Leinster House still in the Dark Ages – but not as bad as London

KEEN observers of politics are letting their thoughts run on a couple of striking parallels in recent times – a mirroring between our own political tempests and Britain’s actual hurricanes.

While Britain had Priti Patel striking it out alone with her own foreign policy in Israel, we have the Independent Alliance offering to stride boldly forth into the waters of international conflict and, ahem, solve the potentially looming nuclear war in North Korea.

And while Westminster is reeling from the shock of Michael Fallon’s resignation as defence secretary, who admitted his conduct with women had sometimes “fallen short”, Leinster House is cringing from the fallout of John Halligan, the junior minister, whose interview skills emerged as also having “fallen short” – though admittedly far less alarmingly so than Mr Fallon’s.

Odd how these angles intersect at the benign though bumbling presence of Halligan, who seems to have a concatenation of disaster following him wherever he goes.

We are left to idly ponder whether Mr Halligan might have adopted the same cosy strategy in North Korea. Would he sit down to ask Kim Jong-un about the wife Ri Sol-ju and what their little daughter Kim Ju-ae is up to these days, clucking that he must be very busy juggling the daddy stuff with the dastardly plots to destroy civilisation as we know it?

Strange, too, how the same minister always happens to be away when a scandal breaks. Mr Halligan was absent from the Dáil for a series of difficult votes on the second Waterford cath lab due to Government business abroad – but insisted he had not been sent away to avoid causing controversy.

This time, he is in Thailand on more Government business.

It is traditional for the Tánaiste to take Leaders’ Questions on a Thursday and so it fell to the clearly furious Frances Fitzgerald – a long-time staunch defender of women’s rights – to stand in the minister’s corner and dutifully defend him in his absence. To her credit, she did not attempt to do so.

Brendan Howlin queried the incident where Mr Halligan had broken anti-discrimination laws in the course of his interview of a senior civil servant for the position of private secretary, saying it was extraordinary that he would put such a question some 20 years after laws banned it, and noting that Mr Halligan’s responsibilities also included equality laws.

He called on the Government to formally apologise to the woman and wondered if the minister would pay back the €7,500 fine out of his own money, seeing as how another minister – through no fault of her own – was wrongly paid a special allowance as junior minister and had to pay it back.

The Tánaiste said she had been “disturbed and disappointed” to read the report about the incident. The minister had expressed regret, she said.

“Is there a war in Thailand as well?” asked Billy Kelleher in the Fianna Fáil benches, in mischievous reference to the hapless North Korea diplomacy mission. Finian McGrath, Mr Halligan’s colleague in the Independent Alliance, could be observed to blush uncomfortably.

Ms Fitzgerald said her department has issued an email “reminding” staff of the policies in place. “Women’s equality is ongoing and needs constant vigilance and monitoring,” she said sternly, as a gloom fell on Leinster House that showed they’re not quite out of the dark ages yet.

Unspoken goes the consoling thought that they’re nowhere near as bad as London.