The Mayor Necessities

Andrew Montague, the outgoing Lord Mayor of Dublin, is coming to the end of his tenure. “I’m really not looking forward to leaving this place,” the silver-haired 44-year-old admits, with a heavy sigh.

He waves his hand expansively. “I mean, like, this room is where I eat my breakfast. Amazing.”
The room in question is an impressively high-ceilinged, wooden-floored affair, with expensive antique furnishings, valuable oil paintings on the walls, and a long polished table that could easily accommodate 20 diners. Steeped in political history, from Éamon de Valera and Michael Collins to Charlie Haughey and Bertie Ahern, leading politicians and reprobates alike have breakfasted here.
Earlier, Montague had given Hot Press a brief tour of the Mansion House. As its name suggests, it’s a very fine gaff indeed, and its current occupant proved a hugely informed guide. There’s a story behind each and every one of the numerous portraits of previous incumbents hanging on the walls, and he seems to know them all. His favourite painting is the large oil of Daniel O’Connell that hangs in the main entrance hall. Montague’s political hero, the ‘Great Liberator’ was Lord Mayor of Dublin in 1841, and campaigned against slavery in the US at a time when it was neither popular nor profitable.
It isn’t just the thought of moving that is bothering Montague. The previous day’s Evening Herald ran a story – with the front page headline ‘DRINK TEST PREGNANT WOMEN - MAYOR – claiming, misleadingly as it happens, that Montague was calling for women from working-class areas to be tested for alcohol use during pregnancy. “I’ve written to them asking for an apology and a retraction,” he says. “If I don’t get one, I’ll take them to court.” (An apology appeared the day after our conversation).
Born and raised in the northside, and a qualified vet, Andrew was first elected to Dublin City Council in 2004 as a member for Ballymun-Whitehall. He was re-elected in June 2009 for the redrawn local electoral area of Artane-Whitehall. He is the man behind the Dublin Bikes scheme, which has proven to be such a huge success in the city.
As we speak, he has just four weeks left as Lord Mayor…

OLAF TYARANSEN: What’s your earliest memory
I remember watching my brothers going to school before I was going to school. And I’ve strong memories of being in school in what we called ‘low babies’ and ‘high babies’. I had a fantastic teacher for the first couple of years, Mrs. O’Shaughnessy. We grew up in Santry, and we went to school in Larkhill and then St. Aidan’s on Collins Avenue.
I believe that you’ve just turned 11.
(Laughs) I was actually born on leap year’s day in 1968, so I’m 44 going on 12. Actually, it was a leap year this year so I invited all leap year children into the Mansion House and we had a big party here on February 29. That was a bit of craic.
You come from a large family?
Yeah, I have five brothers. I’m in the middle, I’ve one brother, Pat, who’s seven years older than me, and the youngest, Peter, is seven years younger than me.
What did your father do?
My dad was a publisher’s agent so he would have represented all the companies like Longmans or AMC Black or Unwin, and sold their books in Ireland. The house was always packed full of books – and still is from top to bottom. My parents are both very fit and well and active.
Was it a religious upbringing?
Yeah, both my parents would have been very strongly Catholic, and still are. But not necessarily in a dogmatic kind of way. They were involved and active – thinking people.
Did it rub off on you?
I wouldn’t be religious. I don’t believe in God. But I do respect the values of Jesus: forgiveness, for example, is a really powerful idea, a really important idea. And also loving one another and also loving the least of your brethren so that we’re all, even the lowliest people, equal. Those values are really strong and probably helped guide me. But I don’t believe in the afterlife. I stopped believing in God when I was about 16 or 17, and it’s been pretty much like that ever since.
Do you think Cardinal Brady should have resigned?
I think it’s actually quite an exciting time in the Church. What’s been happening is just dreadful, as is how they’ve handled things, but ordinary members of the Church know that themselves – and they’re stuck in a real dilemma because they’ve a very dogmatic Church and these are the rules and, no, you don’t get to decide the rules. And yet a lot of people in the Church want to change things. It’s a bit like our economy. It’s in such big trouble that there’s new possibilities emerging.
What about Brady?
I just think that the more that we on the outside criticise Brady, the less chance there is for reform. I’d rather give them the breathing space to get stuck in and make changes.
What were you like in school?
I was pretty good in school. I wanted to do Veterinary Medicine so I worked my ass off to get the points I needed. I didn’t get it the first time, repeated, and got a really good Leaving Cert the second time. My favourite thing about school was playing soccer in the yard, on the tarmac – with a tennis ball – from 4 o’clock until it was dark every day. That was the thing I loved most about school.
Were you successful with women as a teenager?
