INTERVIEW:LAST MONTH, AT the funeral Mass of Limerick rugby player, Shane Geoghegan, reporters logging prominent names in the congregation looked around for John Fitzgerald. While national politicians and city councillors in ceremonial robes were being ushered to reserved seating near the top of the overflowing church, Fitzgerald - the man charged with saving Limerick's heart after decades of neglect by some of the same politicians - was elsewhere in the city, maintaining his customary line between political territory and his own.
Some might call it self-effacing, or an indifference to his public image. In fact, it's more considered that that. During his 10 years as Dublin city manager, the robe of office cherished by his predecessor remained on its hanger. It was to avoid a confusion of roles, he says. "I always wanted to be seen as a member of staff, part of the team driving and leading change. It was a message to them that I was one of them."
No doubt there was also an element of that "healthy disregard for pomp and ceremony" that he mentions. "I would always tend to value people for what they do and what they think rather than where they go or what they earn."
It also applies to his down time. Offered a choice between a round of golf in Barbados or a walk across the top of Lugnaquillia, he would "take Lug any time". And anyway, he hates golf. Offered a chance to make "real money" after leaving the Dublin city job, when half a dozen developers were queuing up with open cheque books, he said no thanks. "They were looking for someone to open doors for them, but I made the conscious decision not to engage in anything that I had been involved in myself. Anyway, there's only a certain amount of things you can do with money."
Which doesn't mean he is naive about his professional worth. "By the time I finished on Dublin City Council, you'd be almost ashamed to admit what you earned if the subject of salaries came up with middle-ranking bank managers or fellows working for building societies."
His salary in 2006 for managing a city of half a million, a 7,000-strong workforce and a budget of €2 billion was €170,000. "I never complained. It was open to me to apply for a private sector job if I wanted to. But I don't mind saying that I always regarded as outrageous what people got paid in financial services, particularly for jobs that carry no risk - especially building societies, where you take in money and give out money on the basis of risk-free securities."
John Fitzgerald is one of those exotic birds: a public servant who left and has actual, cutting-edge experience of the private sector. To earn his chartered accountancy stripes while studying at night, he chucked in his permanent, pensionable job in the Revenue Commission to work in Chadwicks, where he spent 10 years rising from accounts clerk to middle management.
"I was there for the oil crisis in the 1970s and they were tough times. I remember putting people on three-day weeks . . . Real survival stuff. Then when things began to get good again, I went back into the public sector," he says, deadpan. Under pressure, he concedes that, yes, this is virtually unheard-of at public service administration or management level. "And I think that is a pity. You're not genetically programmed to be a public or private sector worker. I'm often asked why I moved back . . . but I've always got a lot more satisfaction from working in the public sector."
What about the perception that the public sector is genetically programmed to work a fairly leisurely nine-to-five, with lots of days off, job security and fat pensions?
"I think that perception is totally wrong and very unfair. The people I worked with in the public sector are at least as good as the ones I worked with in the private sector. This perception that people in the public sector are layabouts who are just sitting there . . . There are some, but there are some in the private sector too - though I suppose, you get found out easier. I think what's absent in the public sector some of the time is motivation and management. Management in a lot of cases is deficient in that the people who should be providing the morale, leadership and guidance don't always do it. It's not the fault of the people down the line. It's the system itself that conspires against them."
THERE IS A certain symmetry for 62-year-old Fitzgerald about finding himself with the job of resuscitating the heart of Limerick city. It finds him back in his beloved native county, with problems - "worse now than they were 10 years ago, for sure" - that go to the heart of his life's work.
The physical regeneration, he says, is the easy part. The real challenge is less amenable to sexy soundbites: it's about breaking the cycle of disadvantage, pulling all the services together, and - his major bête noire - the reluctance of successive governments to place the citizen at the centre of its structures. "There are far too many senior policy-makers in government departments who don't understand what local community is all about, who don't always have a feel for the issues they are dealing with, because they've never been there. Yet they're reporting in to ministers and influencing policy."
His tone is even - born of years spent coaxing, cajoling and biting his tongue - but the frustration is palpable. He was astonished to discover no fewer than 85 services, statutory and non-statutory, operating in Limerick, some of them not even aware of each other. "It staggered me that people living a kilometre from Limerick city centre didn't know who to turn to. They didn't know who was running the place."
So what makes us so different to other democracies? "Central government at civil service level have no trust in local government. And too many government departments want to pull the levers themselves. If you control the levers, you want to keep it that way - and they are in a position where they can keep it that way."
DIRECTLY ELECTED MAYORS can only be as good as the structure and functions that underpin them. "It has been promoted very strongly on the basis that it has worked well, particularly in the US. But when you look at the US system, you find that directly elected mayors preside over a local government structure that is totally unlike what we have. They deal with health, policing, education, hospitals, welfare - all the functions that affect people at local level."
"Official Ireland" and its public service structure is simply not capable of dealing with the Limerick problem. "If I were to say 'let's resource Paddy Flannery and the Moyross Community Centre - one of the best community centres I've ever seen - to do it', there would be shock and horror on the basis that you can't do that. But this is a radical problem and it needs radical solutions."
A perception in middle-class Limerick that Fitzgerald is a woolly liberal when it comes to violently dysfunctional families is not borne out by his words. He is clear that many of Limerick's problems are caused by children "causing hell, making life miserable" for their neighbours. "Most of the damage in Limerick is done by young kids, four- and five-year-olds, and the system is not able to handle them."
He is not against putting such children into care - "it works well for some" - but notes the ultimate futility of it when "most of them - as they do - eventually walk back into their own environment almost as if they never left it". Instead, he favours tight, consistent one-to-one support, "getting into that house at 9am to ensure they are fed and sent to school, then being there again in the evening". He also favours "serious sanctions" - to the point of eviction - for seriously disruptive families. "Sometimes it may be a choice between saving one or two families and saving a whole community."
The bleak conclusion is that official Ireland is in statis. Fitzgerald's "Most Admired Politicians" list is lamentably short and possibly limited to the name of Michael Noonan, the Limerick TD. Limerick City Council and local government is "traditionally very weak and remains weak", he says. In short, a damning judgment from a man who has devoted most of his life to public service and knows the system inside out.
Ask him about his proudest achievement in Dublin? The Liffey boardwalk? The Spire? "It matters a lot that Mrs Smith in Cherry Orchard has water coming through the roof and there's nobody going to fix it only us - and that we have local services at the stage where she knows where to go and get an answer fast."
His values, he says, are rooted in his birthplace in Galbally, a valley at the western end of the Glen of Aherlow, a place where "there was never a sense of them and us; where there were people who were worse off and had to put up with awful conditions but nobody looked down on them. We all went to the same school, the same church, played the same games. We were all thrown in together and I've always valued that. You just talked to people as people, not for who they were or what they were." The Fitzgeralds' small farm was "very self-sufficient. The place provided everything that was needed; you could bring the shopping home on the bar of a bicycle."
His father, Jimmy, who established Roundhill Nurseries, died when John was only six, leaving a 30-year-old widow, Elizabeth, with five children between the ages of one and eight. "My mother suddenly had to become a businesswoman. She worked early morning to late at night, which was probably not so different to others, but she had to carry the can. I probably had a hyped-up sense of responsibility as I was growing up because you felt you didn't want to be a burden on her any longer than you had to be."
Yet she gave him the choice of staying on at school to do his Leaving Cert - "almost unheard of at the time. I'd say out of the 20 that I went to primary school with, 17 had gone to England or America by the time they were 16 or 17."
After his Leaving Cert at the CBS in Tipperary town, he worked briefly in England, in a Grace Brothers-type emporium in Bournemouth, before landing the sought-after job with the Revenue Commission.
BACK IN IRELAND, he shared a digs with 23 others on Parnell Street in Dublin, while taking an evening accountancy course in UCD. "Nearly every one of the others in the digs was studying at night. You'd almost feel out of it if you weren't. It was a kind of a social thing too - at night in the UCD canteen, you'd know everybody. And it was cheaper than going to the pictures." The long evenings were often spent playing football and hurling in Fairview Park and, on Parnell Street, they were in dancehall heaven, surrounded by the likes of the Ierne, Clery's and the National.
It was in the Town Country ballroom (now the Pillar Room in the Gate) that he met Marie Kennedy, a 19-year-old civil servant from Edgesworthtown, Co Longford. It took them six years to get married, "through lack of resources", and the marriage bar meant she had to leave her job, but it was a happy union, producing four daughters, with Marie "quite happy being a full-time housewife and very good at it".
They were married 25 years when she contracted a highly aggressive oesophageal cancer.
"I lost her in 1996, the year I started in Dublin City Council. She got sick in September. We thought - well, I never figured it out in my mind. I don't know whether I was deluding myself but we certainly always talked of it being a long-term thing. We assumed it was something to be got over. I knew nothing about it at the time and didn't ever ask anybody what it was likely to do and I don't think she did either. She was getting treatment and they talked about operating but her system wasn't able to handle it. She only survived until December 1st. It was like a car crash in that sense.
"I went back to the consultant afterwards and asked him would he have told me, and he said, 'to be honest with you, we know those who want to know and those who don't and if people want to know, we tell them'. And we didn't want to know . . . It was a total, absolute shock out of nowhere at all."
MEANWHILE, HE HAD four daughters to soothe and nurture - the youngest of them only 12 - and a big new job that involved breathing life into a grim capital city. "The suddenness of it, the shock of it, was tough on all of them. There was a great deal of support around but you very quickly realise that everybody has problems of their own to be getting on with and can't be listening to yours. People used to say they couldn't understand how I could handle the two, but I found it quite the opposite. In that job, you had to get out and get working. You couldn't be half there and half not. People were looking to you for guidance, for signs and signals."
He found "a very good lady" to be there for the girls after school, "but I suppose there can be no replacement for the person who was there all the time. Everybody would say the first year afterwards is incredibly difficult because you're always coming up against the first anniversary of everything. But even going places where you've gone together . . . Dublin was twinned with Liverpool - not the most attractive place - but she and I had been there for a few days not long before. Anywhere you've been, there are reminders and that was pretty acute for that year. I'd hate to think what life would have been like if the four girls hadn't been there. They were great, never caused me any problems."
Twelve years on, he has not remarried. "Life's complicated enough. After 31 years with somebody . . . I found that picking up the pieces and adjusting was huge, everything really. You do an awful lot of getting used to a whole different life."
Now his life seems full, with his regeneration work in Limerick and with Grangegorman development (he is chairman of the agency that will oversee the relocation of Dublin Institute of Technology to Grangegorman), plus his vice-chairmanship of Intertrade Ireland, an all-island trade promotion company set up under the Belfast Agreement.
He still lives in the leafy Dublin suburb of Blackrock, where he cherishes his "great neighbours", plays tennis, and strikes out most weekends for the Wicklow hills. His passion for mountain hiking takes him across Europe. "When you grew up around my time and where I did, I think you don't have mad notions of what makes you happy or what keeps you amused."
He splashed out on a villa near Malaga a couple of years ago - "well-used" by the whole family - and that's where he spent Marie's anniversary last week, in the company of his youngest daughter, a recently qualified doctor.
"I like going out there for a week every few months but I'm always glad to be back. Sometimes we don't realise how well off we are, and the sense of community that's still here. In a way, this kind of [economic crash] that's going on - maybe it was no harm to calm it down. Things had gone a bit mad for 10 years. I value that sense of community a lot and if you're trying to inculcate it in places where it doesn't exist, it's easier to do it in the present circumstances than last year or the year before. I don't want to see anyone lose their job, but there are side issues that are maybe more beneficial than we care to think about."
