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The Interview Jerry Cowley has settled back into normal life, after five years as a politician
Citizen Cowley The Interview Denise Horan
FOR five years, he was omnipresent. On radio. In the newspapers. On the Dáil floor. In Rossport. At public meetings and rallies. At community events. Talking. Demanding. Annoying people. Fighting the good fight. On May 25 last, it ended. As the votes were counted in the TF, the message quickly became clear: Jerry Cowley’s political odyssey was at an end. The man who had swept to victory in 2002, claiming a vote from every ballot box in the county, was set for a return to his GP’s desk. He resumed the life of a general practitioner at 9am the following morning, May 26, and he’s been there since. Gone from the airwaves. Faded into the background. A citizen once more. In the weeks leading up to the election, there were predictions of his demise. As the Mayo taoiseach campaign gathered pace, it was clear there would be a high-profile casualty. If it were obvious it would be him, Jerry Cowley didn’t see it. Not until election day. “I felt something was afoot when I was going around to the polling stations during the election itself. I just got a feeling when I was meeting people. I remember being outside St Patrick’s NS in Castlebar and I felt there was something not right about the way people were relating to me. I was in Crossmolina too and I got the same feeling there,” he recalled last week. His fate wasn’t finally sealed until late on that night, when he was eliminated on the sixth count. But the early tallies indicated a collapse in his vote and inevitable defeat. “If the people feel I have done my duty, I respect that and I am happy to move forward to the next stage,” he told this paper on the day of the count. Six months on, he is still gracious. Defeat hurt, naturally, but he quickly saw the positives and they remained with him. “It would be very wrong to say I wasn’t disappointed; I was. I was geared up for another five years and there were so many things I feel I could have concentrated on and done. But then there was a sense of relief on the other hand that I was spared having to be public property for another five years. At least I could get on and do the things that were very important to me, things like my family. “Things happen in a family over five years. When I started [in politics] my eldest daughter Caroline wasn’t even in medicine and now she has just a year to go. That was the silver lining on the cloud: I really appreciate being back and having time to spend with the kids.” Many commentators point to his central involvement in the Shell to Sea campaign, to the apparent exclusion of all else, as the cause of the people’s loss of faith in him. He doesn’t agree, and in any case, he doesn’t really care. He did what he thought was right and there was never any prospect of him abandoning the people of Rossport, he says. “Really, do you just walk away when the cause is just? All the TDs were involved in that cause, but when it suited them they just walked away from it. To me, that was wrong. That was immoral to desert people. The people of Erris stood by me; I only lost 12 votes in Erris,” he says, remarking that more was made of the Rossport ballot box result, from which Michael Ring secured more votes than Cowley, than there should have been. It didn’t reflect the overall picture in the area, he asserts. “People said to me ‘get a thousand miles away from that [Corrib]; you’re going to suffer’. I had to make a decision: was I going to continue to serve the people or was I going to turn my back on the people and look after my career. To me it was never about career, it was always about service and doing the best job I could.” That has always been Jerry Cowley’s political philosophy – advance the people’s agenda at all times. And, at all times, that’s what he tried to do. He was accused of political naivety, of trying to be all things to all people, of being a blind crusader. He doesn’t reject these accusations; he just didn’t believe in any other way of operating. “All the issues were so important and I suppose if I could have cloned myself I would have been fierce happy with that,” he says with a smile, half-acknowledging that he was pulled in a thousand different directions. “Everything I did in politics was geared towards serving the people and if someone came to me with something, I would do my utmost – as in general practice – to do all I could for that person. “It goes without saying that my first duty was to the people of Mayo, but if someone from some other part of the country came to me with a problem, I would try to deal with that too. A lot of these things were so important and so fundamental that I couldn’t say no. I couldn’t say ‘my votes are only in Mayo so I’m not going to help you’.” Even now, with no votes to be gained or lost, Jerry Cowley talks passionately about the causes he believes in. He flits from one to the other, words tumbling from his mouth with all the urgency and impatience of one who feels there will never be enough time to do all he would like to do. Causes like care for the elderly, which he believes should be operated on a not-for-profit basis, like social housing, like the BMW underspend. Like health, the issue on which he was primarily elected in 2002 and the one on which he has the greatest expertise. Had he been in the Dáil a fortnight ago, he would not have voted for Mary Harney to be retained as Minister for Health. “I would have voted against Mary Harney because I really feel that, while she is certainly a determined politician, her response has not been the best response for this country. The Mary Harney solution has been private hospitals, but you’re on a wing and a prayer trying to get the services in a private hospital. She is pragmatic, I suppose. She said ‘we need more beds, let’s set up a private hospital beside a public hospital, let’s do it that way’, instead of saying ‘let’s build a hospital beside the main hospital which will give us the beds that we need, which will be immediately accessible and won’t be in competition with the existing public hospital and that won’t rip off the taxpayer and won’t be enriching people who already have more than enough money anyway’.” He could go on for days about the health service, its faults and failings, about wrong approaches taken and courses that could have been followed instead. He believes in a single-tier health system; he believes people shouldn’t have to travel long distances for hospital services – ‘I saw people die that shouldn’t have died because of the hardship of having to travel such distances for treatment’; he believes in the excellence of Mayo General Hospital and fears that if some services are removed, there will be a sliding effect, with more and more services gradually taken away. He is an idealist and while his idealism probably cost him his Dáil seat, he still believes in it as the only starting point. “My vocation in life was general practice, serving the people. I wouldn’t be a consultant – I had thought about it – because if someone came up to me with a broken leg I’d hate to have to say ‘sorry, I’m an E&T surgeon, I can do nothing for you’ . I want to be of help, I want to be of service. I’m a great believer in the gospel where it says ‘if you have talents, use them’. I did a degree in law, I did the bar exams, because I wanted as much ammunition as possible with which to help people. I had a vision in my mind of a place you could walk in to and no matter what problem there was I could help.” There is a purism about Jerry Cowley that is almost hard to accept as real. But come at things from as many different angles as you wish, question him on as many issues as you can think of, challenge him on whatever beliefs you will, and you will come away with the same overall impression: sincerity underpins everything he says and does. He is neither a populist nor a fundamentalist. Just a believer in what is right, what is good. He’s a believer in people too; no matter what his differences with individuals, he respects them at a human level. People disappoint him at times, but his criticisms never stray into the sharp-toothed realm of the personal. There is more than a little merit in the theory that more cuteness and cunning, more astute reading of situations and more malleability than Jerry Cowley possesses are needed to succeed as a politician. But that’s politics’ problem. Jerry Cowley has no regrets about doing it his way. “I’ve always slept at night. I’ve never tossed and turned in my bed at night since I went into politics, because I did what I felt was right. I knew I was crossing the line with some issues and I was warned ‘you’re being controversial here’, ‘pull out there’, ‘think about getting re-elected’. But that would have been very hypocritical of me. Having been entrusted with the job of representing the people, I wasn’t going to let them down. And I was very happy about that,” he says. In addition to his wife Teresa and five children, more time is now also being devoted once more to St Brendan’s Village in Mulranny, which he founded, to the Safe Home programme and to his general practice in Mulranny. He was also recently elected as Vice President of the Irish Council for Social Housing. Through all of these involvements, he continues to serve. TD no more. Community man always.
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