Michael McGrath — From child entrepreneur to Ireland's next ...
With Finance Minister Michael McGrath set to be announced as Ireland’s new European Commissioner, it marks the latest stop in a journey that began in Greenmount Buildings at the top of Barrack St on the southside of Cork City.
The McGrath family — Michael is the fourth of seven children — moved from Greenmount to a council house in Passage West when he was three, where his mother Marie still lives.
His father Jack died when Michael was just 17, having almost succumbed to an illness a decade earlier.
In his speech at the Cork Chamber dinner in February of this year, Mr McGrath said that walks at the Monkstown Golf Club with his father played a part in his early career.
In February, Michael McGrath told a Cork Chamber dinner that if anyone had lost balls in Monkstown Golf Club in the 1980s and 1990s, 'I probably found them and sold them three for a pound, so thanks for that'. Picture: Denis Minihane“When I was about seven, we almost lost my dad to a serious illness.
“While he did survive, he couldn’t work again, but thankfully we got another 10 years with him, leaving us with many precious memories of the time spent with him — going to matches together, he and I would go for walks searching for lost golf balls in Monkstown Golf Club and selling them on.
“So if any of you hit balls into the ponds or ditches in Monkstown Golf Club in the ’80s or early ’90s, I probably found them and sold them three for a pound, so thanks for that.”
Having studied at University College Cork (UCC) and qualifying as an accountant — working in UCC and with RedFM before it went on air — he would be elected to the Passage West Town Council in 1999 aged just 22, where he would remain until 2007, and also joining Cork County Council in 2004.
In 2007, he was picked to run alongside then trade minister Micheál Martin in Cork South-Central.
The Irish Examiner report from the day after votes in that election were counted said that Mr McGrath had “decimated” Fine Gael MEP Simon Coveney in the Carrigaline area on his way to a quota-busting vote.
In 2011, the two Fianna Fáil TDs managed to hold on to their seats despite the party’s obliteration in the polls that day.
The Examiner said that Mr McGrath had put in “an incredible performance” to hold off Sinn Féin and take the fifth seat.
Being one of only 20 Fianna Fáil TDs meant that Mr McGrath’s profile was automatically boosted and he would become the party’s spokesman on public expenditure, taking on the finance portfolio following the death of Brian Lenihan.
A member of the Fianna Fáil delegations that negotiated a confidence and supply agreement with Fine Gael in 2016 and the coalition in 2020, Mr McGrath was seen as a “tough negotiator”.
One person involved in the 2020 talks said he was “far more focused on policy than many in Fianna Fáil”.
In that government, he was named public expenditure minister, with the understanding he would become finance minister when the coalition rotated the taoiseach’s office in December 2022.
The father of seven children, Mr McGrath is popular among his party and considered a serious, committed, and detail-oriented man.
In the aftermath of the first budget he delivered as finance minister, sources called him “savvy”, “shrewd”, with another calling him “a taoiseach in waiting”.
Now that he’s off to Europe, that one may have to wait.
