireann, which gave him a "very republican view of life" - a view buttressed by classes run by Terence MacSwiney's sister.
"Then I read James Connolly's Labour in Irish History. It was a completely different history to the one that I had up to then. It had the same impact on me as Allen Carr's book did later," he says.
By the late 1950s, Magner was back in Cork working in Dunlops: "The only way to get a job there was to have family working there, or to have a letter from Jack Lynch."
In the early 1980s, Magner became a close ally of Dick Spring, and organised the secret printing of the 1982 coalition deal with Fine Gael leader Garret FitzGerald. The document was printed in Cork in the early hours, as RTÉ continued to report that negotiations were still ongoing, and rushed to Limerick for the party's special congress.
The motion just passed, helped by an influential speech from Spring, which had been written in great haste by Fergus Finlay, who had been drafted in by Magner with just a day's notice.
The 1982/87 coalition was, he says, so different to Labour's later 1992/94 alliance with Fianna Fáil. "In the first, the two leaders were very close, but the Cabinet ministers weren't particularly.
"In the second, the leaders weren't close, but the other people at the Cabinet were. They did not want that government to fall," he says. Neither did Magner, who was, and is, generally liked by FF.
Magner was deeply involved, along with Brendan Howlin and Fianna Fáil's Charlie McCreevy and Noel Dempsey, in the bid to patch the coalition back together after the Fr Brendan Smyth crisis. Though ostensibly it fell over the paedophile priest, the beef tribunal was the real rupture, where, he says, Spring and FF's Albert Reynolds had agreed to say nothing for three days after Liam Hamilton's final report came out. Reynolds, however, moved within hours to claim vindication. "Albert believed that he had to get his version of events on the record first," says Magner, shaking his head. Reynolds's successor, Bertie Ahern is, he believes, unmatched: "Nobody, but nobody in my view matches Ahern. Despite everything, he is still there standing.
"He would be brilliant in the fire brigade, because he has this way of dampening down fire and smoke like nobody else," he adds jokingly.
Though "hugely committed" and "terribly bright", Labour's Pat Rabbitte is "somewhat cold", while opponents who underestimate FG leader Enda Kenny are making "a huge mistake". "I saw him when he was a minister [for tourism and trade]. There is more steel there than people realise, a lot more," he comments.
Rabbitte's remarks in January about immigration, when he said "there are 40 million or so Poles after all, so it is an issue we have to have a look at", clearly rankle with Magner though he chooses his words carefully. "Immigration always brings problems. We brought problems with us to Britain and the US. The only caveat I have is that you have to be very careful about focus group analysis to current problems.
"Furthermore, immigration is a modern phenomenon that will not go away. You have to deal with that in a way that respects human rights and dignity," he says, leaving the impression that Rabbitte did neither.
He believes that FG and Labour must move faster to agree policies and put them before the public. "They must look like a government-in-waiting. It doesn't matter whether the ideas are taken up by FF, or not."