Not the limelight Callely craved

THE political year is going to end in 2005 just like it did last year - with a couple of ministerial heads on the rack.

But this time it’s a bit like Riverdance coming back into town, after Michael Flatley and Jean Butler have jigged off elsewhere.

This year it’s no longer Micheál Martin and Martin Cullen who are reeling furiously before our eyes. It’s a relatively unknown star this time but, boy, can he do some job out of a slip jig.

Ivor Callely has been around Irish national politics for 16 years and has risen from back bench TD to junior ministry almost without trace.

It has not been for the want of trying. There are few politicians around with such an eagle eye for a photo opportunity.

But in the past month, the junior minister for Transport has won the kind of national attention that he has always craved. But not in quite the way he ever imagined it.

The kind of bother he has become caught up in is on the lower end of the whoops! scale.

There is no fiddly stuff; no major project that has sunk to the bottom; no allegations of a major booboo during his watch.

Callely’s problems are a bizarre by-product of his driven and unrelenting quest to become a player. His website portrays him as a “young” member of government (though one or two of the senior ministers are younger than him).

What you can take from that is that the Dublin North Central TD sees himself as a heir apparent, to a senior ministry, and perhaps eventually to the top job himself.

A story often recycled about him is his experience on a bus as a four-year old when he was told by a fortune teller that he would be Taoiseach one day. In a recent radio interview, he spelled out a general wish (maybe in two elections time) to reach for that lofty prize.

There is one small difficulty with that. And that is that Callely has shown precious little to suggest after a decade and a half in the Dáil he is marked out for greater things. His political project seems inordinately focused on his own profile and guarding his patch in the shark-infested waters of his constituency (which is being reduced from four seats to three for the next election).

In the Department of Health, he was the junior minister with responsibility for the elderly.

The abject failures of policy during that time (the nursing homes charges and the revelations about woefully inadequate standards of care in other homes) should have gouged his reputation more than that of the senior minister Micheál Martin. But somehow he managed to edge himself away from his fray.

The recent series of events - all of them self-inflicted by the way - has seen the prospect of a minister being felled by the ancient method of death by a thousand cuts.

The brass neck use of his picture in adverts for Dublin’s Operation Free Flow was bad enough but not ultimately politically fatal. Even though the Standards in Public Office Commission is examining the propriety of this, Mr Callely would have safely survived it with no more than a slap on the wrists.

What has been damaging has been the revelation that two of his staff have resigned from his staff - with reports of others applying for transfers - in the past month.

That sorry situation has arisen from the manner in which Callely goes about his ministerial business. Reliable sources say that towards the end of his tenure, there were some officials who were not on speaking terms with him. He was abrasive and impatient for all the wrong reasons and with all the wrong people (career civil servants).

On the face of it, Callely’s problems are not in the same league as those faced by senior ministers last year. But the resignation letter from his former parliamentary assistant Neil Phelan has a certain timebomb quality to it.

Callely’s offer of a new car to him was a strange inducement that gave rise to a lot of tangled questions. And while he said last night that he would have paid for it out of his own funds, his defence was not - by the longest stretch of the imagination - convincing.

Will he be the first of Bertie Ahern’s ministers since Ray Burke to be asked to fall on his own sword? The Taoiseach has remained tight-lipped so far, though Mary Harney did accept yesterday that there was a “difficult” situation.

Ahern does have a higher tolerance level than many other modern politicians. But if further disclosures about staffing difficulties emerge, Callely fate may be sealed.