THE SATURDAY INTERVIEW/Joan Burton:THE SENSIBLE WAY to conduct a lengthy interview? Leave the provocative questions until last. That way, if things turn ugly, the bulk of the story is already in the bag. Rarely, however, does the provocation relate to something as personal as someone's voice. "She can clear the chamber with it – it's just so . . . so grating," shudders one of many Leinster House denizens. One swears it has improved though: "It's definitely better. I'm convinced she's had voice coaching," writes KATHY SHERIDAN
And so, in a friendly kitchen coming down with cookbooks, spices and Indian take-away menus, it’s a while before the “v” word is delicately introduced to Labour’s deputy leader and spokeswoman for finance. She laughs. “I think it comes with the territory . . . If you’re a woman doing anything in the public domain, you have to try and learn from it.”
And so she has. She laughs about an e-mail from a bunch of men who said she was in danger of becoming a Dusty Springfield icon and proposed a collection to replace her ubiquitous pink jacket. There are worse fates than being a Dusty icon, we agree; nonetheless, the pink seems to have been ditched. Likewise, though she denies the voice coaching, she has talked to people about it. “I’ve often talked to people after someone had made really sharp comments about my voice. I do know that the key thing for me – as for a lot of women – is to slow down and speak slowly. If I speak slowly, my voice gets deeper and deeper,” she says, offering an entertaining rendition of an audio tape losing battery power.
“But I haven’t had voice coaching. I probably should go and do it. Bertie Ahern did. So if there’s somebody out there offering . . . ”
This is all delivered with mild amusement, while her interviewer struggles to remember when anyone ever asked a high-achieving man such questions. (On cue, a text arrives after her Prime Time appearance saying she needs a good hair colourist.) The gender issue might explain why obscure Fianna Fáil backbenchers still fancy themselves superior enough to sneer at her – “sit down woman” being the height of the wit. The brighter ones have learned to be wary of her work-rate, which is backed by well-honed financial expertise.
Before the last Budget, she raised the issue of the price differential between North and South and warned against increasing VAT, only to be heckled by Fianna Fáilers baying: “Oh go and shop at home woman, don’t be shopping in the North.” “That’s the ‘yah boo’ stuff they go on with . . . I think practically every woman in the country knew about it but there are very few female politicians in Fianna Fáil. I notice that Brian Lenihan has now acknowledged that the VAT increase was a disaster.”
Then again, this is a woman who has inhabited a man’s world since she arrived late into a UCD lecture hall in 1967 to a “friendly” foot-stomping, wolf-whistling welcome from 260 male commerce students. The 10 or 12 women kept their heads down.
To get to UCD, she had to win a county council scholarship when most such prizes were reserved for boys. Arriving at Price Waterhouse as a trainee accountant, she found she was the first woman apprentice they had taken on in more than 30 years. When she and other opposition finance spokespeople were invited to the Department of Finance for a briefing by top officials in recent weeks, she was the only woman in the little blue-and-white meeting room, a point slammed home by the gallery of headshots of previous, exclusively male ministers for finance.
After a recent shredding by Vincent Browne on his TV3 show for refusing to reveal Labour’s proposals to balance the Budget (of which more later), she wonders, “would Vincent Brown have spoken to a male Fianna Fáil politician like that – as in ‘give me the money, give me the figures right now’? Possibly not – because Fianna Fáil politicians wouldn’t have gone on his programme.”
There is no whining, but the lack of women in high finance seems distinctly odd. “The funny thing about this [banking] crisis is that it’s a male crisis. There are very few women. I’ve only met two in this crisis – Gillian Bowler, the chair of Irish Life and Permanent, and the chairperson of the post-office bank [Margaret Sweeney]. That’s it. Everybody else, it’s been men all the way. It’s not that a woman, or even 10 women, would be able to make all the changes, it’s just that it’s hard to think of a banking or financial scenario where there were no men.”
So what are the chances of a female minister for finance in a new coalition government? Her answer is of the “if the party leader deems fit” variety. Won’t she have to sound a bit more determined than that? “Yes, a woman minister for finance is still one of the glass ceilings that has to be got through. If I’m the person to break it . . . ” Where’s the ambition in that? “I am ambitious, particularly for ideas, but it is the choice of the party leader.” Could she try to sound more ambitious? “Yes, I would like to be minister for finance – but at the end of the day, I think it would be hubristic to call the decision for the leader of the Labour party.” Oh God. Well, does she think she is as good as Richard Bruton? “I would absolutely consider myself Richard Bruton’s equal, but say there’s a coalition government, that’s an issue as to what jobs ministers in the government get. I’m just being a realist.”
So if you were minister for finance what would you have done on the bank guarantees?