I remember the first girl I went out with for a couple of months in the summer when I was about 13 or 14. But I wouldn’t say I was particularly successful. I stumbled through things just like most people do. So, it took me a while to get there – but I’m getting married in July!
Your fiancée is named Sinéad Ahern. She’s not related to Bertie, by any chance?
She’s not of that family, but she is very political. She’d be involved in the Labour Party, that’s how I met her. She was director of elections for Rebecca Moynihan, a fellow councillor on Dublin City Council. So we met after a council meeting – January 21, 2009 it was. After our budget meeting we would traditionally go out for a drink, and that’s when I met her.
What age were you when you had your first drink?
I was about 16. I used to go to the Grove, on the northside of Dublin, and we would’ve had a couple of beers on the way down there. I never was a big drinker. If I did drink too much, I’d just be sick. I’m not teetotal, but I’d only be an occasional drinker. Especially this year, because I’m the Mayor, and because I have to get up and perform every day, I’m just not drinking. If I was out with friends it might be different. I don’t drink at public functions because I want to keep my wits about me, and I’ve always got to think about the next morning.
When was the last time you were drunk?
A long time ago. I’d say I was probably a student so it’d be 20 years ago.
Did you ever experiment with illegal drugs?
When I was in America on a J1 in 1987. I was 19 and I smoked marijuana a couple of times, and again it didn’t agree with me. I got sick and I didn’t like the sensation. Other people I knew found it really funny or really enjoyable. I felt disorientated and uncomfortable so I didn’t do it again.
Are you into fitness and health?
Yeah, but I’m not excessive. I cycle to get around the place, and that covers it. I live in Ballymun, so to get into town is about half an hour, to get out of town another half an hour. I’d be in and out three or four times a week and that’s my fitness covered really. I don’t have to go to the gym.
Was music important to you growing up?
Yeah, I loved music. Always watched Top Of The Pops. I loved Mud, Slade and all of those glitter bands. Then when I was a little bit older, I loved Stiff Little Fingers. The Boomtown Rats would’ve been my first band that I really loved, got all of their albums. They were probably the best band that I ever saw live. I saw their last concert in Ireland in 1984, in the RDS. They were just stunning. I also got involved with a band myself. I was in a band called A Little Death.
As in after the French “petite mort”?
There ya go! (laughs)
So essentially your band was named after an orgasm?
Not everybody makes that connection. A lot of people thought it was a very bleak name. Actually there was more to it than that. But we played from about 1986 to about 1991. Mostly small stuff. We played lots in the Underground and places like that – it’d break your heart because there’d be 20 people there. But we did some bigger shows. Do you remember Slowest Clock? They would have been around about the time of Tom Dunne and Something Happens – anyway, they were a great band, and we supported them in The Baggot. I sang and played a bit of guitar.
Why didn’t you make it?
We were never good enough. We always knew that (shrugs): we were good, but not good enough. I’d be quite proud of what we did and really enjoyed it, and I still love music. Actually, I played guitar and sang a few songs here in the Mansion House last night. One of the things that’s happened with people is that they’ve kind of got this notion that singing and playing guitar is for somebody else – you have to be famous, or whatever. Singing is so much fun when you do it amongst yourselves. So we had a group in from Santry and we had young girls singing, middle-aged people singing, and one woman, who could be 90. I love that kind of participation thing rather than you have to be an ‘artist’.
Did you ever practice as a vet?
I worked for about ten years as a vet. I found being a vet very hard, which is why I gave it up. I found it’s a very stressful job. Most of my career I was working in small animals and I would’ve seen maybe 20 cases a day. 15 or 18 would go grand and you’d know what was going on, but biology is never straightforward and doesn’t follow the textbooks so I would always be worrying about those two or three problem cases. I’d worry about what could go wrong. Also the hours in the job were very, very demanding and very unsociable because people want to see you before they go to work or after work, so you’d have this very busy period early in the morning and then you’d be very busy late in the evening and you’d kind of have an empty day – but you can’t do anything useful because you have to be available in case an emergency comes in.
So it wasn’t quite like James Herriot portrayed it?
I have to say James Herriot was a big factor in me getting into veterinary in the first place. When you re-read his books, what’s unrealistic is how confident he was in all his diagnosis. Back in the ‘30s he didn’t have the blood tests or the ultrasound or the x-rays or all those modern diagnostic tools. He would’ve been going on instinct – and it’s impossible to make accurate diagnosis. In an awful lot of your cases you just wouldn’t know what was wrong. I never stopped with the worry so it was too stressful for me.
Are you a vegetarian?
No.
So you care for animals, but you still eat them?
