Éamon Ó Cuív lives up the Seanbhóthar behind Corr na Móna, in a small, well-sited bungalow himself and his wife, Áine, built in 1980, six years after moving to Joyce Country, where Éamon landed a job establishing an ill-fated lamb fattening station which later became a successful sawmill.
A small drumlin shields the now massive timber mill in Tóin le Gaoith from the Ó Cuívs’ home. The hillside house is sturdily unassuming yet commands all approaches to the surrounding district. There is a political metaphor for Ó Cuív there somewhere.
Parliamentarian
Ó Cuív represented Galway for 35 years in the Oireachtas. He was TD for Galway West for 32 unbroken years, regularly topping the poll in a constituency hosting other ‘big beasts’ like Michael D Higgins, Bobby Molloy and Noel Grealish.
He says he is retired now, but there are hints of remorse, as he speaks in an unmistakable voice recognisable on the airwaves for decades, reminiscent of a stout door to a secret room, hinging slowly open: “I canvassed Galway city for the first time in 23 years [last November] for John Connolly, and I got a great welcome on the doorsteps. I said to Áine: ‘maybe there is a seat here for me…’.”
He admits he is missing the collegiality of parliamentary affairs up in Dublin. As a former Oireachtas member, he carries a photographic Leinster House campus ID taped to his phone “in case a new usher doesn’t recognise me”.
Although universally respected across politics, media and civil society, Ó Cuív has never seemed concerned about image, or the catchy soundbite in a current affairs space shaped by an ever-decreasing attention span. He exudes an almost clerical quality of asceticism; not aloof, but earnest. He chooses his words carefully, and cuts through booby-trapped questions like a minesweeper.
Former colleagues complained he could be long-winded and censorial. But there is also a softer side too, perhaps more apparent in his personal and constituency affairs in Galway, than his national, political persona. Aged 75, and appearing increasingly ‘cut out of his grandfather’ as they say in Iar Connacht, there is a dryly honed, often self-effacing edge of humour too.
Ó Cuív punctuates plodding tales of committees and government bureaucracy, with anecdotes about being erroneously apprehended by gardaí for suspected drug dealing in inner-city Dublin (he was visiting the Liberties with a community worker, handing out sweets ), or having to call in the army when he found himself alone at night, locked inside Leinster House: “a place that’s harder to get out of, than get in to”. His humour never punches down, and his only harsh words are for a handful of former Fianna Fáil county councillors “who never did a thing for anyone.”
Legacy
Ó Cuív’s foremost political legacy is the 2003 Official Language Act. It revolutionised the use of Irish across public administration. There is also his hush-hush work on the Peace Process in prisons across this island and in Britain, which continues post-retirement. He was inaugurated as president of Oireachtas na Gaeilge in January, to promote indigenous arts through Irish, and he is chairman of the republican plots in Glasnevin Cemetery.
The UCD graduate has held six ministries overall, was deputy leader of Fianna Fáil, and in a not-so-distant, alternative universe, Ó Cuív may have been offering up the shamrock in Donald Trump’s Oval Office earlier this month, but he lost out to Micheál Martin in a 2011 leadership election, when Fianna Fáil was languishing at its nadir of 10 per cent in the polls. Martin temporarily booted Ó Cuív from his front bench soon after, when Ó Cuív objected to the 2012 Fiscal Compact referendum.
“Micheál did well,” is all he will say about St Patrick’s Day, and he is critical of “no mandate” Conor McGregor as the veteran politician skilfully steers the flow of conversation to what he wants to discuss: his personal and political legacies, like setting up an indigenous industry in Conemara – now the Corr na Móna saw mill producing 600,000 tons of timber, initiatives to rejuvenate rural Ireland, such as CLÁR and RAPID programmes (Revitalising Areas through Planning, Investment and Development ), and his eight grandchildren in Brisbane, California and Tipperary, who he is hoping to see more of since retiring from electoral politics last summer.
Family
Ó Cuív and Áine have four children aged in their 40s: Pádraic, Brian, Emer, and Éamon. They were all reared in Corr na Móna, with sporting links to nearby An Fhairche.
The couple have eight grandchildren aged 15 to infant, and Ó Cuív has so far detected a political interest in one. “My mother always said it often skips a generation,” he recalls of Emer Í Chuív, last surviving daughter of his grandfather, taoiseach and later president, Éamon De Valera. She passed away in 2012, aged 93. “It’d be something though to see an Ó Cuív in Australia’s parliament…” he imagines.
Ó Cuív grew up in leafy Blackrock, in Dublin, where his father, Brian Ó Cuív, was a noted Celtic Studies scholar. After finishing university, he was professionally aimless, but wanted to be immersed in Gaeilge. Securing a job setting-up and managing a sheep station in Irish-speaking Corr na Móna, meant moving to County Galway in 1974, aged 24. He admits he knew “absolutely nothing” about sheep, and reveals at one stage he was exporting light lambs to Italy – by jetliner.