“The two big banks – Allied Irish and Bank of Ireland - should have been the centre of attention. There should have been a complete regime change, done in an orderly way, and there should have been a complete change in terms of bankers’ pay and conditions”.
THERE IS NO provoking Joan Burton. She genuinely likes many of her adversaries, describing Mary Coughlan as “one of the most charming people in the Dáil”. However, following sharp exchanges in the House on Wednesday with Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan, does she still believe, as she said earlier in the week, that he is “extremely pleasant to deal with”?
“Brian Lenihan is absolutely courteous, always – in private. But then – head boy in Belvedere and a Cambridge graduate. Himself and Richard – two Jesuit boys. Perfect gentlemen. Maybe Brian finds me a little rougher . . .” But she says she was quite taken aback by the exchange in the Dáil during which the Minister claimed she had accused him of corruption.
“I had spoken the evening before about a web of deceit involving Fianna Fáil. When he referred to the question of the State acquiring toxic assets, I said the whole issue was around what value the assets would be acquired at and he got very angry. I did not accuse him – and I never have – of direct corruption.”
According to the Dáil records, what she actually said was: “There is a well-founded suspicion which is denied fervently that the national interest in these decisions is identified solely with the interests of the very people whose wild excesses caused the problems in the first place. Is the Government the silent spider at the centre of a toxic web of dodgy land deals?”
She is standing by that statement. “The reality is that there is a circular relationship between Fianna Fáil, the developers and the developers’ bankers – and that’s a reality they cannot deny.”
At least Brian Lenihan is normally pleasant – that’s by contrast with the “dourness and sourness of Brian Cowen . . . I always got the impression that asking him hard questions, he was metaphorically rolling his eyes and saying ‘oh God, do I have to listen to this?’.”
Coughlan ran out of luck, she says, on becoming Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment “at a time when charm was no longer the key attribute”. Fianna Fáil ministers, including Lenihan, “come floating into the Dáil with whatever briefs they’ve been given but you don’t get a feeling that they have an ownership, a mastery of it”.
Is there a Fianna Fáil minister who would make a good minister for finance for the times? Willie O’Dea, she suggests, on the grounds that “he’s less flamboyant and might actually sit down and do the work”.
Fianna Fáil’s general problem, she reckons, is that Bertie Ahern’s absence has left the party “quite adrift . . . It’s no accident that the top triumvirate are all third-generation Fianna Fáil royalty; their primary allegiance is to Fianna Fáil and that is one of Brian Cowen’s greatest disadvantages . . . Fianna Fáil is his religion and I think he has difficulty seeing the country and life in a broader perspective than just Fianna Fáil . . . Maybe because of the difficulties, he has turned in on himself and the party more, when in fact he should have looked outward.”
This in turn has made him “very bullish” in his dealings with the opposition, leading to “a cat-and-mouse game” between the opposition and government in relation to the exchequer figures. “Like a miser with his gold, the Government wants to hoard as much of the information to themselves as possible.” The Government invited the Opposition in for a civil servants’ briefing on the books but what they were told was already well known, she says. No insights were offered into options under discussion since civil servants will not stray into policy areas.
Bipartisanship, or the lack of it, crops up frequently and she regrets the lost opportunities, such as practised in committee systems with teeth in the US congress. Here, notoriously, Department or Finance agency heads invited in to account for policy effectiveness or value for money can and do decline. The point is that in politics as elsewhere, knowledge is power.
This is the thinking behind her refusal to engage with Vincent Browne’s demand for Labour’s budget proposals: “I had submitted questions to the department and I am waiting for answers. I wanted to work it out and I still do.” But the “main thing”, she says, is the danger of falling into “the Fianna Fáil trap, which is to say ‘we [Fianna Fáil] won’t produce any figures other than when we stand up on April 7th, but we would like everyone else to supply all the figures beforehand and we won’t engage in any discussion’. I’m not falling for that trick.”
As for any prospect of a national government, that’s not going to happen until Fianna Fáil faces up to its own past, she says. “The next month and the Budget will show whether or not it has done that. Charming and all as they can be, the real doubt is whether after 11 years and the particular policies they’ve pursued, they really are in a position to change. I’m not convinced. I think the reason for Cowen’s continued sullenness and grumpiness is that he can’t acknowledge the change that is necessary and he also can’t acknowledge the mistakes that he was responsible for. The point is that Fianna Fáil were not able to take the public interest and separate it from the interests of developers.”
