Why Éamon Ó Cuív remains opposed to FF and FG being in government together
Dr. Richard Martin
I recently sat down with former Galway TD Éamon Ó Cuív for a chat.
I’m fairly well versed in Irish history and in the days leading up to meeting, I was wondering what we’d discuss.
His 35 years in the Oireachtas - as Senator, TD, and Minister? His father? Brian Ó Cuív?
De Valera, perhaps?
His 35 years in the Oireachtas - as Senator, TD, and Minister? His father? Brian Ó Cuív?
Éamon Ó Cuív possesses an uncanny physical resemblance to his grandfather Eamonn de Valera.
And because over decades he was a politician of national repute in Fianna Fáil, the focus is always on Dev.
But what most people don’t know or appreciate is that Éamon's father Brian Ó Cuív (1916–1999) was one of the foremost Irish language scholars of the last century.
Brian Ó Cuív was a Professor of Celtic Studies at UCD and later worked at the DIAS (Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies).
It’s worth mentioning here that De Valera founded DIAS in 1940.
Brian was an expert on Classical Irish. He also published widely on other aspects of the language such as dialects, grammar, metrics, literature, and history.
Over 300 of his publications are listed by Rolf Baumgarten in Bibliography of Irish linguistics and literature 1942–71 (1986), but a complete list is lacking.
All of this was floating around in my head before the drive to Corr na Móna.
Who is Éamon Ó Cuív?
A simple but accurate description is that he is the child of Irish politics, rebellion, language, folklore and culture.
When all these paths converge, this is where you will meet Ó Cuív.
And there aren’t too many standing alongside him.
The day before I met Ó Cuív, I met a friend of mine in Caffè Nero for a coffee. Dr. Leo Green.
Like Ó Cuív, Leo Green is a man of immense personal integrity and intelligence. I had told him I was meeting Ó Cuív the following day and, as we sat, he handed me an envelope and, with a smile said: ‘Give that to Ó Cuív’.
I opened it. It was an authentic picture of De Valera taken in the autumn of his life.
Leo Green is a former IRA hunger striker. He was a prisoner in the H-Blocks and, later, in the late ‘90s and 2000s, became a senior Sinn Féin official and adviser at Stormont. He would have come into contact with Ó Cuív in years past through his work with Republican prisoners.
With that picture in my possession, I knew where I’d start. The prisons.
Dev, after all, was a republican prisoner and a jailbreaker. He famously escaped from Lincoln Prison in 1919 with the assistance of Harry Boland and Michael Collins on the outside.
Sitting opposite Ó Cuív in his living room I handed him the photograph and asked: “When did you start meeting the prisoners?”
ÉÓC: I started meeting the prisoners in 1994.
RM: That's an unusual move for someone in Fianna Fáil.
ÉÓC: Well, it wasn't. It was perfectly logical. Remember, this was the Albert Reynolds days.
Albert Reynolds had set up the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation. And he knew I was interested in the whole issue of the north and so one day there was a session with the prisoners' families.
I was there as a member of the Forum. And one lady made a complaint that her husband was in prison in England and that they were refusing to let her husband speak to her and the family in Irish, even though they were an Irish-speaking family.
He was serving a long sentence at the time. So, I went to her after the meeting, and I said to her would it help if I visited your husband.
Now, I knew from my own background that if you didn’t sort the prisoner issue, whether it was the Fenians or whatever, you wouldn’t sort anything out. So, I said to her, would it help if I went over to see him.
And I was the obvious person because I was an Irish speaker. And the issue initially raised with me was in relation to language.
I could go over and authoritatively say that it's just a language like any other language. Would you refuse a French person permission to speak French to his family, right? Or a German person if you had a prisoner from Germany.
As it happened before I ever got there, he got transferred to the North. I did see him subsequently in the Maze. But I said I'd go over anyway.
RM: But what did you actually talk about? You know, they're in the Provisional IRA, and you're in Fianna Fáil.
ÉÓC: The humanitarian issues were the first issue. So, the first issues were prison conditions and whatever. The Special Security Unit was 23-hour lock-up, no natural light in the wintertime.
RM: Were you trying to build bridges?
