"I’ve never heard of anyone standing in a wheelchair who didn’t get a seat,”
the former taoiseach Bertie Ahern quipped some years back. He may yet rue
that remark, and not just on the grounds of bad taste.
Brian Crowley, a wheelchair-bound Fianna Fail MEP, wants to be Ireland’s next
president in succession to Mary McAleese and, unlike Ahern, has no qualms
about saying so publicly. “It’s the highest office in the land and it would
be great to go for it if the opportunity arose,” he said last week.
Crowley, 44, has never made any secret of his ambition to become president. In
1997 he talked to Ahern about getting the Fianna Fail nomination. But at 33
he was too young, under the Irish constitution, and the prize went to
McAleese.
When her first term ended in 2004, Crowley declared publicly that he would be
interested in the job if McAleese decided against a second term. At the time
he was a member of the president’s advisory council of state. “The president
that we have is a fantastic holder of the office and I hope she will stand
again,” he added, wisely, since she did exactly that.
So it should have been no surprise to Ahern, battered by the Mahon tribunal,
that just a week after his daughter Cecilia coyly suggested to The Irish
Times that her dad would make a great president, Crowley trumped him again.
The six-bedroom detached mansion with expansive landscaped gardens, otherwise
known as Aras an Uachtarain, will be vacant in 2011. Despite his relative
youth and lack of domestic political experience, Crowley would be a
formidable opponent for the don of the Drumcondra mafia.
Born in March 1964, Crowley comes from a long-standing Fianna Fail family from
Bandon, Co Cork. He father, Flor, was the local TD and a supporter of
Charles Haughey who ran a pub, Flor’s. Brian was given the imprimatur to
follow in his father’s political footsteps at an early age. Mark Killilea, a
former MEP and later a mentor, remembers a young Brian visiting Leinster
House with his father.
At the age of 16, the 6ft 5in Crowley was playing touch rugby with friends on
the flat roof of the local Allied Irish Bank when he tripped and fell off
the side of the building. He told an interviewer, years later, that he
clearly remembers asking, as he plummeted to the ground, to live to tell the
tale. He did, but was left paralysed from the hips down and has been
wheelchair-bound since.
“I suppose you could say that it took me two years to come to grips with the
full impact of what had happened,” he said. “It was an awful shock to his
parents. They were devastated,” said Killilea.
Crowley spent eight months in a rehabilitation centre in Dun Laoghaire. When
he returned home, the family widened the space behind the bar of the pub so
he could go on serving behind the counter. He began to study law in the
evenings at University College Cork.
In 1993 Albert Reynolds offered him a seat in the Seanad. Local gossip has it
that the then taoiseach’s offer was to compensate Crowley’s father for not
being given the chairmanship of a local college.
A year later, Crowley stood in the European elections. A political unknown, he
nevertheless topped the poll in Munster with 84,463 votes. Four years later,
in June 1999, Crowley made Irish election history when he notched up 154,195
first-preference votes in Europe, more than Ian Paisley or John Hume.
Like his former leader, Crowley knows how to work a constituency. “The Munster
MEP is everywhere, whether in poster or in person. Efforts to escape are
futile,” wrote one observer of his 2004 campaign who watched one night as
Crowley had 26 canvassers working the estates of Killarney, 3,000 houses a
night. They rang the doorbells and Crowley wheeled down the centre of the
road, waiting for the nod, before steering himself into driveways. Crowley’s
campaign also revealed his no-nonsense approach in dealing with Fianna
Fail’s hierarchy. John O’Donoghue, director of European elections in the
South constituency, wanted Crowley to shed some votes to ensure Fianna Fail
still won two seats in the reduced three-seater constituency. O’Donoghue
ordered a carve-up of Munster — Crowley was to be allowed to seek
first-preference votes only in Cork, leaving Gerry Collins free to roam
Kerry, Limerick, Tipperary and Waterford.
Crowley was having none of it. He publicly complained about posters that asked
the public to give Collins the number one vote. “Because my picture and name
are on these posters, people naturally assume I have agreed to them,” he
said. “For months I have informed party HQ that on principle I am against
directing people on how to vote. People should vote for candidates in order
of preference and that is the only type of democratic electioneering I will
participate in, and the one that is for the long-term good of the Fianna
Fail party.”
O’Donoghue could do little but urge the party faithful to obey party orders.
“Do you expect me to chase him around with a torch and stick?” he asked,
when questioned about Crowley’s open defiance. Crowley topped the poll and
Collins lost his seat. There have been offers over the years to stand for a
general election seat. Crowley asked Killilea for his opinion and the Galway
politician advised him to stay clear. Better not to sully his name or
devalue his political currency in the hurly burly of Dail politics.
Crowley is acutely aware of other people’s reaction to his disability. “When I
started out and people saw me in a wheelchair, there was a bit of
wonderment, even embarrassment,” he said. “People didn’t know what to make
of me, but the committee structure is where it all happens in Europe. When
they saw that my disability was no disability in terms of fighting a cause,
I gained a new respect. I’m on equal terms now with all my new colleagues.
“The thing is, my mind hasn’t changed at all. Intellectually I’m the same
person and I’ve overcome the physical problems.”
Crowley can drive and flies twice weekly to Brussels or Strasbourg. “There
never really was any problem once check-in was made aware of my disability.
It works perfectly well now and it’s the same on the other side because they
are used to me.”
He is an affable guy with a ready smile. A talented singer, he plays the
banjo, the guitar and the piano. He is a regular at Shanley’s in Clonakilty,
a well-known musical bar. He likes racing, both horses and greyhounds, and
is a rugby fan. Like Ahern, he is a supporter of Manchester United football
club.
Crowley has never married but has a reputation as a charmer and a flirt, and
retains boyish good looks. Asked in 2004 why so many of his canvassers were
young women, Crowley smiled, and then claimed that it was because they were
less threatening on the doorsteps. The only smudge on Crowley’s otherwise
impeccable Aras credentials is an appearance last year at the Mahon planning
tribunal. Owen O’Callaghan, a Cork developer who has been accused of bribing
Dublin councillors in the early 1990s — which he denies — gave him IR£10,000
for his 1994 election campaign. Crowley said he never asked for the money,
and that it was his late father Flor who approached O’Callaghan.
Ahern will have to await the final report from that same planning tribunal
before he can definitively seek a Fianna Fail nomination in 2011. Crowley’s
other internal opponent will be Senator Mary White. “I know I would be a
good candidate and a very good president,” she announced last February.
White first came to prominence as a founder of Lir Chocolates which was sold
last year for €8m and is married to Padraic White, a former managing
director of the Industrial Development Authority. She is regarded as
something of a maverick even within her own party. She travelled to Colombia
in support of the Colombia Three, the IRA gang that was caught training Farc
guerillas.
Crowley will still be wary of her as an opponent. In 2004, White topped the
poll in the election for the Fianna Fail national executive, the party’s
most powerful body. By the time 2011 comes around, however, the country
might be ready for a revolutionary change, one not seen since 1990 — a man
in Aras an Uachtarain. Crowley has been waiting a long time and as Ahern has
so sensitively pointed out, the man with the wheelchair invariably gets the
seat.
