We badly need the leadership and honesty of FitzGerald or O’Malley

RUDY GIULIANI was in Cork the other night, talking about leadership.

An interesting, down-to earth man a lot of what he had to say made sense, at least from where I was sitting.

I didn't agree with all the characteristics of leadership he identified, but there was enough to start me thinking. As I listened, recent images of two of our former leaders popped into my head, and I couldn't help thinking they would both have met Mr Giuliani's criteria rather well, in their different ways.

I'll resist the temptation to apply Giuliani's tests to some of our current Government (you can do that for yourselves). If you do, and especially if you think about the roles that both Des O'Malley and Garret FitzGerald (both of whom have been in the news this past week) played in our lives, you might well come to the conclusion that we're not as well served by our current leaders as we were by some of our past ones.

These are the six characteristics of leadership, in the words of the man who led the people of New York through the horrors of 9/11.

First, you have to have conviction. Second, you need to be an optimist someone who is always looking for solutions and refuses to be overwhelmed by problems. Third, there must be a willingness to take risks, what Giuliani described as courage. Fourth, he prescribed relentless preparation an absolute refusal ever to take anything for granted. Fifth, he said, teamwork is essential, springing from the ability to inspire trust. And finally, he talked about the need for leaders to be able to communicate, to express what they believe in to the people around them.

Granted, Giuliani was making an after-dinner speech, but I think he cut quite a few corners.

The key requirement in a leader is not courage, but character. Trust is something, especially in politics, that has to be earned again and again. The best communicators are people who listen as well as talk. And relentless preparation might work in a lot of lines of business, but great political leaders have to be ready to deal most often, and most of all, with the things you can never prepare for. In fact, it is character that often gets them through.

When asked what was the greatest challenge a politician had to face, Harold Macmillan answered, "events".

Very few democratic politicians have ever had to face the sort of event that confronted Rudy Giuliani, and all the contingency plans in the world were no substitute for the mental toughness that years of experience had implanted in him (possibly even a toughness he didn't know he had until he was called on).

Whatever you might have thought of Giuliani before that event, after it you knew he had character.

John Clifford, a Cork man who lost relatives himself on September 11 and who was at the dinner the other night, summed up Giuliani's characteristics surprisingly eloquently because his description was so simple. Giuliani, he said, was the right man in the right place at the right time.

How often is that the case? How often do leaders have greatness thrust upon them, in the words of the old saying?

Or to put it another way, how often can you measure the success of a leader by the way he or she deals with the major events that confront them?

Which brings me to the two leaders who popped into view this week. I never voted for Des O'Malley or his party, and I never will. There is a lot about his convictions and political philosophy that I could never agree with. But when he stood up to Larry Goodman, he stood up to some of the most powerful forces in Irish politics.

It wasn't the first time he had made a stand.

It was never my impression of him that he enjoyed taking difficult and isolated positions, even though it could also be said that he had no interest in courting popularity. Indeed it can be argued that if he had turned a blind eye once or twice, or been prepared to give the glad hand, he would almost certainly have had a chance to become leader of Fianna Fáil. But when he was confronted by events, his instincts usually forbade him from that kind of compromise.

He became Minister for Industry and Commerce, more or less by accident, a few months after he discovered that in Larry Goodman's interest we, the taxpayers of Ireland, were insuring highly risky transactions in respect of product that wasn't even being manufactured here. And he put a stop to it.

THAT sounds like a simple enough thing to do. But anyone who was around in those days, anyone who crossed the paths of the enormously powerful business and political interests involved, had reason to be afraid. I was a bit player in some of the events involved, and in the course of them I frequently met people in the middle of the night, because they were physically afraid to meet in daylight. I have no doubt whatever that in attempting to do what was right, Des O'Malley had to withstand many similar pressures.

As Pat Rabbitte said the other day, Des O'Malley stands vindicated by the withdrawal of the legal action over that export credit insurance. In that case, as in others, O'Malley was the right man in the right place at the right time.

Garret FitzGerald wasn't as tough a leader. But he inspired trust; he communicated brilliantly at different times; he never lost his convictions, and he certainly never lost his optimism.

I can remember him taking personal charge of a national roads plan in the late 1980s, summoning the relevant civil servants to his office (he was Taoiseach then), and demonstrating detailed knowledge at least equal to theirs of the engineering and planning issues that arose along every mile of the roads he was proposing.

I thought of that meeting the other night the stunned look on the civil servants' faces, the realisation that what they were going to take months to do he was able to complete in a weekend when I watched FitzGerald's tour de force on the Prime Time programme about the LUAS.

Most of us, I suspect, have had a sinking feeling for some time that the LUAS was turning into a disastrous white elephant.

We should have listened to Garret FitzGerald long before now.

Throughout his career, and especially when he was expressing urgency, he was right much more often than he was wrong. On issues of public transport but also in relation to much that has affected our lives for 30 years, from Northern Ireland to the fairer distribution of wealth in Ireland, his has been a clear, cogent, and honest voice.

The qualities of leadership displayed over many years by these two elected public servants are different, just as their personalities were.

Sometimes all they had in common was their enemies. But they were, and are, leaders worthy of the name. We could use a few like them in our Government today.