ÉÓC: I was building bridges. And the prisons became central to the whole Good Friday Agreement, and as part of that agreement they all got out within two years.
Bertie Ahern was very supportive of highlighting the issue, and he was leader of Fianna Fáil at the time.
RM: How did you get on with the relatives of Michael Collins? I’ve read that the two families knew each other quite well, and they were friends.
ÉÓC: Oh, yeah. That's a fact. So, Johnny Collins (brother of Michael) was working in the Land Commission. He lived in Blackrock. My mother and siblings played with Johnny Collins' family as children.
And, in 1974, I came down here working in a co-op. Sometime between 1974 and 1975, we started building the co-op, and I was looking for money to do this in 1974. I went to the AIB and they refused.
So we applied to the ACC Bank. I was young at the time, I was 23. And, anyway, I decided to ring the chair of the bank to make my case.
I found out that it was a Michael Collins of Clover Meats.
Anyway, I made the phone call, and I'll never forget the phone call. It rang through to Clover Meats, and the secretary answered, and I said: "Look, could I speak to Michael Collins, please? My name is Éamon Ó Cuív."
So, a man's voice came onto the line. And I repeated, my name is Éamon Ó Cuív. I'm the manager of a co-op in north-east Connemara.
Well, he said: “Tell me, are you Emer’s son?”
And I said, yeah. And he said, tell your mother I was asking for her. And then we got on to explaining my business.
RM: Go away.
ÉÓC: Now, that same Michael Collins, every time one of my mother's siblings passed away, he used to always send her a telegram.
RM: Really?
ÉÓC: Yeah. Because he knew them. He knew them.
RM: Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael historically were sworn enemies. Now, after 100 years of division, they are in government together. But you were and are against that?
ÉÓC: I am still against it.
RM: Why?
ÉÓC: You answer me this. Show me the alternative government because I can't understand a parliament that works without a credible alternative government. That's the number one reason.
RM: Sinn Féin are the opposition, right? You don't see them as being credible.
ÉÓC: Sure Sinn Féin are a 20% party.
RM: I know, but they all are. I’m a pragmatist. A government has to be formed.
EÓC: A government has to be formed but what I'm saying to you is when Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael went into power, the rationale, from my point of view, is, if I stand back a bit, 40% to 45% of people never agreed with the government.
No government had ever done better than 50%, really.
But, the reality is you have to have an alternative government. It doesn't work properly in the Dáil without that. And the alternative government, ideally, has a slightly different ideology, but not too violently different ideology. And in every proper, functioning democracy, you need that.
So, the alternative government at the moment, that we've now created, by going in with Fine Gael, can't be Fine Gael, is an amalgam of Sinn Féin, Labour, Greens, Social Dems, and PBP.
The Fianna Fáil that I belong to, the Fianna Fáil of the grassroots out there, would be bolder looking after the national interest. That's where myself and Micheál [Martin] would differ.
RM: Bolder?
EÓC: More stand-up for ourselves. Less supine. We would also be slightly more socialist.
Fianna Fáil, to me, were really very effective in both creating wealth, and realising that you can't distribute what you don't make and, on the other hand, distributing wealth.
Now, where I'd disagree with Fianna Fáil again, even though I'm in Fianna Fáil, and I think a lot of grassroots would share with me the aspiration of 80% house ownership as we had in the past to ensure social stability. Because house ownership is important for stability.
We spoke for over two hours. His wife Áine kindly interrupted us at one point with a beautiful tray of scones, Jaffa cakes and a pot of tea.
We had a break and discussed Mayo’s historic win for a few minutes.
How would I describe Ó Cuív? A very ordinary extraordinary person. No more.
No less. A voice of middle Ireland. A voice of rural Ireland. A dying voice of the FF grassroots.
I still can’t understand how he wasn’t the FF candidate for the Presidential Election.
In every election in Galway West he outpolled Catherine Connolly. In the general elections of 2007, 2011, 2016 and 2020 when they were both in the same electoral contest Ó Cuív headed the poll on every occasion except in 2011 when he placed second behind Derek Nolan.
Catherine Connolly was elected on three key issues: neutrality, Irish unity and the Irish language. All core FF grassroots values and no one epitomises those values more than Ó Cuív.
It is, as they say, just one of those things.