It’s toff at the top for Lord Ross
Minister has had a bruising few days as scandal hits the Olympics. Can he handle it?
AS A boy, Sports Minister Shane Ross was packed off from his comfy south Dublin home to the worldfamous Rugby boarding school in Warwickshire. Having contracted tuberculosis as a sixyear-old, the young Ross had already spent a year in bed. Because treatment for the disease had forced doctors to remove two vertebrae, the trauma was to continue at his new school. The operation meant the Irish lad couldn’t play rugby at the place where, in 1823, William Webb Ellis took the ball in his arms and ran with it, inventing a great and brutal game.
Standing on the sidelines, watching his schoolmates ruck and maul, was tough – but it left Ross the energy to excel in other fields.
There, in the English midlands, he came to learn what sport once stood for. And those formative lessons should be with him as he comes face-to-face with the corrupt monster that is the modern Olympics. At Rugby, founded in 1567, he also gained the impeccable manners and courtesy of the English upper classes. His English-sounding accent and unfailing politeness were to get him ahead in Ireland, where we remain suckers for a chap who brings to mind our former colonial masters.
Nevertheless, the privileged Ross also spent decades posing as an outsider, shouting loudest from the political sidelines, telling the big boys how it should be done.
He earned a good buck as a stockbroker and hedge-fund manager – he once worked for the Kaiser Dermot Desmond but was let go. He was also the business editor of the Sunday Independent, which he used as vehicle to attack politicians, the civil service and state companies like FÁS. During the crash, Ross astutely tapped into the anger of a bewildered population, giving his books unsubtle titles like The Bankers: How The Banks Brought Ireland To Its Knees and The Untouchables: The People Who Wrecked Ireland And Are Still Running the Country.
OVER the decades he spent carefully crafting this image, Ross was also a part-time independent senator from 1981. Then, in 2011, he finally entered the Dáil as an independent, with a stunning 17,075 first-preference votes in Dublin South.
I met him in Leinster House shortly after his election and he told me that the Dáil was a much more serious prospect than the Seanad. This was the place for the real ‘action’.
The system – fellow politicians and civil servants – was in a state of utter bewilderment that he continued to excoriate it.
He became a member of the powerful Public Accounts Committee, joining John McGuinness, Mary Lou McDonald and John Deasy in a vicious struggle to reach the pinnacle of moral outrage. And he won, which, considering the publicity hounds he was up against, must rank as one of his finest achievements. ‘Rosser’ as some call him, had played a dangerous game. He posed as an outsider, a fighter of the good fight, but he was really as firmly planted in the south Dublin establishment as one can possibly be. Now he is on the first team, in Cabinet, and his early performances have been criticised. A Cabinet colleague told me last week that he seemed paralysed by caution.
Ross’s Independent Alliance only last week appointed a co-ordinator to liaise with Fine Gael. The group has not even appointed a deputy Government press secretary yet. The whole thing reeks of Cabinet inexperience. Meanwhile, the public and his former friends in the media have been appalled at the slow official reaction to the emerging Olympic scandals.
LAST week, the Irish sporting community faced a double whammy of embarrassment and disappointment just as the Games were getting under way. An Irish boxer was eventually sent home after he tested positive for a banned substance, and it also emerged that tickets allocated to the Olympic Council of Ireland (OCI) were allegedly being sold illegally in Rio and an Irishman was arrested.
When the scandals broke in Rio, Ross was in Dublin. He said he was disappointed at boxer Michael O’Reilly’s positive test. And he was ‘confused’ at all the separate investigations – OCI, Brazilian police etc – that had been launched into the ticket-touting. But he didn’t announce his own plans for an investigation until Friday.
Many of us, particularly those of us who lost interest in the Olympics when Ben Johnson sullied the Games, don’t understand the power of the International Olympic Committee (IOC).
Yet professional politicians tell me that these people are ruthless international operators who move between the stadium corporate seats and the international corridors of power seamlessly. President of our own OCI, Pat Hickey, sits on the IOC ruling body, the executive council. For those getting confused by the acronyms, just accept that Hickey is an international political power-broker and not a man to be trifled with. A Cabinet minister told me last week that Hickey had been outflanking naive Irish politicians for years. So Ross’s friends tell us he will fire off his big guns when he meets Hickey at the minister’s hotel, the Windsor Excelsior on Copacabana Beach in Rio later today. Ross’s methodical reaction was understandable but it could have been better. Firstly, it was a reaction – he could have been prepared for the disasters that have hit the Irish Olympic image: Ross is the Cabinet minister with responsibility for sport. Just because we have a small team it doesn’t mean our athletes don’t succumb to temptation.
AT FIRST, as the debacles unfolded, Ross may have neglected the fundamental lessons that Rugby taught him. Sport ought to be about valour and leadership When there is an Irish link to ticket corruption, it seriously damages the country’s reputation. Ross, a man of many talents, could have shown better leadership.
Thomas Hughes, in 1857, based his famous novel, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, on his experiences at Rugby. One day a master says: ‘Remember this, I beseech you, all you boys who are getting into the upper forms. Now is the time in all your lives, probably, when you may have more wide influence for good or evil on the society you live in than you ever can have again.’
Ross might get just one chance in Cabinet and he had better protect himself against the ruthless men he meets.