Book review: Optimism ultimately crushed by the weight of trying to get things done

In one of the more entertaining, albeit deeply unreliable, Irish political memoirs of recent years, the former taoiseach Albert Reynolds remarked of his time in office that if mistakes were made, they were made elsewhere.

The entertainment in Reynolds’s account of his time in politics comes from his view of himself as being almost superhuman and infallible in how he dealt with the various issues that arose in his tenure. He was never wrong.

This is not a problem that the former housing minister, and much else besides including the weather, Eoghan Murphy suffers from. 

His memoir of his whirlwind time in public office is infused with failure and self-doubt.

He is the antithesis of Reynolds, constantly second guessing himself, blaming himself for failures when he would be well within his rights to point the finger at others, and wracked with guilt over how his policies, or perhaps lack of them, impacted on people.

It all eventually gets too much, and his mental health suffers leading to a numbness that is difficult to read about but refreshingly honest in this searing account of life in Irish politics.

The cliché about Murphy when he was in public life was that he was a privately-educated, upper middle class, dyed-in-the-wool Fine Gaeler who would bleed blue and was wrapped in bullet-proof self-confidence.

The first surprise of many in his riveting memoir is that he had no interest in politics as a teenager and that his family are not Blueshirts. 

He admits to being completely clueless about the politics of the country he was born and raised in until he was well into his 20s.

He writes of applying to join the Progressive Democrats in the aftermath of their calamitous election of 2007 but never gets around to it, which was a good thing as the party was wound up in a few years.

He eventually joined Fine Gael after meeting its leader Enda Kenny in a bar in London but admits that the party was just a vehicle to his own ambitions to win a seat in Dublin City Council, and from there the Dáil. 

He originally wanted to be an independent but was savvy enough to know that as a political nobody, he needed a party behind him.

Within months of his election as a TD in Dublin South East at the 2011 election, Murphy worried about whether he was in the right party after all as he has to sit through another interminably boring parliamentary party meeting where his colleagues groan on about their constituency problems.

Being a backbench TD, which he describes as a sort of glorified postman delivering queries from constituents to civil servants, wasn’t what he signed up for and he resolved not become lobby fodder for the government. 

Later, as a minister he will end up hating what he calls ‘those bloody backbenchers’.

Futile attempt to change things from within

As a humble backbencher, Murphy is emboldened after being lied to by the government as to how swingeing the cuts were in the 2012 budget. He leads a clique of new Fine Gael TDs trying to change things from within and gets nowhere.

He hates the whip system and fantasises about leaving politics altogether after only two years in the Dáil. 

The frustrations of not doing anything get to him and with some significant self-awareness he writes of getting drunk in the Dáil bar two nights a week, wondering in what other profession would this happen.

The meat of this memoir is Murphy’s time as housing minister and his growing frustrations at not being able to get things done. 

He bemoans being thwarted by Paschal Donohoe as the man with the money, the Attorney General Seamus Wolfe, the man with the constitution telling him what he could not legally do, and a strangely disinterested Leo Varadkar, the taoiseach who had made him minister to solve the housing problem but never gave him the backing to actually make a difference.

One of the criticisms of Murphy as housing minister was that because of his background he didn’t care enough about and couldn’t empathise with those who were homeless. 

He strongly rails against that view and in some detail outlines the reasoning behind his various strategies to counter the opinion that he had no idea of what he was doing; the minister for no housing as some of his more acerbic critics called him.

It was with some desperation that he was forced to threaten local authorities with cuts to their funding if they did not start to come up with realistic strategies to build more houses and it was here that he finally lost Varadkar.

He plaintively writes that he “could sense, for the first time, a lack of trust in my judgment from the boss”. 

He soon found himself out of the inner circle notwithstanding the fact that he had orchestrated Varadkar’s Fine Gael leadership victory just a year earlier. 

He also lost the civil service, complaining that the path to success was internal and one of road blocks and machine-gun tests.

Ultimately, this is a sad memoir. It is essentially a political story as old as time, of optimism crushed under the weight of trying to get things done against the machine. 

The new twist on the story is that it comes under the unwavering gaze of an all-invasive media, and the baying hordes of the internet warriors.

Murphy writes of relationship problems as women with him on nights out run the risk of an angry public who accuse him of having no shame. 

There is a heartaching tale of his ex-girlfirend becoming pregnant, losing the baby, and Murphy leaving her on the steps of the hospital as he rushes back to some meeting. 

He sources sleeping pills from different GPs. He becomes fatalistic about failure and is convinced a punch is coming his way when he is out and about.

There are light-hearted moments, and Murphy can certainly tell a story against himself, but the overwhelming emotion deriving from this book is one of dejection. 

Despite his protestations at the end of the book that the highs outweighed the lows it does not read like that.

The highs of engineering Varadkar’s leadership win are overshadowed by the bone wearying lows of what he describes as yet another pointless government meeting about the housing issue.

He resigns his seat to do different things, and the weight of the public crusher is lifted but in finishing this remarkable book is clear that the scars remain.