Profile: Mary O'Rourke's decision to appear on a new TV game show should not be taken as a sign that the Leader of the Seanad has run out of political steam, writes Mark Brennock
'Mammy", they call her in Fianna Fáil. Less than 18 months ago she was in the Cabinet. Tomorrow night she appears on the panel of a new TV game show, The House of Love, having made her TV light entertainment début earlier this year as a guest cook on The Restaurant.
But Mary O'Rourke is no fading politician taking a detour through celebrity television on the road to retirement. At 66 she is Leader of the Seanad, a position hitherto regarded as a minor bauble for senior second-rank politicians, but which she has used to harry Ministers and to raise the profile of the traditionally sleepy Upper House.
She is driving the process of Seanad reform with an enthusiasm that is alarming some in the Government. If you are in power, Seanad reform is something to say you support from time to time. But, in reality, a weak Dáil and a practically impotent Seanad suit members of the Cabinet, who generally don't want to give parliament the power to cause trouble.
But O'Rourke isn't a minister now, a fact which becomes more and more obvious as her term as Leader of the Seanad goes on. Last year she lost the Dáil seat she had held for 20 years to party colleague Donie Cassidy. Fianna Fáil had insisted on a vote-splitting electoral strategy in her Westmeath constituency. She had warned that this was potentially disastrous - for her - and so it turned out. She doesn't automatically toe the Government line any more.
Her nomination for the Seanad by the Taoiseach was seen as a consolation prize for a senior politician whose Dáil career had been ended by a party strategy that went wrong. However, O'Rourke quickly made it clear that she was not yet ready to coast towards retirement.
As party Senators began to suggest they would not automatically choose her to be Cathaoirleach of the Seanad, she scorned the idea that she would like the job, saying it would turn her into a "female eunuch". Instead she opted to accept the post - in Bertie Ahern's gift - of Leader of the Seanad. Party colleague Rory Kiely was left to become Cathaoirleach, a job in which, O'Rourke said, she would not have been "able to do anything other than be very solemn".
She is unlikely to be very solemn on the next eight Sunday nights, when she will sit with writer Marion Keyes and psychologist and television producer John Masterson in judgment on eight competing couples, one of whom will win a €200,000 house in Mullingar. Interestingly described in the programme's promotion material as one of three "love experts", O'Rourke was chosen, according to a spokeswoman for the programme, because "she has a commonsense approach, is very enthusiastic and doesn't pull punches". Indeed she doesn't.
"She is very protective of the Senate," remarks an opposition Senator. "She won't let Government departments treat the House with disrespect."
Just this week the Tánaiste led Government protestations that planned legislation to reform the insurance industry would be enacted by the end of this year, as promised. O'Rourke blithely told the Seanad on Thursday morning that the Cabinet was still to discuss this legislation, next Tuesday, and that it would not be possible to have it enacted by the end of the year. The message was that Ministers couldn't expect to ram important legislation through the Seanad without proper debate.
Labour's Seanad leader, Brendan Ryan, says: "She is a Fianna Fáiler and her loyalties are clear. But she is sophisticated, extremely independent in her thinking, and won't let Ministers treat the Seanad badly."
She was a schoolteacher before entering politics, and has not fully left the stereotypical mannerisms of that profession behind. The pose she most typically strikes in the Seanad is that of a teacher trying to keep order in a roomful of people, some of whom she fears have a tendency to be silly.
However, there aren't many teachers who would tell people they were talking "crap", which was what she said to Fine Gael's Brian Hayes in the Seanad a fortnight ago. Or many who would tell a Cabinet Minister to "shape up and stop moaning", as she did to Seamus Brennan earlier this year. And O'Rourke also had the temerity recently to condemn her own Government's refusal to accept an amendment to the Oireachtas Commission Bill.
Her Seanad reform committee has been taking its job very seriously indeed. It intends to present a report to the Government proposing reform of how the Seanad is elected, and how it operates.
O'Rourke has a big personality, which undoubtedly made her attractive to the producers of The House of Love. Those who had not met her late brother, Brian Lenihan, and seen the similarities, would describe her manner as unique. Both shared a natural ability to be extremely affable, their light-hearted manner masking an intellectual seriousness. In O'Rourke's case there is a prickliness which sometimes emerges from behind the jollity, and also a hint of personal vulnerability beneath the self-confidence.
She can dish out the abuse, but she knows what it's like to take it too. As Minister for Public Enterprise from 1997 to 2002, she received constant criticism for her hands-on approach to semi-State companies including CIÉ. The strident Ryanair boss, Michael O'Leary, sought to portray her as a Luddite enemy of progress. His full-page newspaper ads attacking and insulting her, and his comments on radio, caused laughter throughout the State.
But this was not just a personalised clash of egos; it was about money. O'Leary wanted O'Rourke to break up Aer Rianta, a move which he saw as being to the great advantage of Ryanair. O'Rourke said no. The minister, therefore, was in O'Leary's way and she took a sustained barrage of abuse as a result.
Seamus Brennan is now breaking up Aer Rianta and so hasn't been given the full-page ad treatment. Although O'Leary is currently campaigning to get the Government to agree to an independent terminal at Dublin Airport, he has instead targeted the Taoiseach.
As a minister, O'Rourke often got involved in the smaller detail of the semi-State organisations for which she was responsible. She was seen walking the Luas line to get a better understanding of the objections of residents and others to the work. She took train trips to Westport and Sligo to check out complaints of overcrowding for herself.
Her relationship with her successor, Seamus Brennan, is tetchy. Brennan has successfully portrayed himself as a new broom cleaning up various messes left behind by his predecessor. When Brennan said earlier this year that costings for the Luas project appeared to have been done on the back of an envelope, O'Rourke remarked that he should "shape up and stop moaning".
O'Rourke's husband, Enda, died in 2001, and she has two sons. She was elected to Westmeath County Council in 1979, the Seanad in 1981 and the Dáil in November 1982. She was appointed minister for education in 1987, serving until she became minister for health from 1991 to 1992. Following the collapse of the Fianna Fáil/PD Coalition in 1992, Albert Reynolds, who had become taoiseach earlier that year, saved himself from political oblivion by entering into government with the Labour Party. O'Rourke was one of the Fianna Fáil ministers demoted to give Labour the six cabinet seats it required as its price for putting Reynolds back into power. O'Rourke and Reynolds shared a constituency for some time, and relations between them were frosty.
She survived the Reynolds era as a minister of State, returning to cabinet under Bertie Ahern in 1997. Surviving another forced demotion - the loss of her Dáil seat - is a further sign of her resilience.
Says Brendan Ryan: "Donie Cassidy [the last leader of the Seanad] took her Dáil seat. He was supposed to be the winner and she the loser. But in terms of national profile she has managed to sustain herself while he is an obscure backbench TD."
The O'Rourke File
Who is she?
Leader of the Seanad and highly experienced former minister.
Why is she in the news?
Is to be a panellist on RTE's new The House of Love programme, having been deemed by the producers to be a 'love expert'.
Most appealing characteristic
Candour.
Least appealing characteristic
Candour.
Most likely to say
Don't give me any of that crap, Minister.
Least likely to say
You're doing great with that Luas there, Seamus.
The House of Love starts on RTÉ1 tomorrow night at 8 p.m.