FG is happy to provide heads for the chop as long as it’s not any of its own

Ministers insist Simon Harris shouldn’t take the blame for the NCH debacle, while happily pointing the finger at all and sundry, writes Eilis O’Hanlon

MINISTERIAL careers are not that long. Before he became Taoiseach at the age of 60, Enda Kenny had spent only two and a half years as a full Cabinet minister in his entire life, and that was as Minister for Tourism and Trade in the 1990s.

Simon Harris is only 32, and is already coming up to his third anniversary as Minister for Health. There are two ways of looking at this. One is that the former Baby of the Dail is a brilliant politician who is set on a long career occupying the great offices of State. The other is that he may already have enjoyed his allotted share of good fortune.

Just because the health minister has flown high doesn’t mean that he will get to fly long. Think of it as “Icarus Syndrome”. Even when they do occupy a succession of positions in Cabinet, the average length of time a minister stays in one job is rarely more than two or three years, the thinking being that, if you haven’t done what you set out to do in that period, then it’s unlikely that you’ll suddenly blossom into the role, and, if you have chalked up some achievements, then it’s best to bank them and move on to another Cabinet position before your luck runs out. It always does. The Taoiseach might even be doing Harris a favour long-term by reshuffling him out of the firing line.

The inherent insecurity that comes from being a Cabinet minister may be why they tend to huderal dle together, like sheep in a snow storm. It stops them being picked off one by one by roaming wolves. Minister for Foreign Affairs Simon Coveney certainly leapt to his fellow Simon’s defence, as pressure built on the health minister over what he knew about spiralling costs at the National Children’s Hospital, when he knew it, and what he chose to tell, or not tell, his colleagues and the Dail.

Harris supported the Corkman for the Fine Gael leadership, so he was probably owed some loyalty in return; but Coveney’s argument that it is out of order to “apportion political blame to Simon Harris personally” is so curious as to bring the casual observer up short.

Politicians under the heat of public scrutiny are rarely squeamish about apportioning blame on to opponents or convenient scapegoats. Did Coveney leap to the defence of Tom Costello, chairperson of the National Paediatric Hospital Development Board, when he was left with no option than to resign as public disquiet grew over the rising costs of the NCH project?

Everyone insists that Costello was not pressurised to do so, but no one denies that he was left in little doubt that he had no future on the board. Some might say that’s splitting hairs. Either way, full-voiced declarations of support for the now former chairperson were notable by their absence, as they were also for the now former HSE Director Gen- Tony O’Brien when he stepped down last May following criticism of his role in the cervical cancer scandal. Speaking at the time, the Taoiseach immediately made it clear he was “never informed of any patient safety concern or potential scandal”. So that was him off the hook.

But if O’Brien was in the wrong for having seen a memo in 2016 which acknowledged the problem long before it went public, then why is Simon Harris not equally culpable for the current NCH crisis when it’s now clear he also saw a memo showing a €391m overrun last August, but failed to inform Cabinet colleagues before November, one month after Budget 2019 had been presented to the Dail? Isn’t that a tad inconsistent?

One can only imagine that these figures would have been of some interest to Public Expenditure and Finance Minister, Paschal Donohoe, as he did his sums.

Harris has apologised and admitted he “should have added further detail” to a parliamentary question in September, and that seems to be the end of it, as far as the Government is concerned, but it doesn’t really answer the charge of hypocrisy. Why do other people under pressure for failing to disclose the full extent of their knowledge of mistakes being made not get the same benefit of the doubt? All that Minister Donohoe will say is that Harris did exactly what he would have expected in the circumstances, namely to “quantify, give me the exact figures, which he did”. If the argument that other ministers would have done exactly the same thing is meant to be reassuring, it isn’t. If anything, it raises much more widespread worries.

While the Tanaiste piously condemns those who would personally blame Simon Harris for the things over which Simon Harris was supposed to have control, the Taoiseach showed no hesitation in throwing certain bidders for large capital projects under the bus last week by saying that the Government had a “real concern” — they do love that language, like headmasters putting on a disappointed face when ticking off a naughty pupil — that “some companies are low balling” in order to get contracts, knowing full well their estimates are inaccurate. If that’s not personally blaming people, what is?

He even suggested that some of them should be excluded from future bids. He refused to name any, prompting BAM Ireland, the company awarded the NCH contract, to ask the Taoiseach to clarify that he was not referring to it; BAM has since offered to withdraw from the project if the board no longer has confidence in it.

Contractors are responsible for the estimates, but it’s ministers who sign off on the project. At the very least, they must be expected to have a working BS detector in place when faced with rival claims about who can best bring in huge capital projects on the cheap. In Harris’s case, he may have taken on responsibility for existing projects when assuming his new role, in the manner of stepchildren picked up during a second marriage, but, when they do get into trouble, it’s not possible to wash one’s hands of them on the grounds that you didn’t have a part in their conception. They’re your problem now.

Incredibly, the Taoiseach had the cheek to say last week: “Accountability is not about giving in to the baying mob, witch hunts and the almost weekly demand for a head, any head, somebody’s head.”

You’d think butter wouldn’t melt in these people’s mouths. They’re more than happy to provide heads if doing so ensures their own are safe. Last December, Varadkar blamed the courts for delays in hearing personal injuries cases related to the cervical cancer controversy. At the party’s Galway think-in last September, he blamed homelessness on left wing-dominated councils. In what Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin called a “narky” intervention, the Taoiseach also suggested that nurses taking time off over Christmas were responsible for winter overcrowding. “It was classic ‘blame someone else’.” he chided the Taoiseach.

As for his determination to blame the Brits for all potential negative consequences of leaving the EU, that led one unionist newspaper in the North to pen an editorial saying that he seemed to be acting “as if Brexit, not terrorists, will be to blame for violence”.

The Taoiseach himself tends to take the moral high ground, telling the Future Jobs Summit in Dublin last November that people who “feel forgotten or left out” are being “seduced by populism and the politics of the easy answer and someone to blame or hate”, adding: “We know where that ends.”

We do indeed. It ends in the tawdry spectacle of senior politicians deploring a culture of blame whilst sneakily seeking to shift responsibility for their own errors on to everybody but themselves.

‘When decrying a culture of blame, it’s as if butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths’