There are two types of political memoirs. In the first, former politicians or ministers refight old battles to justify their past actions. The second involves honest reflection and at times self-critical commentary on the challenges of political office.
The first kind of memoir has little value and is generally soon forgotten soon. The second often provides valuable behind-the-scenes insights into the real operation of power and the world of politics.
Former Fine Gael TD and minister for housing Eoghan Murphy’s political memoir, Running From Office, firmly fits into the second category. It is honest and at times insightful, though in ways which its author may not have intended.
It is a story of excessive ambition, rapid ascent and catastrophic fall. In the end it is a story of failure, which to the author’s great credit he himself admits.
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At the outset it is important that I declare an interest. As Sinn Féin’s spokesperson on housing in the Dáil it was my job to shadow Murphy during his term as minister from June 2017 to June 2020.
Like a Gaelic footballer tasked with marking one of the top teams’ full forwards, over the course of the championship you develop an unusual relationship with your opponent.
You track their every move, you exploit their every mistake, you sledge and tackle hard to disrupt their game. Your aim, at all times, is to get possession of the ball, counterattack and help your team score.
Of the three ministers for housing that I have shadowed, Murphy was the most genuine.
While I fundamentally disagreed with the policies he sought to implement, I always got the sense that he believed in what he was doing and thought it would make things better.
Running From Office is a compelling account of why this sincerity was never going to be enough to address a housing crisis, the causes of which were embedded in the very policies that the minister chose, and at times was forced, to implement.
One of the book’s strengths is its form. While it takes us from Murphy’s decision to enter local politics in 2009 to his resignation from the Dáil in 2020, the story is not told chronologically.
Rather, the book jumps back and forth through different periods of his decade as an elected politician. This out-of-order narrative, while disruptive, makes you look at the different periods with fresh eyes, informed by the present as much as by the past.
Murphy’s unusual entry to politics is intriguing. As a middle-class, privately-educated South County Dubliner, he exuded all the unchecked confidence that came with his socio-economic privilege.
Like many of his peers he was contemptuous of the world of politics. His initial interest was in international relations, seeking out employment as an UN agency adviser on nuclear disarmament and then the Irish diplomatic corps.
But somewhere between failing the diplomatic corps exam twice, listening to Barack Obama speeches and reading Breaking the Mould, Stephen Collins’ history of the Progressive Democrats, Murphy decided to change tack and run for office.
He was a typical social liberal, committed to European integration, more suited to high-minded, technocratic decision-making than the mundane business of “residents’ associations, party branches [and] old folks’ homes”.
So, what drove him into a world that by all accounts he was in the end neither interested in nor suited for?
In June 2008, after voters here rejected the Lisbon Treaty, a work colleague in Vienna pinned a copy of the Economist to Murphy’s office door. It was a drawing of a sparrow with an arrow piercing its breast.
The bird was the EU and the arrow was Ireland, which had, according to Murphy, “just killed off any chances of deeper reform of the European Union”.
The outcome of the referendum had presented the voters here as “ungrateful, small-minded and selfish” and was, again according to Murphy, the result of “a lack of political leadership”.
And so, “young man comes home to help his country in time of crisis”, announced Murphy, with tongue only partly in cheek.
Tellingly, Murphy toyed with standing as an independent in the 2009 local elections but soon realised that the only way to have real influence was in a party.
Fianna Fáil were now electorally bankrupt, and despite his reservations about “conservative” Fine Gael he took the plunge, following a chance encounter with Enda Kenny in a bar in London.
The first-time candidate campaigned hard, with the support of family and friends but little love from the local Fine Gael branch. He toped the poll in the Pembroke-Rathmines local electoral area with an impressive 15 per cent, dislodging sitting Fine Gael councillor Paddy McCartan.
Here the memoir is very revealing. Confronted with the local issues of “bin collections, parking spaces and dog poo”, Murphy privately complained to a campaign colleague: “I hate people”. But he told himself, “I had to care. Not deeply. But just enough to get people’s votes.”
Here we meet Murphy the ambitious career politician, using local politics and local government as a stepping stone to higher office, where he believed someone of his calibre really belonged.
Within two years of his election to Dublin City Council, Murphy was duly elected to the Dáil in Fine Gael’s landslide victory of 2011. But despite his strong self-belief, his five years on the back benches were of little note to anyone beyond the Fine Gael back benches.
His election alongside Lucinda Creighton, a rising star of the Fine Gael Right, meant that Murphy was cast in that mould along with the group’s mentor Leo Varadkar. But despite the close political relationship that would develop between the two men, Murphy reveals that it was more a marriage of convenience than conviction.
After a brief spell as an unremarkable junior minister in the Department of Finance, the Dublin Bay South TD’s big opportunity arrived as he was invited to run Varadkar’s bid for the leadership of Fine Gael and Government.
