Regina Doherty is Government chief whip and Fine Gael TD for Meath East, though she grew up far from the countryside - in Finglas, north Dublin.

“There was one very large field that separated Finglas from Ballymun and that was about as country as it got,” she tells Irish Country Living when we call to interview her in Leinster House. She looks right at home in Government buildings and her journey to the Dáil began with an upbringing in a household that was mad about politics. Every man in Regina’s dad’s family worked in the ESB, “so that was a kind of generational institution”, while her mother ran the canteen in Coolmine Community School.

Her parents were fiercely political and fiercely Fine Gael – a tradition that went back three or four generations. Regina says the only way she got to stay up late as a child was to “pretend to Dad you wanted to watch Today Tonight with him”.

Regina’s parents brought her everywhere with them as a child, including to a Fine Gael Ard Fheis on her communion day, which isn’t as bad as it sounds because she “made loads of money”. She had a little autograph book with her and Maurice Manning and John Bruton wrote in it that day – and paid her for the privilege.

Fast-forward half a dozen years and Regina went to college to study economics and marketing but dropped out after second year. Instead, she went to work in an IT distribution company.

She bought a moped which she thought was “deadly”, and started what went on to become a “very successful 20-year career in an industry at the time that exploded”.

She forgot about politics, describing her 20s as “a few years off in the middle when I went off looking for men ... then I found a man, that was game ball, and we moved to Meath”.

The man in question is Declan, a software engineer and the couple live in Declan’s hometown of Ratoath.

Married Life & starting in politics

Regina describes Ratoath as a “lovely sleepy little town that still has the same street through it that was there when my husband was growing up 35 years ago” and “which was one of the villages that had 800 people living in it for 800 years and then suddenly there was bucketloads of houses built. There’s about 13,000 of us now.”

The Dohertys had baby No 1, Jack (now 17), and when he was born there was no playground in Ratoath.

“We’d all of these new mammies the same age as me, in our 20s, with buggies and lovely kids. We didn’t have a community centre, we didn’t have a playground, so they’re the kind of things you want, and that’s what really politicised me,” says Regina.

“So I got involved locally with other women and we fought and we got our playground and then I rejoined actively as Fine Gael.”

While she was dipping her toes in local politics, her career was also going in a new direction. In 2001, she quit her “very well-paid job” at Europlex (she was sales director at the time of leaving) because the hours were long and she wasn’t seeing much of her children, and a few months later she set up a business which dealt in surplus sales.

“If there was an organisation that had surplus stock [IT stock such as hard drives, memory and RAM cards], I’d buy it cheaply, hold the stock, sell it when the stock became scarce and make a few bob.”

Regina says the business was successful for a number of years “and then it just wasn’t” – something she partly attributes to companies that owed her money going to the wall. The business was closed in 2009 but owed a lot of money and the Dohertys were in arrears on their mortgage. Regina says they eventually worked their way out of it but she is still paying off the debt: “It just goes out of the bank every month; it’s like if I haven’t got it, I can’t spend it.”

Regina says that while it was difficult to close a business that “I had started, knowing that I was obviously wholly or partly responsible for the demise of it”, it was her father finding out about her difficulties that really upset her.

“That was genuinely a killer ... for him to have that worry going to bed at nighttime – you don’t stop worrying about your kids just because they grow up or get married. That killed me.”

Running for office

In 2007, during pregnancy No 4, Regina was persuaded to run for election – by her mother. Four children and a job with hours as long as those in politics is no mean feat and Regina says she wouldn’t be where she is without the support of her parents.

“Kate arrived and my father looked after her for the first six months of her life – and actually she was the first nappy he ever changed, because men didn’t do nappies – that generation of men – but him and her are besties, they’re so tight. And he just took over, minded the kids, minded the house, and Mam was director of elections.”

Regina opened up a Fine Gael office in Ratoath “which had never seen a Fine Gael office in it ever ... it was a Fianna Fáil town and anybody new to the town just rowed in behind the Fianna Fáil representatives because they were the people who got you everything. That was just the way it was; they’d been around for so long.

“So when the Fine Gael sign went up on the door in the main street, there was consternation, and the people coming in after mass thinking you were so brave and you’re like: ‘What do you mean I’m so brave?’ I’m so thick when I think about it now.”

Although her first run at Dáil Éireann was unsuccessful, she won her seat in 2011 and has been chief whip since May of this year.

Anyone who has watched House of Cards on Netflix will recall Frank Underwood was the Democratic Party’s majority whip, and spent a considerable amount of the first series standing in front of a whiteboard, moving around red and blue magnets which represented congressmen and women he had successfully persuaded into voting one way or the other. Well, Regina has a white board of her very own, complete with magnets that represent every member of the Dáil. Irish Country Living wonders if she uses the same tactics (charm blended with threat) to get TDs to vote the way she needs them to?

“You’d be hard pushed to find a woman who couldn’t be charming or flattering. That’s the easy part,” says Regina, “but there isn’t a threatening part with me because there isn’t the numbers to be threatening. In different scenarios where you have the numbers, you can have a disciplinary code because you can afford to enforce that disciplinary code. I have the magic number of 59/58 people to make sure that when Fianna Fáil abstain that I pass a bill, so there isn’t a case that I can be snarky with you, so I have to constantly think that you’ll catch more flies with honey than you will with vinegar. And it’s hard sometimes, to be honest with you, to be consistently flattering.

“But we’re here and we’re here I think a lot longer than people thought we would be here, and we passed a budget that is the largest amount of money that this State is going to spend ever, this year, and it’s not withstanding the challenges that we have that are many, but we’re still here and we’re still very willing and wanting to be able to provide Government so long as that ethos exists within this partnership Government.

“It is unusual obviously because it doesn’t just have two coalition parties – it has four – but as long as that ethos exists and we all want to get to the same spot on the other side ... and there are many differences of opinions and that’s fine – I think we’ll keep going.”

Regina says the last Government didn’t resonate with the Irish people.

“You look at the personalities in this Government and some of them do resonate an awful lot with [the people] but we wouldn’t be able to do it without the support of Fianna Fáil, and I think there’s a very mature reflection in Fianna Fáil that the country does need stability at the moment ... if there was an election in the morning, would the Dáil be very much different to now? I don’t think there would be a drastic difference.”

Environment

One policy area Regina is very passionate about is climate change. She concedes it’s an area that’s going to cost a huge amount of money and that won’t be received well by many people, “but if we want a world for my grandchildren, for your children, then we’re going to have to be cognisant of it and realise it’s going to cost money and we can’t continue with impunity what we’re doing at the moment ... and actually the debate for the next number of years is going to be if we have an extra €100m next year, do we spend it on more teachers, more nurses, more doctors, or do we invest in the future of Ireland as part of the global planet, with regard to global warming?

“That’s not a conversation that you can have with people who are on waiting lists for two or three years, waiting to get their hip done, so there’s a challenge, but that’s the exciting part of this job.”

There’s no doubt Regina has a tough gig. She received death threats, for example, after a debate on local radio with Gerry Adams and after an appearance on Vincent Browne when a threat was made that her house would be burnt down with her four children in it. However, it takes a lot to rattle Regina. She’s 45, feels there’s a “good few years” left in her and has ambitions to be minister for children.

Irish Country Living gets the impression she’s only at the start of her political journey and a ministerial post might just be one rung on Regina’s ladder to the top.”