Yeah… (laughs). I would prefer to eat animals that would at least have had some kind of decent life. Thankfully in Ireland our cattle and our sheep are reared outdoors in a pretty good environment. I’m not totally au fait with how pigs are reared at the moment. When I was working in Ireland to me they were battery pigs essentially, and so I would have avoided pork.
After you retired as a vet, you moved into website design.
My second choice after veterinary had always been computer science and I was really lucky that way back in 1980, before there was Windows, my maths teacher taught us computer programming.
He taught you Basic?
Yeah, Basic. I hadn’t touched computers since school. It was all database and spreadsheets and word documents, and I really enjoyed all that stuff. I dropped into a few website design courses and was blown away by the possibilities. When I learned how easy it was to build a website, I just thought it was a new medium – it was like radio being discovered, and I was so excited about it all. So I set up a website design company.
Was it successful?
I was able to make a living out of it. But not long after I started it up, I got into politics. So they kind of worked well together because it’s very flexible. If somebody wants a website they want it by next month, you know. It’s not by five o’clock tomorrow, and so if I have a constituency meeting or if I’ve to go and meet a residents’ association you can work around it. I wouldn’t have been making big money out of either. Together it was very nice. Since about 2008, I’ve been 90% politics and only a small amount of the web.
When did you first become involved in politics?
I suppose I got the interest from my family, from my parents, and from my older brother. Current affairs was always on the TV. My dad was from the North – so Northern Ireland current affairs featured a lot. When I first got interested in politics, there were three parties. Even as a teenager, I perceived Fianna Fáil as being corrupt. It was obvious...
Was Charlie Haughey in your constituency?
Yeah, Haughey was in my constituency and, you know, it was all about, “I’ll do this for you in return for that,” and “you scratch my back.” It wasn’t about what’s best for the country. To me it didn’t feel like it was the right way of making decisions. And then there was Fine Gael who, in my opinion, were more the party of the middle-class and the upper-class, and weren’t concerned with the issues of inequality. Now I came from a middle-class area, but I was always interested in issues of inequality and a fairer Ireland, and to me there was only one party out of the three that could possibly go anywhere near that, and that was the Labour Party. My brother Pat, who was a member of the party, had me out dropping leaflets when I was about 13. I think I joined when I was 16, but then that lapsed. But I spent six weeks working really hard on the general election campaign in 2002 and the Labour Party did very badly in that campaign – totally undeservedly. So I joined the party in 2002, and in 2003 the party approached me and asked me would I consider being a candidate in the local elections in 2004. I had already been considering it. So I was selected and I got elected in 2004 to the council.
What’s been the high point of being Lord Mayor?
It’s been an amazing year. Dublin winning the All-Ireland was fantastic. We had the team back in here and then we went out to Merrion Square. I had to speak, basically to stir up the crowd before the team came on, and I just loved that. 40,000 people! That was my kind of Bono moment. Then Dublin is twinned with San José and so every year the Lord Mayor and a delegation goes out to San José, and I had no idea how important that is for Dublin until I got there. San José is the centre of Silicon Valley, and the doors that were open to us as a result of that were extraordinary. We got in to meet senior executives in Facebook, Google and Apple, and it makes a big difference.
So the Lord Mayor gig is more than just a ceremonial role?
It’s a huge opportunity for promoting the city. One of the things that I do is meet a lot of visiting delegations. In particular I meet a lot of people that are planning to bring tours here. Just this morning I had about 15 or 20 people, tour operators from Brazil – it was their first trip to Ireland. I meet them here at the Mansion House, give them a tour, tell them about the history. People are very excited that the mayor came to meet them – it shows respect, and it enthuses them with the idea of bringing tours here. So there’s a huge opportunity for the mayor to promote the city. We’ve a lot of conventions coming here: the convention centre is a massive thing for Dublin. 6,000 people can attend a convention. For example I met recently with the World Nursing Organisation. They’re planning their 2018 World Convention, and they’re looking at Dublin. So they come here and they meet me and think, “This is great, the mayor’s onside, he’s going to back us, he’s going to help us through this.” Then they find out, “Oh, we’ve to deal with six more mayors,” and they’re kind of thinking to themselves, “What’s this about?” We can’t have that relationship built up over time, that I can pick up the phone to the mayor of San José and say, “Chuck, it’s Andrew here. What’re we going to do about getting the flight between San José and Dublin re-established?” Because I’ll be gone. You can see how those relationships can be really important for a city, and how changing the mayor every year means we’re not working at our best.
So would you suggest a four-year term?
Well, whatever the term of the council is, so it should be a five-year mayor.
Have you ever been offered a bribe in your time on the Council?
