I fell for FG after a ‘BLIND DATE’
Emer Higgins quit her executive post in PayPal when she won her seat... and now she wants Leo’s job
IT was a blind date with a young Simon Harris that convinced first-time Fine Gael TD Emer Higgins to join Fine Gael. The TD for Dublin Mid-West had been involved in student politics but didn’t come from a family with party political links.
Her father’s boss was a member of Fine Gael and had been trying to persuade her to join the party for some time. He eventually convinced her to meet with a promising young member of the party,
‘So he said [to my dad]: “There’s this young fella who’s from near where you are, about the same age as Emer, really interested in politics, bit of a geek but really interested in politics and very passionate, very persuasive. He’s going to be big and I think if she met him, got to know him she’d be interested in joining Fine Gael...” So I went on my political blind date, in the Dáil bar, the Visitors’ bar, in Leinster House with none other than Simon Harris.’
A budding Minister Harris was working for then senator, now MEP and former minister for Justice, Frances Fitzgerald, whom he introduced Ms Higgins to.
The youthful pair ended up jobsharing the role of Ms Fitzgerald’s PA while she was a senator before Ms Higgins took over the role as PA fulltime when Ms Fitzgerald got reelected to the Dáil in 2011 and appointed minister for Children and Youth Affairs.
Being attached to a minister on the corridors was ‘a huge opportunity’ and an ideal learning ground for policy development as well as balancing constituency issues.
Ms Higgins was also directly involved in managing the communications around the children’s referendum, spearheaded by Frances Fitzgerald in her newly founded department.
Ms Fitzgerald has cultivated an impressive political stable, having also mentored another high-profile Fine Gaeler, Tánaiste Leo Varadkar.
Following encouragement from Ms Fitzgerald, who was also her Fine Gael representative in Dublin MidWest, Ms Higgins decided to run in the 2011 local elections and got elected to South Dublin County Council. This was the beginning of Ms Higgins’s successful venture into electoral politics.
‘She encouraged me to get involved in local politics… And I suppose the rest, as they say is history.’
Ms Higgins grew up in Rathcoole, Co. Dublin and went to the local Holy Family Community School before studying Economics and Sociology in University College Dublin. She then did a Higher Diploma in public relations.
Shortly after leaving UCD she worked for Fáilte Ireland before departing Ireland to work in Australia for a few years. Her professional career reached impressive heights upon her return, where she held the lofty role of Chief of Staff Global Operations Europe for PayPal. She worked there, between Dublin and Berlin, for five years until she handed in her notice the day she got elected in February this year.
‘I loved working for PayPal… I had the pleasure of working with some amazing women as it happens. I only ever reported to women in PayPal. I would have been in charge of things like the employee engagement strategy for all those people, our corporate social responsibility, strategy, diversity and inclusion strategy.’
It was a ‘big decision’ to leave PayPal, which saw her reporting to the vice president of customer solutions for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, Annette Hickey, in the multinational giant.
Despite the joy of the job, ‘I always felt that my heart belonged to politics’, she says.
In 2019 she moved to a three-day working week to focus on campaigning, first in the 2019 by-election and again in February’s general election where she claimed her Dáil seat.
The 2019 by-election saw her ‘thrust into the limelight’, but for some of the wrong reasons. Comments she made expressing ‘delight’ back in 2014 about a Traveller housing scheme being scrapped in her constituency meant she found herself on the backfoot ‘clarifying things’.
‘I was a lot younger. I was in my 20s and I’d said something that had caused huge offence and I never intended it to cause offence,’ she says, adding that it was ‘difficult’, but that it was also a huge learning curve.
‘And it made me realise just how impactful, especially as a public representative, every word you say is.’
While some new TDs in a large party might be shy to vent views contrary to the party line, Ms Higgins hasn’t been afraid to vent her frustrations with the party’s track-record in housing.
Ms Higgins currently rents a home in Lucan with a friend.
‘I suppose nobody loves the critic, but, for me, and I represent an area where I represent a generation who are struggling to be able to afford their own home, rents are so high it makes it very difficult to save to be able to afford a mortgage. And I think that’s very frustrating for people my age.’
In recent weeks Ms Higgins has also been vocal in her calls for stricter rules around international travel than her party has implemented.
While accepting that it is hard to regulate international travel, she is in favour of more stringent checks and mandatory quarantining for incoming travellers.
Citing the fact that there are families across the country ‘who have made exceptional sacrifices over the
‘Ms Fitzgerald encouraged me to get involved’ ‘I never intended to cause offence, so it was difficult’
last number of months’, Ms Higgins believes that the quarantine measures for people arriving here need to be better ‘policed’, as they pose the greatest threat.
‘I suppose that’s why I was quite vocal on the need for quarantines to happen, the need for people to be self-isolating for two weeks when they arrived... for that to be mandatory through the forms, and the need for that to be followed up on,’ she says.
Ms Higgins stressed the need to make a ‘concerted effort’ to let incoming travellers know checks are happening.
In political life she has learned that things ‘change really rapidly’, pointing to the support for her party leader, Mr Varadkar, who endured a bruising election but has since soared to the top of the opinion polls due to his handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
When asked which Cabinet portfolio she would most like, she points to Mr Varadkar’s, who she mistakenly calls the ‘Taoiseach’ – which continues to be a common cross-party mistake in Leinster House these days.
‘I think, for me, Business, Enterprise and Trade will be something that I could really bring my skills to. And having worked in industry, having been part of things like the American Chamber of Commerce, the Louth Economic Forum, and of course, my experience in PayPal, I think I’ve a lot of experience and exposure within the business community.
‘I studied economics in college, so that would be something that would really, really interest me. I also worked previously in Fáilte Ireland, so anything around the tourism and hospitality sector I’d be really interested in.’
The relentlessly ambitious highachiever is determined to make her mark on Irish politics.
While she is a first-time TD, she has been around Leinster House and, more importantly, the ministerial corridor, for a long time.
It is hard to see her not being there for a long time to come.
‘I could really bring my skills to Enterprise’