“He’s been practising this speech for a long time,” says one Fianna Fáil colleague of Minister for Finance Michael McGrath, who will become the first minister from his party to deliver a budget from that post in 13 years on Tuesday.
McGrath has been a TD since 2007, and finance spokesman since taking over after the death of Brian Lenihan in 2011. Since then, he has built a reputation as being a consistent if slightly unspectacular operator, shrewd but inscrutable. “You wouldn’t want to play poker with him,” says one colleague of the Passage West native.
“What he’s very good at is listening, but he doesn’t always debate,” says a source who dealt with both him and, a generation ago, Lenihan. “Brian Lenihan was more outgoing, he would talk endlessly on a topic because he’s a legal man. Michael is an accountant and would prefer to absorb everything.”
When he was first elected, colleagues remember he came in with a huge vote as a councillor, with a widely held view that there was no love lost between him and constituency colleague Micheál Martin. In more recent years, any tension has “evaporated into a tight alliance”, says one Minister.
A frontbench spokesman as Fianna Fáil sought to rebuild following their shellacking at the 2011 general election, McGrath was put up front and centre with investors and journalists as part of an effort to restore Fianna Fáil’s reputation, and was on the banking inquiry in 2015.
In addition to a fastidious attention to his brief, McGrath is devoted to constituency work (“a phenomenal work ethic”, says a Fianna Fáil TD). “That chap was delivering leaflets in his constituency since the mid-1990s,” quips another, with one colleague marvelling that a leaflet drop was organised last week on the eve of his first budget.
Seamus McGrath, his brother and a Cork city councillor who is seen as one of his closest confidantes, was responsible for that. He is advised by Grant Sweetnam and Kevin Barrett, and is said to be particularly close to the latter, who worked for the party as an economic adviser before moving to Irish Life, returning when the party went into government. “He would trust Kevin with his life,” says a colleague.
Generally well liked in the parliamentary party, McGrath has few enemies but, as can be common in Leinster House, few truly close friends among colleagues. “Nobody knows him well. He’s very private, he keeps his thoughts to himself,” says one Minister. A father of seven whose own father died when he was 18, McGrath has spoken of being the first in his family to go to university. Beyond a devotion to Manchester United and soccer at a community level, his personal life tends to be kept just that: personal.
In the words of one TD, while accessible generally to backbenchers, critics say he can also be “cold”. “If you’re of use, he’ll be engaged. If not, he’ll be less engaged.”
His close alliance with Paschal Donohoe, forged during confidence and supply and copper-fastened in Coalition, is seen as the strongest connection in the Government. Generally even-tempered to a fault, some nonetheless remember him remonstrating at times with Marc MacSharry, the Sligo Leitrim TD who was Fianna Fáil’s harshest internal critic before losing the whip.
Even though he is in the job less than a year, there is speculation this could be his only budget as Minister for Finance. Colleagues exchange theories about whether he will be leader (although there is a view that he has not sufficiently embedded himself into the depths of the rubber chicken circuit to burnish those credentials fully) or appointed European commissioner next year.
McGrath’s politics are in some ways hard to pin down. Colleagues believe he is steered by a pragmatic and strategic streak, alloyed with a thread of social conservatism, exemplified in the eyes of one TD in his opposition to abortion reform.
“That’d be his cautious nature,” the TD says, putting him in a category of Fianna Fáil TDs who “believe their support base that keeps them in the job is a conservative one, an aged one that wouldn’t be receptive to that sort of change”. Most colleagues argue he is a traditional Fianna Fáiler in the sense that he believes in the institutions and power of the State to deliver for voters, but would be more business-friendly than some others in the parliamentary party. He isn’t the type of politician to wax lyrical about the precise details of his political outlook.
Even as he rounds the corner of the biggest speech of his professional life, one Minister says he will be judged – by himself and others – more on political, rather than rhetorical delivery. “The speechifying can be lovely but bread and butter comes first – and those who don’t have to worry about bread and butter can worry about the speechifying.”
