Long-standing and politically adept minister for agriculture

Joe Walsh, who has died aged 71, was a long-serving Fianna Fáil minister in the Department of Agriculture who made his political peace with Charles Haughey in the 1980s, having earlier opposed his leadership of the party.

Walsh was among those TDs who tried to unseat Haughey and was even mentioned as a possible defector to the newly formed Progressive Democrats in 1985.

Two years later, when Haughey formed a minority government, he made Walsh minister of state for agriculture. Fences had been mended and Walsh assumed the same role when the FF-PD government was formed in 1989. His friendship with former FF TD Mary Harney, then a senior figure in the PDs, was considered important at the time in the initial contacts between the two parties leading to the unlikely coalition.

Rewarded with ministry

He backed

Albert Reynolds

for the leadership when Haughey stood down and was rewarded with the senior ministry in the department in 1992, remaining there until the government fell in 1994.

When Fianna Fáil returned to power under Bertie Ahern in 1997 he was again made minister for agriculture and remained in the post until 2004.

It was a remarkably long tenure in the same department, illustrating Walsh’s political survival skills and his undoubted ability which was sometimes concealed behind an affable exterior.

Walsh was educated at St Finbarr’s College, Cork, and UCC, where he took a degree in dairy science.

His involvement with Fianna Fáil had already begun, having set up the party’s first cumann in the university.

He worked as a researcher in the National Dairy Research Centre in Moorepark, near Fermoy, before becoming managing director of Strand Dairies in Clonakilty.

He was elected to Cork County Council in 1974, serving also on the committee of agriculture and the vocational education committee.

Walsh was elected to the Dáil for Cork South-West in 1977, in the electoral swing to fellow Corkman and Fianna Fáil leader Jack Lynch, who secured a 20-seat majority.

The tensions between Walsh and Haughey, which were to intensify in the early 1980s, were already evident in the election campaign as Haughey backed fellow Fianna Fáil candidate the late Flor Crowley, father of Brian Crowley MEP, who was disillusioned with Lynch and in the Haughey camp.

Walsh lost his seat in the 1981 general election and served in the Seanad before winning it back in February 1982 when the FG-Labour coalition fell. He held the Dáil seat until his retirement in 2007.

Relations restored in 1987, Haughey gave him responsibility for food when making him a junior minister and Walsh later recalled meetings in the then taoiseach’s Kinsealy home where the emphasis was on job creation.

Foot-and-mouth crisis

His biggest challenge as senior minister came with the foot-and-mouth crisis of 2001. After a shaky start and much criticism of controls at ports and airports, following the discovery of the disease in Britain, he supervised a system that worked with the help of the Irish people.

He was hands-on, sometimes going in to the department in the early morning to talk to the staff manning the helpline control centre giving advice to the public on how to prevent the spread of the disease. Sometimes he answered calls himself.

After the 2002 general election there was speculation he might be one of those dropped by Ahern to make way for new blood.

But he clearly had influential supporters outside government, with Ahern conceding at the time that there had been an “enormous amount of lobbying’’ involving farm and other groups.

It was a stay of ministerial execution and Walsh bowed to the inevitable when he announced, in the summer of 2004, that he was retiring as minister and from the Dáil at the next election.

Record of competence

Overall, his record in Agriculture House was one of competence, not least having argued for the agriculture lobby at cabinet on a number of issues, including the provision of additional funding for farmers when the Common Agricultural Policy was reformed.

He retained his interest in horse racing in retirement, involved himself in a number of projects, and sat on the board of the Bank of Ireland as a public interest director.

Walsh, who lived at Emmet Square, Clonakilty, is survived by his wife, Marie, three sons and two daughters.