No, and I think it’s very unlikely in Dublin City Council to be offered a bribe. The corruption in Irish politics is largely rezoning agricultural land into residential or commercial land. Dublin City Council area really doesn’t have any agricultural land so most of our decisions actually are about, “Well, how dense should we go?”, and stuff like that. So there’s never been a major issue of corruption in Dublin City Council.
What about George Redmond?
Corruption will always be there when there’s massive temptation – so we have to remove the temptation from Irish politics. That means we need to remove that particular bugbear of the rezoning of agricultural land because massive amounts of money can be made at the stroke of a pen: land values can increase ten-fold. I think corruption will come back to haunt us if we don’t remove that temptation – which can be done with a massive windfall tax of 75% or the Kenny proposal years ago which meant that the value would accrue to the State.
You were responsible for introducing the hugely successful Dublin Bikes scheme to the city.
I started cycling in Dublin in 1998 and it was grand, but tough getting around. What really opened my eyes was I went on holidays to Utrecht, and it was such a pleasure to cycle in Holland. There was a bike rack at every door of every shop, and of every cinema, of every theatre, and every church. Everything was set up for cyclists in Holland. So when I got elected to the council I was interested in improving facilities for cyclists. It’s only €10 to join the Dublin Bike scheme per year. I knew that if we made it easy for people to join, those people who had been thinking about cycling would do it. A large proportion of our customers have only cycled twice a year but once you get them in the door and they see how pleasant it can be to cycle around the city, a large number of the people who start cycling Dublin Bikes go on and buy their own bike. We’re bringing a whole new audience to cycling.
You were also responsible for bringing in the 30km per hour speed limit on the quays, which proved rather less popular...
There was fierce resistance to that and I have to say, from a political point of view, I certainly didn’t win too many friends (laughs). But I brought it in around about the same time we brought in the Dublin Bike scheme and I think it was essential for the two of them. They went hand in hand and I don’t think the Dublin Bikes would be near as successful if people didn’t feel safe cycling in the city.
So that was the main idea behind it?
A big part was to increase confidence among cyclists. People said, “Well, it’s safer to drive at 50km an hour.” I mean all of the research and the laws of physics will tell you that that’s just not true. What we’ve seen since the 30kph came in is that the number of fatalities in Dublin dropped from 32 in 2009, which was the year before 30kph, and in 2011 there were 11 fatalities. That’s a 70% drop in fatalities across Dublin. Now 30kph wasn’t the only factor, but the Garda Chief Superintendent Aidan Reid, who was head of traffic in Dublin, said that this was a factor in the big reduction. Also the other factor was the increase in cyclists because the more cyclists you have in your city, the safer your city is.
There’s a massive begging problem in Dublin city nowadays...
There is. The legislation that was introduced last year banned organised begging. So there’s a lot less Roma begging because they were being let off in vans and being collected at five o’clock. But their pitches have just been taken up by Irish people. And a lot of it is aggressive begging. Now, aggressive begging has been outlawed but it’s very hard to catch people: they don’t carry cups with them anymore, they tend to just come up to you and ask for the money and say, “I’m looking to go to a hostel.” It’s a very difficult one because obviously one has sympathy for people who are on their uppers. However, a lot of people who are begging aren’t in that situation and a lot of them make a lot of money. But there are some people who are struggling and there are some people who can’t access social welfare, so it’s hard to ban begging – because you could be cutting someone off from all income altogether.
Many of the beggars are addicts. What are your thoughts on the idea of legalising heroin?
There is evidence from other cities that having controlled injecting rooms is something worth looking at and that there is some evidence of success. I think we should do some trials here in Dublin to see how successful it is. We have people openly injecting on our streets in Dublin, on our city centre streets, in little laneways off Abbey St., off Henry St., and that’s not good for them and it’s not good for Dublin. I think it would be worthwhile gathering some evidence to see if we can do it in a more successful way. Most people who are addicted to opiates are on methadone, and they have some structure and control in their lives. But a lot of our heroin addicts are living in a very chaotic moment, or maybe sometimes people can be stable on methadone and go back onto heroin for a while. So I think we should try out controlled, supervised, clean injecting rooms. But we would need to see what the results were before that you would change your policy.
You hit the headlines yesterday over calling for working-class women to be tested for alcohol use during pregnancy. What was all that about?
That was a totally untrue article, written by the Herald, and I’ve asked them to retract it. We have a commission here on anti-social behaviour and we were looking into the issue of Foetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder. It’s a big mouthful, but it’s children whose central nervous systems, their brains, have been affected by their mother drinking during pregnancy. Some research shows somewhere between 30 and 70% of the prison population have FASD – so it’s a serious problem. If you are born like this, there is no recovery, you are affected for life. People with FASD find it very hard to concentrate, so something like school is really difficult for them. A lot of them will end up in the criminal justice system. Some research shows 30% of prisoners, some research shows up to 70% of our prisoners, are affected by this. We need to take this really seriously.