Murphy’s considerable campaign skills and contacts with the party’s younger backbench TDs won the day. His expectation was that he would be appointed to a senior cabinet position. Here the memoir gets very interesting.
Most people were surprised by Varadkar’s appointment of Murphy as Minister for Housing in 2018. Indeed, so too was the new minister himself. But only days before the cabinet was to be announced it looked like Varadkar was set to demote him to chief whip or leave him out entirely.
It took a confrontation with the new taoiseach to secure a top job. Murphy says, “I wasn’t aggressive, I wasn’t emotional, but I was certainly direct”.
His argument wasn’t that he would make a good minister for housing, or foreign affairs or trade but, according to his own account, “If I was to have his [Varadkar’s] back, I needed to have the status of a full Minister…”
And so, a man without an interest in, knowledge of or track record on housing was handed the single most challenging portfolio of the new government.
Murphy inherited his predecessor Simon Coveney’s housing plan Rebuilding Ireland. The new taoiseach had said he wanted his minister to shake things up. So off Murphy went, meeting a wide range of individuals (this review writer included) and organisations in search of new ideas.
Running For Office reveals, for the first time, what the outcome of that Murphy review was. He proposed to Varadkar a series of dramatic changes to Coveney’s plan including: declaring a housing emergency; holding a referendum to enshrine the right to housing in the Constitution; centralising more power in the Department of Housing; transforming Nama into a state house builder; taxing vacant properties; and linking public housing targets to overall housing output.
Unfortunately for Murphy, the taoiseach had backtracked and decided that he “needed harmony within the party and harmony within the Government”. It appeared that fixing housing was less important than keeping the peace in cabinet.
After what Murphy described as a “brutal” meeting with the taoiseach, minister for finance Pascal Donohoe and attorney general Seamus Wolfe, the review was quietly dropped.
The new housing minister was now trapped within a housing policy framework that wasn’t working and in a government that, despite its claims to the contrary, was not prioritising housing.
Murphy’s conclusion was that “…perhaps we couldn’t see the damage our financial conservatism, and our conservatism generally, was doing to people right in front of our eyes”.
Despite this very revealing account, the author repeatedly sidesteps the thorny policy issues that dogged his time as minister. Instead, he focuses on more personal matters.
As the housing and homelessness crisis deepened, Murphy’s public popularity plummeted. Poor media performances resulted in a social media backlash. He was being insulted by the public on the streets and when out socialising. He was dropped from the Taoiseach’s inner circle, taking criticism from his own backbenchers. Any new proposals from himself or his secretary general were being rejected.
The result was an emotional breakdown while in London at the end of 2018. Here Murphy writes with a level of honesty not often seen in politics. He talks about seeing a counsellor, the impact of his now former partner losing their baby, and his descent into a short alcohol-fuelled crash.
Though Murphy pulled himself back together during 2019 he admits that the “job was exacting a price, and it was too high”. And so, he began to plan his exit from office and from electoral politics.
In the end he admits that “it would be hard to conclude that I had been a successful Housing Minister”. With admirable honesty he says that he “failed to manage the politics of housing, within government and without”, accepting that “my mistakes were my own. I had to find peace with that.”
Running From Office is a valuable contribution to the small number of political memoirs that open up the world of politics to outsiders. It reveals both the internal machinations of political power and the personal impact of pressure and failure on politicians in the era of the 24-hour news cycle and social media saturation.
Eoghan Murphy should never have been appointed as minister for housing. His naivety, lack of political experience, shallow political base and even shallower understanding of housing policy made his failure inevitable. But in having the courage to lay bare his time in office he had done future ministers a service in alerting them to the considerable challenges that holding such office entails.
Further reading
Bernadette Devlin’s The Price Of My Soul (1969) is one of the outstanding political memoirs of contemporary Ireland. Published when Devlin was just 21 and elected MP for Mid Ulster on a civil rights ticket. Fifty-five years on it has lost none of its passion, focus and razor-sharp analysis of the North’s descent into conflict.
Gemma Hussey’s diaries At the Cutting Edge: Cabinet Diaries 1982-1987 (1990) remains one of the most honest and insightful memoirs from a former Minister. Covering her terms as Fine Gael Minister for Education and Social Protection from 1982 to 1987 it lays bare the operation of power during a time of important transformation in Southern politics and society.
Lisa Belkin’s Show Me A Hero: A Tale of Murder, Suicide, Race, and Redemption (1999) tells the story of Yonkers councillor Nick Wasicsko. His turbulent tenure as mayor from 1987 was dominated by the federal government’s attempt to have low-income public housing, primarily for African Americans, built in the town. It is a cautionary tale of what happens when race and class collide in the world of small-town electoral politics.
Eoin Ó Broin TD is Sinn Féin spokesman on housing
