MEMOIR: Leading Lights: People Who've InspiredMe By Eamon Gilmore with Yseult Thornley, Liberties Press, 209pp. €16.99
GEORGE W Bush and Eamon Gilmore might seem like unlikely literary bedfellows, but both have adopted unorthodox and ultimately timid and deeply unsatisfying approaches to their political stories. While the former US president has recently offered readers an account of his presidency based on 14 “decision points”, Gilmore gives us 12 “leading lights” in the shape of people who have inspired him. Around these individuals he weaves aspects of his personal development and political career in a slim volume that is part fragmentary biography and part political manifesto with large dollops of sentimental mourning for an Ireland long vanished.
The result is an overtly careful balancing act, craving to be safe and offering little depth or candour. In person Gilmore is a decent, intelligent, compassionate and often powerful communicator, which makes it all the more disappointing that he has allowed an even less than half-baked memoir to be published under his name. While Yseult Thornley gets a credit for having assisted in the book’s compilation, the fault for its weakness lies squarely with Gilmore.
At the very end of the book the reason for this is clear: it was, he admits, “written over a period of more than six months in a series of moments snatched from the day-to-day demands of political life”. This is no way to approach the serious business of book writing. If practising politicians are too busy to write credible political biography they should wait until they have retired.
This book, we are told, was produced because the Labour Party opposed the blanket state guarantee of the liabilities of Irish banks in September 2008, which involved making “the right judgement for the right reasons”. A year later Gilmore felt confident enough about the Labour Party’s progress “to set out my objective of heading a Labour-led government”, and the book has been produced because he “can understand why people are interested in finding out more about someone who is asking for the privilege of leading the country”.
The “leading lights” he chooses are a diverse, interesting group, some well known – TK Whitaker, Seán Ó Riada, Martin Luther King, Seán O’Casey, Proinsias De Rossa and Margaret Thatcher – others less so, including his grandmother Ellen Gilmore and his close friends Tríona Dooney, who became vice president of the Workers’ Party, and Joan Miley, trade-union representative of the RTÉ symphony orchestra in the mid 1980s, alongside Fr Joe Cassidy, his former teacher, Joe Connolly, the Galway hurling captain and All-Ireland winner in 1980, and Matt Byrne, the socialist and environmentalist.
What is apparent is Gilmore’s gift for forming friendships with committed, hard-working and often selfless activists, and this, to his credit, suggests much about his own sound judgment, genuine patriotism and lack of vanity. The first chapter reveals that his father dropped dead as a result of a massive heart attack at the age of 36 while his mother was pregnant, when Gilmore was just 14 months old. The role his widowed grandmother played in laying the foundation for his interest in politics and sense of values was paramount, in what was a Fianna Fáil household in Galway. It is the most satisfying chapter in the book because it gives us an insight into the strong, close-knit community he emerged from, and the sense of solidarity and commitment to education that existed during difficult times, nationally and personally.
The stylistic problem, however, is apparent from the early stages of the book. The “leading lights” and their stories are frequently parked as Gilmore elaborates on aspects of Labour Party policy, such as its position on university fees, community control of schools and the need for universal health insurance and a green economy. In the midst of this he defends his muteness on the Croke Park agreement: he had no role in negotiating it; therefore commenting on it would have been “disrespectful of those who were being balloted”.
Gilmore raises, through the characters he chooses, occasionally interesting perspectives on the evolution of Irish society, in the context of trade unionism, sectarianism, economic neoliberalism, public service and the environment. But while the people he extols are in many respects inspirational (with the exception of Thatcher, who inspires him because of his desire to define himself by opposition to her and her contention that there is “no such thing as society”), Gilmore is also playing ultrasafe in this book and wearing the political equivalent of two condoms.
He was a student radical at UCG in the 1970s but glosses over his joining of Official Sinn Féin, and avoids any engagement with the complexities of Irish socialist-republican politics in the 1970s, beyond the assertion that he believed the Officials were “the most vigorous in campaigning for a modern Ireland and for real social change”. His transition from ITGWU official to Workers’ Party candidate and eventual TD in 1989 is in no sense teased out; in November 1982, he maintains, “I found myself as the new Workers’ Party candidate.”
Instead of meaningful reflection the reader is offered a succession of neutral stances – “we need to reform our public service, but we also need to defend it” – and an anodyne idealism that few could consider contentious, original or challenging. Here are just some examples: “We are not Fianna Fáil and we are not Fine Gael. We have a distinctive view of Ireland”; “We need to upskill our workforce”; “Social dialogue of some sort has an important role to play”: “We are capable of succeeding in whatever we put our minds to”: “Knowledge of Irish opens up for us a rich seam of information about our own country”: “I’m open as to how best to achieve certain ends. It really is a question of what works”; “Like so many people in Ireland, I love sport”; “We have our work cut out for us”; and, of course, “Let’s build a better Ireland.”
Let’s indeed. But at a time of national crisis, the severity of which is repeatedly acknowledged by the author, a disillusioned and frustrated political audience, aware that Gilmore is likely to be in a powerful position of political responsibility in the near future, deserves better, and braver, than this book.
Diarmaid Ferriter is professor of modern Irish history at University College Dublin