So what can you do?
There’s no cure for it, but you can help modify behaviour. Children in better-off areas tend to get treatment or tend to get help for this, whereas children in poorer areas tend to get less help, and therefore the outcomes for children in disadvantaged areas are worse. So what I called for is that children should be screened for FASD in disadvantaged areas because we need to help those children.
Not the mothers.
Not the mothers! And the Herald quoted me as saying children should be screened, but their headline was something like ‘Lord Mayor calls for pregnant mothers in disadvantaged areas to be tested’. It was an outrageous story. People calling me a fascist. It was just outrageous and I’ve written to them asking for an apology and a retraction.
Is austerity working?
I think austerity is damaging our economy and is damaging our society – but the alternatives appear to be worse. I think, we’re borrowing €44 million a day, just to pay our way and nobody is willing to lend us that money except for the European Union. So I think we have no choice and it’s not the European Union being nasty to us. There is an issue with our bank debt, and remember the Labour Party was the only party to vote against the bank guarantee. Sinn Féin supported the bank guarantee. Pearse Doherty talked about pulling on the Irish jersey to support the bank guarantee. So we’re now stuck with the situation where we have these debts. We need to re-negotiate that, but we’re in a very weak negotiating position because we have to borrow €44 million tomorrow, and if I have to borrow €44 million from somebody tomorrow I can hardly tell them, “By the way, I’m not going to pay you back the money I owe you!”
So we have a gun to our heads?
We do, but I think…
So they are actually being kind of nasty to us...
Well yes, in that way they are, but I think there are opportunities opening up in terms of Spain’s need to sort their banks out. Their problem is so big that Europe is going to have to address it, and when they address Spain’s banking problems we have that opportunity to address ours. We were able to get our interest rates reduced last year, which saved the country €10 billion, so we have been able to re-negotiate some of the conditions of the troika. But I think we have no choice but to reduce expenditure. If you take the bank debt out of it, we still aren’t paying our own way. I think what’s also difficult for us is when we’re paying more to our civil servants than other countries, but we’re taxing less, it gives us a very weak negotiating position.
Do you think the likes of Bertie Ahern and Brian Cowen deserve the pensions they’re on?
No. I think we need to find some way of reducing that. There are constitutional issues but I think we should look at those issues. It’s not just Bertie Ahern and Brian Cowen – there’s far too many people going out on massive pensions – people in their 50s retiring on €80,000 or whatever. It’s just outrageous. It’s not sustainable, when the country’s in the midst of the worst financial crisis some say in the world. That people are going out with pensions on €100,000 in their 50s. Crazy!
How do you think Michael D. Higgins is doing as President?
I’ve never seen an Irish politician ever get the amount of affection that Michael D. is getting. My nephews are in the Dublin Youth Orchestra so I was invited as guest of honour to one of their shows in the National Concert Hall last January, and Michael D. came in his private capacity. I came as the official guest and I walked in and was seated and got polite acknowledgment as I walked to my seat. He walked in in his private capacity and the crowd stood up and roared in unison. I think his personal engagement with people and his warmth is really winning people over, and I think his ability to talk about issues in a deeper, more reflective way, is connecting with people at the moment.
Your term as Lord Mayor is about to end. What are your ambitions beyond that?
I would love to see a directly-elected mayor for Dublin. I think it makes sense for Dublin. If you’re going to have somebody there for five years, why should councillors pick the mayor? I think the public should pick the mayor and I think that we need regional decision-making in Dublin. We’ve four councils in Dublin, and the research shows that – the smaller the councils the more effective the decisions are, for a lot of things – but there are some things that make sense, like transport, like regional planning that should be made on a regional basis so I think it would an ideal fit for a mayor to be responsible for that. My personal ambition would be to run for that office. I would like to be the directly elected mayor of Dublin.
You wouldn’t like to be a TD?
I would prefer to be the directly elected mayor of Dublin but, if that doesn’t become an option, yes, I would like to be a TD.
When was the last time you cried?
Em, I would’ve cried... (pauses). I broke up with somebody in 2000 and that was very hard. I’d been going out with her for five years, and I found that really difficult. Yeah, that was very hard.
Is your fiancée your first long-term relationship since then?
Yeah. Now I went out with other people, but I suppose I just never found the person that I wanted to settle down with until I met Sinéad. And I knew pretty quickly when I met Sinéad.