The Leader Interview..with Tony Bromell, former Mayor of Limerick
THE events of the past week could have led many within Fianna Fail to the nearest public house to mourn their losses.
But not so for Tony Bromell, 76, who remains a pioneer to this day, and whose faith in the party is undiminished, despite its near obliteration in the city polls.
During his 17-year term as a city councillor and Mayor of Limerick, Fianna Fail once held eight of the 17 seats at City Hall.
Yet this week, their representation has been reduced to one seat and Fine Gael's majority is once again on the increase.
However, he notes that, five years ago the local elections were similarly "disastrous" when only two councillors were elected – Cllr Kieran O'Hanlon and John Cronin.
A Fianna Fail man "through and through", he was born in the era when the party came to power under Eamon de Valera and went on to join the Kevin Barry Cumann of Fianna Fail in 1955 while studying Irish, history and mathematics at University College Galway.
It was a time when membership of a party was not permitted within the college grounds, and he recalled they had to bribe one of the groundsmen with "a few bob" to order to use one of the rooms to hold their meetings.
"We were on the way in, shall we say," he adds with a laugh.
There was no living the "high life" in his student days, he said, students didn't have the means to, especially as his State scholarship entitled him to just 150 maintenance per year.
Instead, he turned his attention to college debates, where "people knew where you stood politically".
If he were a student today, aware all the revelations that were to transpire in recent years, would he still veer towards Fianna Fail?
"Oh I would, I would," he says emphatically.
"First of all, with Bertie (Ahern] I don't think there's anything that would rule him out, shall we say. But I was flabbergasted and completely disappointed with what came out about Charles Haughey because I found him a very friendly man and very nice to talk to. I look upon Fianna Fail as more than a party, it's a kind of national movement. I was reared in that tradition," he says.
In 1967, former President Sean Lemass urged Donough O'Malley, then Minister for Education, to persuade Bromell to run in the local elections.
He did so successfully, scooping close to 1,000 votes and coming second only to the then mayor, Ted Russell.
The party realised his dream in the 1950s that employment could be provided for the masses and people would own their homes. He returned to Limerick from Galway in that period with hopes of "setting the place ablaze".
Fast forward 50 years and the dream has been shattered for some, with families struggling to pay mortgages and support their families.
While the party is not entirely blameless, he longs for a time when Fianna Fail will return to having absolute power in the Dail – and not in a coalition government, which he views as a "negation of democracy".
"The Government built houses and apartments and then the bubble burst. It's very easy to blame but it's very hard to know, especially when you have one economist saying X and the other saying Y. Politics can bring down people unnecessarily. It's a very inexact science (economics)."
The party's thrashing in the elections were a certainty since the emergency Budget, but there are other criticisms.
"I think maybe the fault has been that the Government hasn't communicated sufficiently enough with the electorate on the huge difficulties the country is facing. There's so much involved in trying to tease out the economic difficulties that they're forgetting to tell people what they're doing."
He recalled when de Valera visited Limerick in 1948, around the time he called for a sudden general election.
"He was making the point that a man who earns 5 a week and who spends 4 19/11 is well off, but the person who spends 5 and one penny is on the slippery slope."
The Government, he concludes, is not on a slippery slope, but "at the end of a slippery pole. That hasn't got across to people. We have to face facts, as Haughey said, that we are living way beyond our means."
In the run-up to the elections, he questioned members of the Opposition on the doorstep on whether they would overturn the decision on medical cards, and other controversial measures introduced by the Government.
"One fellow said: 'We're all saying yes, but we don't know how to do it.'"
As he sees it, the problem is that neither the Government nor the Opposition appear to know how we are going to emerge from what he calls "an economic war".
Furthermore, he fears that the electorate "having taken a beating in the last Budget, will be crucified in the next one or two. This thing could last five to 10 years. There's really no way out of it."
Even so, he believes that all parties must be united on the view that "we'll eventually turn the corner" – especially for the outside world.
The Taoiseach, Brian Cowen, he says, is "in no danger whatsoever of being pushed" or resigning.
"He has a job to do and he doesn't want to run away from the job. I'm prejudiced as you know, being Fianna Fail through and through."
Getting the message across to the electorate and the entire country was part of his own ethos as Mayor of Limerick in the early 1980s, which he felt was essentially "a PR job. The Mayor has no great powers, no more so than any other councillors. What I tried to do was project Limerick as a place to come to, to invest in and get an education."
He believes that "every generation has its leader", but won't be drawn on what he feels are the attributes of the current cohort of city councillors.
"To be honest, I don't know enough about them, but none of them really stands out."
Born on November 15, 1932, in St John's parish, his family only moved to Thomondgate when he was seven. His mother was from High Road and he believes they "became more Thomondgate than the Thomondgate people themselves".
His father worked as a plasterer and his mother worked in a shop on Catherine Street until their marriage.
Tony was the eldest of three siblings: sisters Celine and Anne came many years later, to the extent that he nearly felt as if he were an only child.
His future wife, Aine Ni Thuathaigh, was living just 600 yards away from him in Farranshone and they were brought together by their respective sisters.
Sadly, Aine Bromell was to die suddenly in 1988, aged 51, after an operation in Beaumont Hospital in Dublin to remove a brain tumour. He now lives alone in the family home. Leaning on top of the lace tablecloth on the dining room table, he looks out towards the newly-built conservatory and wonders who he's doing this for.
Still, he says it's nice to sit out there, take the sun, and read a newspaper.
Their four children, all of whom went on to become teachers like their parents, have long left their home in Greystones. Yet photos of their graduation day, and with their father in his mayoralty robes, adorn the walls, while trophies for badminton tournaments rest on a shelf in the sitting room.
Retirement, as with many people, presented a conundrum after he stepped down from his position as registrar with Mary Immaculate College in 1988.
"I woke up that morning at my usual time and thought, 'What do I do now without a job?'"
So he wrote a book – his autobiography, in fact, though it started out as a recount of his wife's life, rather than his own.
His grandchildren would frequently refer to Granny Bromell, "without really knowing anything about her".
So he sat down to write about her life – her career as an Irish dancer, how she travelled the world, and how there wasn't an school in the country where she hadn't taught pupils to dance.
She had just returned from lengthy trips to the United States and England when she was diagnosed with the tumour. Such was the anguish, her husband told her he "didn't want to leave her go to St John's Hospital, not to mind Dublin".
But they followed their doctor's advice, and two days after the operation the time came to turn off the life-support machine.
That memento of her, which he printed off and passed around to family and close friends, became Rian mo Chos ar Ghaineamh an tSaoil, translated as My Footprints in the Sands of Life.
The title is adapted from a line in a psalm by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Tony recites a section on the spot, his eyes smiling after all the talk of political doom and gloom: "Lives of great men all remind us we can make our lives sublime, and, departing, leave behind us footprints on the sands of time.
Personal File
Born: November 15, 1932 in St John's Parish
Family: Two younger sisters, four children and six grandchildren
Career: Register at Mary Immaculate College for 20 years, in addition to being a long-serving city councillor, mayor and teacher at his old alma mater CBS Sexton Street, he was briefly a Senator after winning a by-election to the 18th Seanad for the industrial and commercial panel in December 1988. He was also a founding member of the Limerick University Project Committee, established in 1959, which paved the way for the University of Limerick.
Favourite book: Cre na Cille by Mairtin O Cadhain
Favourite destination: Beal Ban, Na Gorta Dubha, Ballyferriter, Kerry
Motto: If you're doing something, do it well
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