Reality bites as Walsh becomes Joe Soap again

IT’S A tough life when the ministerial Merc is removed.

Former Agriculture Minister Joe Walsh has told of the difficulties he endured after making way for Mary Coughlan in the Cabinet reshuffle of 2004.

The hardest thing to get used to after almost two decades of holding junior and senior ministerial portfolios, Mr Walsh said, was being ignored.

“I think the biggest trauma, and the thing that you would need some counselling for, was that quite suddenly, people who would literally put out the red carpet for you or grovel to you [when a minister] would totally ignore you — you were a non-person.”

Mr Walsh remained a Fianna Fáil TD after vacating the Cabinet. But he quickly discovered that the backbencher’s lot was distinctly less glamorous than the ministerial lifestyle.

There was the discovery, for instance, that airports had things like queues…

“So, when you arrive at the airport, the duty officer’s no longer there with your boarding card; you have to actually find where the Aer Lingus desk is and you have to join the queue like everybody else,” he told RTÉ Radio.

“And then you have to look at things that I didn’t know existed, which are monitors which show your arrivals and departures and the times and the boarding gates — that is all totally new, a totally new world.

“When you returned on the plane, there were things like carousels where you had to pick up your luggage and [you had] to find out what carousel [it was on]. I mean, it is a totally new world, so it does take a bit of time to get back into normal life again, because those services are withdrawn.”

As was the ministerial Mercedes and chauffeur.

So accustomed was he to being ferried around, Mr Walsh admitted, he had to relearn to drive.

“Thankfully my driving licence was still current… [but] things like roundabouts were a new thing to me after 20 years.

“High-rise car parks — I didn’t realise that the barrier didn’t lift until you pressed a button and got out a ticket. And when you returned, you had to cash that ticket in a little machine to make the barrier lift again.

“That was new technology [to me], because in the 20 years literally from the late ’80s to 2005, an awful lot had changed.”