Tax-dodging developer. Pinko leftie. Marxist Mick is a ball of contradictions

MICK Wallace and Clare Daly were finishing up a press conference about a Palestinian related issue on the Leinster House plinth. I’m ashamed to say it, but on this Wednesday afternoon in November 2011 I was more interested in getting to my lunch in nearby One Pico than listening to the two lefties banging on about the Middle East.

The new Dáil had only been sitting a few months and the ‘Mick and Clare Show’ hadn’t really taken off. We knew Mick was a bankrupt developer. With his blond hair and silly clothes you could hardly miss him. I certainly knew Clare, the firebrand socialist, though newly elected, was my local TD. They weren’t terribly friendly that chilly November day. They didn’t seem to notice me as I anonymously stepped in behind them as we walked briskly out the front gate. Imagine my surprise when they took the very turn off Molesworth Street that I was going to take. They hurried down Schoolyard Lane and ducked into the exclusive eatery One Pico ahead of me.

Wexford TD Wallace had recently admitted he couldn’t afford to repay the €19m in loans to ACC Bank. His company was in receivership. Daly was then a member of the Socialist Party, and I had wrongly assumed she disapproved of capitalist indulgence. Main courses that day included braised venison shanks and 28 day aged rib-eye of beef. They drank wine.

It was just such an incongruous venue for the odd couple. I have never seen the two of them in the subsidised Dáil canteen. Yet their nascent friendship did revolve around drink and food. They have often been seen together in many bars and restaurants around Leinster House in the years since. The Cellar Bar in the Merrion, Reilly’s of Merrion Row and Kehoe’s on South Anne Street were known haunts – all trendy and frequented by the chattering classes.

What could Mick and Clare possibly find to talk about? Politics it seems – they have become the almost perfect manifestation of bar room socialists. They also seem to think the ordinary rules of society don’t apply to them. Clare rants against photographers who displease her, or politicians who criticise her friend Mick, whose construction firm under-declared tax.

In 2012 the corporate enforcement watchdog decided not to investigate Wallace’s role in under-declaring €1.4m of VAT in his construction company. The director of corporate enforcement said the VAT returns of companies were a matter for the Revenue Commissioners. But as the Revenue made a €2.1m settlement with Wallace’s company he didn’t face prosecution.

Wallace said he would give up half of his Dáil salary to help pay back the tax but would have to be a backbench TD for 87 years to get there. His troubles didn’t put any dent in his lifestyle. He continued to frequent posh restaurants. He kept his big house in Clontarf. He was at the Euro Football championships in France last week, skipping a full Dáil agenda.

It would have been no surprise if Mick had lingered in Paris after the deadlocked Ireland/Sweden draw he attended there. Here he would be at the spiritual home of counterculture and rebellion. It was in the bistros and cafés of the Left Bank that the Paris Commune was conceived. So dreamy eyed and futile was the 1871 attempt at socialist government that even Karl Marx, at first, discouraged it. Eventually Marx adopted the Commune as a model for socialist rule.

It is such utopianism that Mick apes. He conspicuously totes the copper-coloured Financial Times around under his arm in Leinster House. Yet it is the handbook of the disaffected pinko, the Guardian, that he most frequently quotes in his Dáil speeches. The Gardaí? They’re bad. The United States? It’s the evil empire. He and Clare have protested at Shannon about the superpower using it as a stopover. In July 2014 Mick and Clare were both arrested at Shannon while trying to inspect a military aircraft. Wallace said, ‘All we wanted to do was confirm whether we are being told the truth.’ The National Assets Management Agency, which bailed out rich builders like Mick, is bad too (unsurprisingly Mick hasn’t benefited from Nama largesse).

It’s all starry-eyed, juvenile, students’ union stuff. Unusually for a builder he has a university degree, a qualification in teaching. One of 12 children from Wellington Bridge in Wexford, he has been through two failed relationships and has grown-up children from both. One would imagine he knows something of the world.

Still his hippyish blond curly hair and dress sense says so much. He has a teenager’s fondness for scruffy jeans and cutaway tops with no sleeves. He’s 61 years of age.

He can be stupid and hypocritical, overheard in the Dáil saying of his fellow Fine Gael TD Mary Mitchell O’Connor, ‘Miss Piggy has toned it down a bit today.’ He later apologised.

And what has all his political posturing achieved? He doesn’t seem to represent anybody, he has apparently refused to do constituency work, and seems to live in Dublin. During a surge for Independents in the 2016 General Election his vote in Wexford plummeted. In 2011 he attracted 13,329 first preference votes but in 2016 it was down to 7,917.

It is clear that Clare Daly is the more intellectually savvy of the two. Her Dáil contributions are cogent and effective. In February 2015 she brought forward one of the best constructed private members’ bills of the last Dáil. The Fatal Feotal Abnormality Bill sought to allow for a termination of a pregnancy in situations where a foetus has no prospect of survival. The bill was defeated by 104 votes to 20. The Labour Party, that self proclaimed bastion of social liberalism, voted against it for political reasons, as did many others.

But now it appears Wallace has taken up the fallen standard. Government sources tell me that he will bring forward an almost identical private members’ bill calling for terminations in cases of fatal foetal abnormality. This will happen next week.

If TDs in this Dáil of ‘new politics’ back Wallace they will only be complying with a United Nations Human Rights Committee finding. The UN found that in Ireland a woman carrying a foetus with a fatal abnormality had been subjected to discrimination and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment due to the ban on abortion.

The Taoiseach Enda Kenny said the adverse finding was ‘non-binding’ and ‘not like the European Court’.

Kenny has pushed the abortion issue into a preposterous citizens’ assembly and he hoped it would not see the light during his time in office.

Ministers tell me that Wallace’s loyalty to Daly, and this shrewd move, will put Kenny in a real bind. Abortion will be forced into the open far earlier than he thought and his pledge of a free vote on social issues will be tested. Principle will be tested against pragmatic politics.

And Mick Wallace may become that politician he thinks he can be.