European Commissioner and former finance minister Charlie McCreevy said yesterday he had seriously considered quitting politics for good in the mid-1980s.
Speaking in Dublin at the end of his first year as Internal Market and Services Commissioner, he said he was "totally fed up" at the time.
Mr McCreevy also confirmed that he was the author of a policy document for the nascent Progressive Democrats at that period. The document came to light recently with the publication of Breaking the Mould, a history of the PDs by political journalist Stephen Collins.
Explaining his motivation, Mr McCreevy said that, "in the mid-'80s this country was going down the tubes - it was as simple as that". Under the Fine Gael-Labour coalition the national debt had doubled from £12 billion to £25 billion.
"If you cared about the country, were you supposed to sit on your arse and hope something would turn up?"
In 1984-85 he had participated in "many meetings" but people would not make up their minds about a new party. This came to a head towards the end of 1985: "I said, 'look it's either going ahead now or it's not going ahead'. "
When he walked out, his decision was final and from that night onwards he never had any discussions about joining another party.
"On that particular night, there was an agreement between the people that were there that we would never speak about it again and we'd never refer to anybody else who was at the meeting and I, over the years, have never done so."
He said that earlier in 1985 he had written a foundation document for a new party, "Ideas by Number Two", which was published in the Stephen Collins book.
"That's what the government of '87 more or less followed and what I followed very religiously when I became minister for finance many, many years later," he said.
Asked if his decision to remain with Fianna Fáil was based on political calculation or a lingering emotional attachment to the party, he said: "I went through a period in the '80s when I considered giving up politics." He added: "I just was totally fed up with it."
He felt politics was "a kind of a waste, I could be doing other things, I'm reasonably well-qualified".
But then his interest in politics "kinda got resuscitated" just prior to the 1987 general election and "took on a life of its own".
Like his colleague David Andrews, he could not break the connection with Fianna Fáil which was "an unbelievable tribe".
"People can be desperately critical of us and people hate us for generations but you'd have to admit we're some tribe," he continued. Fianna Fáil had survived "everything under the sun" including the arms crisis and internal dissidents like himself.
But he got his politics from his mother's side of the family, who had been involved in the War of Independence and on the republican side in the Civil War.
He also had a family connection with Fine Gael and his father was a member of the Blueshirts but died when Charlie was only four-and-a-half. But he was brought up to revere Eamon de Valera and he could not leave Fianna Fáil "when it came to the crunch".
He always had "great admiration" for Bobby Molloy who was Fianna Fáil "through and through" but still "made the jump" and joined the PDs. But he also praised former taoiseach and Fianna Fáil leader Charles Haughey who had to be "given credit" for putting the public finances in order when he was returned to office in 1987.
Asked to comment on the dispute at Irish Ferries, Mr McCreevy said, "Naturally as EU commissioner I am not going to get involved in a very contentious issue here in Ireland."