When plans were being advanced for tax breaks for holiday-home developments on the upper Shannon, she recalls, “Charlie McCreevy [a UCD contemporary of hers] told me in private conversation: ‘I will make the Shannon like the Klondike.’ And I remember saying to him: ‘What was the Klondike like afterwards?’” She would “accept it”, she says, if Cowen were to say that Ahern and McCreevy “were more responsible, that they were the leading policy-makers. But Brian Cowen inherited it and went along with it, he didn’t try to change it, he never sought to explain or apologise; so it’s difficult to envisage what a national government would be in that context, unless there is to be an absolute change of heart on the part of Fianna Fáil.”
Fianna Fáil should go out of government, she says – “most of the people who are ministers have been ministers for too long”. However, she refuses to say whether Labour would go into government with Fianna Fáil again.
MEANWHILE, HER MOST passionate concern is for the generation of young graduates now drifting into several life-sapping years of unemployment. “I think that is the greatest social threat and disaster facing the country.”
In the interim, she proposes internship/ apprenticeship work-experience programmes as a gateway into employment, but done “in a more modern way than Fás”. It would involve direct engagement with public- and private-sector employers, funded by a combination of employers’ incentives, such as PRSI breaks and money earmarked for unemployment benefit. Once the offers were in place, benefit applicants would have to show enthusiasm. This is in keeping with Burton’s general philosophy. In 1992 as a junior minister in the FF-Labour coalition, she was wholeheartedly involved in the introduction of phased back-to-work schemes for dole claimants, and in terminating the “totally reprehensible” practice of students spending summers on the dole.
There is nothing soft about her despite her mild, likeable manner; she talks passionately about the strong, working-class work ethic in which she was reared, “when it was unacceptable for people not to work unless they had no alternative”.
The randomness of fate, and how she ended up in a working-class family, is a pivotal part of her story. Hers was one of the 50,000 Irish adoptions that took place between the late 1940s and 1970. Born 60 years ago at the foot of Mount Leinster in Carlow, her parents were farmers who were in a relationship but never married. At a few months old, she was placed in a series of care and foster homes, possibly as a result of an original adoption agreement gone awry; there had been a plan, thwarted possibly by ill-health, to send her to the US. At the age of two, she was adopted by Bridie and John Burton, a foundry worker. They had lost their own infant daughter and lived in a rented artisan’s cottage in Rialto before moving later to Stoneybatter.
Burton was four when the formal adoption papers were to be signed and she clearly remembers the terror among family and neighbours that she would be “taken away” by the social workers: “I can even remember the whole street being involved in force-feeding me in case I was taken away because I was very thin.”
Her particular luck was to find an adoptive mother who “just believed ferociously in me and was thrilled that I was her adopted child and who therefore had the sense that whatever I wanted to do, just try and do it”. Her next piece of luck was to attend the Sisters of Charity secondary school in Stanhope Street, where classes were small, and the ferment of Vatican II was motivating nuns such as Sr Stanislaus (just returned from London with her social-studies degree) to develop their educational ideas in the context of social justice.
“In many ways, that is where my politics come from – that whole notion of justice and fairness.” The nuns wanted her to take a coveted offer for teacher training but she won a UCD scholarship and was already knee-deep in intense Russian novels and planning to do English and History when she encountered Mr Keogh, a famous UCD porter. He gave her the only career guidance of her life: “No, no – you’re going to need a job. Do commerce.” Those years were more muted as a result of caring for her mother who was dying of cancer. She died in the middle of Burton’s finals.
A meeting with David Thornley, then a Labour TD for Cabra and Finglas, led to her Labour party induction. Through that, she met her husband-to-be, Pat Carroll, a precociously young director of elections for Noel Browne, who became a Dublin city councillor while finishing off his Masters in physics. When they returned from a few years teaching in Tanzania, she ran in Dublin West and landed a Dáil seat on the spring tide of 1992.
Their only child, Aoife, is a barrister in the Law Library. “I’d like to have had more children but it didn’t work out that way,” she says. Her weekend time out begins at about two or three o’clock on Saturday afternoons when she goes swimming or keeps order in their well-planted garden. Film and theatre are rare treats. Sunday morning is about joining up with the Fingal Walkers Group for two-hour outings around the Naul or along the canals.
The cookbooks in the kitchen are her husband’s. She does a lot of the cooking on holidays in the same French villa near Périgueux they’ve been renting for 10 years, where they meet up with friends involved in a local Irish music festival. Down there, she “detoxes” with murder/mystery novels and the classics while Carroll gets on his bike.
Meanwhile, she has sought out her birth parents’ families and established ties with her many birth relatives in Carlow and the US. She is close to her brother Paul, the Burtons’ birth-child, who was born five years after her arrival.
She seems content, happy in her skin. “I’ve always felt that I was born under a very lucky star. I know two things: my dad’s family, the Burtons, and my mother’s, the Kings, gave me everything it was possible to give me. And I’ve always felt you should give something back.”