“Contradiction”, contended Blaise Pascal, “is not a sign of falsity”. Avril Doyle might want to adopt this as a personal motto. A life of public service has seen no shortage of admirers and detractors for the Irish centre-right MEP, all seemingly describing a different person. But both friend and foe concur that she is a formidable presence.
Her opponents concede that she is principled and her allies find her exasperating. Interest groups praise her for her open-mindedness, while the media have derided her as patronising, unhelpful and bossy. Those responsible for her image face a public relations nightmare – but they simultaneously defend her impressive track record in politics, where things get done with or without a smooth gloss.
So is she really one of Simone de Beauvoir's women, “a contradiction that entails baffling consequences”? Plain-speaking Doyle would no doubt dismiss such fanciful notions.
She first became politically involved while studying biochemistry in her native Dublin. Although she likes to give the impression that she simply drifted into politics, the truth may be different. She springs from a political dynasty in which her father, uncles and cousins held public office, and her grandfather served as mayor of Dublin.
Within three years of graduating, her political activity had intensified. In 1974 she was approached by the pro-enterprise Fine Gael party to stand for the local elections in Wexford, in the south-east of Ireland, where she surprised the local organisation by delivering them an unexpected victory. Here it was that she received her schooling at the coal-face of politics, learning the intricacies of local interests and establishing herself as a “general practitioner” of the political game.
To this day, she maintains that people “parachuted” into political jobs cannot hope to match the expertise of those who have a grass-roots understanding of power (a philosophy she flaunted energetically during the 2004 European Parliament elections).
By 1976 she had been elected mayor of Wexford – the first woman to hold the post. By 1982, the student who had fallen into politics as if by accident found herself elected to Dáil Éireann, the national parliament. Here, her momentum faltered for more than a decade. She secured only minor roles in government and before 1997 had lost, regained and lost again her seat, as well as spending periods in the sleepy political backwater of the Seanad – the Irish senate.
In 1999 she turned her attention to Europe, winning a seat for Fine Gael in the Leinster constituency. In 2004, with the constituency renamed and reduced in size, Doyle found herself in competition with her Fine Gael running mate Mairéad McGuinness. The party refused to divide the constituency between the two candidates, leaving both of them free to encroach on what had been each other's separate territories on the previous electoral map – and neither of them endorsed the other as second-choice candidate, as is customary for people from the same party.
This was where Doyle showed what was often referred to in European Parliament circles as “her formidable side”. Not long into the campaign, the rivalries intensified, rapidly exploited by the media, who siezed avidly on stories of vandalised posters, sabotaged canvassing and generalised skulduggery. Both women denied any misbehaviour or even any rivalry. But Doyle, never a favourite of the media, found herself trailing McGuinness, a former editor of the Irish Independent. So she fell back on her experience, underlining her long political history and her previous European tenure. She had not, she was keen to stress, been parachuted in.
In the event, both women were elected. Nowadays Doyle declines invitations to talk of the campaign. Instead, she says, she is simply glad to see a “very strong Fine Gael presence” in Ireland East, before pointing out that her own personal vote increased the second time around.
Her activities in Europe have earned her some unexpected opprobrium and endorsements. Within her own centre- right EPP-ED group, she raised eyebrows by working closely with UK Liberal Chris Davies when she was the lead MEP on the fluorinated gases directive – much to the chagrin of the US multinational lobby and the German manufacturing industry. But within the Green group she began to win accolades as that rarest of things: a politician with principles.
As the lead MEP on the current review of the EU's emissions trading scheme, she has already won friends within the clean energy sector. “She is very enthusiastic about our position,” says one satisfied lobbyist. “She is seeing it now for the first time from our point of view.” Similar expressions of support have come from those working in the health sector. It is a depiction very distinct from the prevalent view among many Irish journalists, who remember Avril Doyle as someone for whom communication was customarily a one-way process.
Doyle, who is married with three daughters, has always maintained a keen interest in farming and the land. From 2001 to 2005 she served as president of the Equestrian Federation of Ireland (which led to her being dubbed “the MEP for Horsiness”). While she was in office, Irish equestrian Cian O'Connor was stripped of his 2004 Olympic gold medal after his horse, Waterford Crystal, was discovered with traces of a prohibited substance. Doyle first supported and then distanced herself from O'Connor. Today, she insists that the gold medal was lost only through a minor “technical transgression”. She is also keen to halt the rapid decline of the native European red squirrel, which is under threat from its grey cousin.
But, for the time being, her thoughts are on the “priority mandate” of the ETS. Then, there is the matter of the next European elections, and new friends – and enemies – to be made. The question is, from where?
