DONNELLY IS MINISTER FOR SELF

THERE was one day back in January when the number of new Covid cases reached a staggering 4,000, but the Department of Health’s incoming secretary-general Robert Watt also had something else on his mind that day. Mr Watt, in line for a controversial raise of €81,000 to bring his annual salary to €292,000, took time out that day to question the number of mentions that his minister, Stephen Donnelly, was getting on the Department’s Twitter account.

‘The Minister completed an analysis of the Department’s Twitter feed,’ Mr Watt informed the department’s head of communications, Deirdre Watters. ‘There is no reference to the Minister as you can see. We need to discuss.’

So much to unpack in that brief missive, so little space.

Mr Watt is already one of the highestpaid civil servants in the country, earning €211,000 per annum, or more than €4,000 per week, or almost €1,000 per working day. And yet an unknown amount of his very expensive time was spent, at the height of the third wave of Covid, dealing with a complaint from the minister about the number of times he was mentioned on Twitter. At the very least, this involved dealing with an email, if not attending a meeting, to examine the graphs that Mr Donnelly’s ‘analysis’ had produced comparing his mentions with those of Simon Harris in the Department of Education tweets.

Mr Harris, it’s worth remembering, is not just a constituency rival of Mr Donnelly’s but also his predecessor in Health and one of the most popular incumbents in a department nicknamed ‘Angola’ in some time. Why he picked on Mr Harris is anybody’s guess, but Mr Donnelly discovered that in the period when he was conspicuously absent from his department’s tweets to its 124,000 followers, Minister Harris was mentioned ten times in Education tweets to 10,000 followers. Mr Harris has 212,000 personal followers on Twitter, Mr Donnelly has 68,000.

So as well as dealing with the email/meeting, studying the graphs, and forwarding the observation on his wounded master’s behalf, Mr Watt then had to find time to ‘discuss’ the case of the missing minister with the head of the department’s communications. And generally speaking, it is fair to say, communicating its messages to the general public has not always been the department’s strong point: once again, we are dealing with civil servants who really should have had more on their minds at that time.

And all of those valuable Department of Health resources, while the third wave of a lethal pandemic raged, do not even include the time and energy that the minister himself spent counting his own name in its tweets, counting Mr Harris’s name in Education tweets, drawing up little graphs and boxes to illustrate the discrepancies, and bringing it all to the presumably over-stretched attention of his secretary-general. Talk about not wanting to waste a good crisis.

It was hard not to feel just the tiniest bit of sympathy for Mr Donnelly as he haltingly attempted to defend his complaints on radio next morning.

The department’s communications were ‘important’, he gibbered, and it was ‘reasonable to look at those communications to make sure we are doing as much as we can all the time’. Just how ‘doing as much as we can’ equated to ‘mentioning Mr Donnelly as often as we can’, he didn’t explain, but it was just ‘a piece of work’, he said repeatedly, ‘a piece of work that somebody in the Department was looking at…’

HE ADDED that he hadn’t seen the article, which featured prominently in that day’s Irish Times, but he would ‘have to take a look’. Well, he was in for a proper treat whenever he finally got around to it, because he was mentioned by name on the front page of a national newspaper no less than seven times.

In fairness, too, he is hardly the only minister with an eye to his public profile and his social media appearances. After all, they are all functioning in a system that requires politicians, even those undertaking the most important tasks during a national emergency, to pay at least as much attention to their re-election prospects and their own constituencies as to the crucial portfolios they hold.

It’s no wonder that exteacher Norma Foley plays softball with the teaching unions when she may well have to return to their ranks if she loses her Dáil seat in a few years’ time.

But it is not a good look, to put it mildly, for the minister for health to appear as if he is attempting to use communications with a nervous public as an occasion for self-promotion at a time when death rates were sky-high. A piece of work, indeed.