Leahy says with his outgoings there is no room for savings. “I haven’t had a pay rise for five years and have seen my wages cut and taxes and other costs rise. It is like we are drowning, and the water gets a bit deeper each month. It is a constant battle to keep afloat.” He knows he is lucky to have a job but can’t see “any light at the end of the tunnel”. He is angry. “We have done nothing wrong but are still being punished.”
- ‘It is a constant battle to keep afloat’, Irish Times, October 1, 2011.
2. Has cancer changed his political position? “Oh yes. Certainly. No question.” He’s more old Labour? “Old Labour? It has certainly made me more aware … yes, it’s made me more leftwing is the answer. It has made me realise the importance of public service and community. The other thing that has moved me is being in intensive care, which is really tough for the nurses. I don’t know what they get, £35,000 a year? [The highest pay-grade is £34,189.] They do 12-hour shifts on one patient who is seriously ill and then they start talking about Wayne Rooney or whatever, and you realise with that level of inequality it’s impossible to continue to get people to do these jobs because these jobs are based on the sense within society that there is some fairness about the level of contribution and the level of reward and that has broken down. So that changed me.”
Gould has had a more complicated relationship with money than one might imagine. While Rebuck made a fortune, he struggled. Another irony is that it's only now he is dying that he is earning a decent whack as vice chair of Freud Communications. Until recently he was in debt, he says, and had serious money issues. I look at him – and the house – disbelievingly. How could he have been broke? Didn’t he and Rebuck have a joint account? Now it’s his turn to look at me disbelievingly. They had separate accounts? “Oh yes, of course. God, yes. Yes, yes of course. We had a small joint account, but basically we have our own accounts. My accounts were always very precarious. Keeping my [consultancy] business going was very hard.” He pauses, and says he knows it sounds ridiculous to talk about money problems. “At the end of the day I own some of this house and Gail would have bailed me out, but I think she’d reached a stage where she’d had enough. And I really didn’t want to dump her with money problems. Look I’m not saying in any normal person’s lives I had problems, I am saying though that I didn’t equip myself with glory when it came to making money, so Gail did keep me afloat, and I finally turned that around.” He started at Freud in 2007, shortly before being diagnosed, and Matthew Freud has continued to pay him a salary throughout his illness. Gould says he is one of the few people he still sees a lot of.
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