Conamara philosophy
After growing up in south Dublin with all the mod cons, Ó Cuív recalls as a young man he was incredulous that phone calls in Conamara were still placed through several post offices with manual switches. The bureaucratic, practical and resource issues he encountered trying to get water, communications and electricity to the site of the fledgling Co-op, never mind three-phase power necessary for industrial activity, was the grounding for a political career that Ó Cuív is at pains to present as never ideological.
“So, when I was first down here, before I ever became a politician, I came up against the ‘system’. However, I found a way that we could legitimately beat the system,” says Ó Cuív of his life-defining tenure as a co-op manager. Is Dev Óg a radical too?
Twenty-four-year-old Ó Cuív also discovered the tyranny of ill-thought means testing, where farmers, seasonal and part-time workers were penalised by Social Welfare or Department of Agriculture inspectors for supplementing household incomes with small, entrepreneurial endeavours. Asked about his dream job now, there is no mention (yet ) of the presidency, but Dara Calleary’s combined role as Minister for Rural & Community Development and Minister for Social Protection appeals to Ó Cuív The Reformer.
“I hope I would be viewed as a practical idealist, but not an ideologue,” he says, after the Advertiser fruitlessly tries to identify O Cuív’s ideological underpinnings, which seem to swing from a position far to the left of his party’s current direction, to a steadfast social conservatism, tinged with a liberal sense of tolerance too.
Republicanism
Thus, defining Ó Cuív’s political philosophy might confound any social scientist, except that republicanism flows through him like dark hill water surging through the Dubhachta River near his home at Carraig Thiar: steady, and unpolluted.
“Our republicanism comes from our background – from both sides of the family,” says Ó Cuív, who notes his maternal grandfather de Valera was a physical force republican “when it came to the crunch,” but his paternal grandfather, Cork journalist Shán Ó Cuív, was a supporter of the Republican cause through political means.
“I've long argued that the more you study the War of Independence period… the more you see that basically what they did was way more sophisticated than a simple ‘shoot-out war’ they could never win,” says O Cuív, who thinks historians ought pay more attention to the achievements of establishing a functioning parliament, government departments, courts, labour tribunals and a global foreign affairs footprint. Despite this, he deplores the label of “revolutionary” generation, because his grandfather’s colleagues and comrades “had already established a state they were legitimately fighting for” he asserts.
“I place myself where the ordinary people of this country are,” responds Ó Cuív about where he sits on the simplified left-right political axis. Even getting that out of him takes multiple questions, and he avoids agreeing to the proposal that he occupies the leftfield and ‘greener’ pastures of Fianna Fáil.
Salthill summers
O’Cuív had two major ties to Galway before moving here in 1974.
Firstly, his aunt, the botanist Máirín de Valéra, lived on Maunsells Road in Galway city. Young Éamon and his siblings spent several long summers there. He particularly recalls swimming in Salthill, overseen by the late Jimmy Cranny who taught generations of Galwegians to swim. His childless aunt, whom Ó Cuív had a close relationship with, was also a marine biologist at UCG who regularly took her nephew on drives across Connemara and the Burren, or over to the islands, to look at specimens discovered by locals.
“She was very much an ‘on-the-ground’ type of person,” says Ó Cuív, a trait the former Dáil deputy is renowned for, with his constituency clinics at Maam Cross famous for the time and attention to detail he gave each constituent. His knowledge of the minutiae of social welfare and agricultural form-filling is mythical amongst civil servants, especially when he was minister for Social Protection for two years in the depths of the Great Recession.
Willing accomplice
Ó Cuív’s second link to Galway is his wife. He met Áine Ní Choincheannain, from An Spidéal, through Conradh na Gaelige, in Dublin. They married in 1976. It’s a cliché, but the native Irish speaker has most definitely been Ó Cuív’s greatest support, or “willing accomplice” as he smilingly calls her.
She ran the Ó Cuív household when Éamon was away on ministerial business, and the striking Cois Fharraige woman is a formidable political campaigner and canvasser in her own right. Ó Cuív recalls it was Áine’s father who first gave him the idea to reform a penal social welfare system which militated against small farmers working temporarily off the land.
As afternoon sun illuminates the Ó Cuívs’ ‘good room’ where we talk (Ó Cuív’s study was out-of-bounds for the nosey Advertiser ), Áine brings tea. Sunlight falls on a pencil sketch of de Valera, hanging by the window.
Have people asked you about being de Valera’s grandson throughout your career? In an uncharacteristically unguarded moment, Ó Cuív expresses pride, but also how being descended from the late president has occasionally been a “nuisance,” for a politician who regards himself as “his own man”.
Would he run for the presidency, if asked? “I’d have to think about it, if asked, but I’m not looking for it."
There is a bungalow on the old road above Corr na Móna, and in case old comrades arrive with ideas, one suspects the door is left ajar.
