Zappone goal? When Francis met Katherine

We may never know what Pope Francis really thought about his Irish trip but Katherine Zappone must be delighted with her starring role in it. The Children’s Minister and flagbearer for Marriage Equality stole the show at Áras an Uachtaráin, impressing His Eminence so much with her hair-raising account of the Tuam Mother and Baby Home related in her freshly brushed-up Italian that he went off script during his Dublin Castle speech to pay her a compliment.

He even praised her a second time on his flight home, saying how ‘the lady had a dignity that touched my heart and now I have the memo there that I will study when I get home’. If the Pope wasn’t celibate or the Children’s Minister lesbian, you’d be forgiven for suspecting they had a crush.

Joking aside though, Minister Zappone’s rising to such prominence during a whistlestop Papal tour whose primary purpose (The World Meeting of Families) was absolutely none of her business, was certainly a coup for the relative newcomer to politics.

With the Taoiseach highlighting the unresolved issue of clerical child abuse and the President singing from the same hymn sheet, a third politician pressing the case of secular Ireland was surplus to requirements, if not bordering on rudeness.

But that didn’t deter Zappone from pushing herself to the forefront to deliver a carefully prepared request to the Pope that he stump up half the costs for the excavation and exhumation at Tuam. ‘Nothing less will demonstrate remorse,’ she argued in her accompanying memo whose contents she cunningly delayed revealing until Monday’s Miriam O’Callaghan radio show.

But not everyone bought her self-serving account about her encounter with the Bishop of Rome. The Tuam Home Survivors Network dismissed it as a ‘publicity stunt’ from the Minister who scraped into the Dáil with only a hundred or so votes to spare.

It’s not the first time that Zappone has proven adept at manipulating events to her advantage. Almost alone of the Cabinet she secured substantial extra funding for her ministry in Budget 2017, after waging a PR campaign for a new childcare package.

But her behaviour during one of the convulsions arising from the Maurice McCabe saga showed her appetite for self-promotion in a less than favourable light. She kept the Government on a knife-edge and humiliated the Taoiseach Enda Kenny because he couldn’t contact her to clear up the row about what she had told him about her meeting with the whistleblower.

There was complete radio silence from Minister Zappone while she tended to family affairs in her native Seattle but, on her return, she landed the hapless Taoiseach in hot water, obliging him to retract his Dáil statements about being in the loop regarding the Tusla file on Sergeant McCabe.

Zappone later confessed that she may have been ‘politically naive’ in helping cause such confusion about Tusla’s involvement in the McCabe affair. Modesty is an attractive quality but it was certainly not a feature in her doorstepping Pope Francis.

The Bons Secours order ran the home and while they are answerable to the Vatican as a congregation their healthcare business is their own affair.

It makes sense that they shoulder the costs of exhuming the remains of the ‘little ones’ as both Pope Francis and Minister Zappone fondly call abused children, as should the State who paid them a pittance for their services to the poor. In any event the €5m bill for such an undertaking is a pittance, and certainly not worth wasting a potential diplomatic incident on.

The only selfless interpretation of Minister Zappone’s manoeuvres on the international stage is that the Vatican’s footing the bill in Tuam may be taken as a sign of liability which, as she suggested on radio, might then pave the way for further redress for victims. But any deliberations within the Vatican will take place behind the scenes where it is highly doubtful that Zappone’s brazen attempt to strong-arm the Pope in public will have a positive influence. She may have won herself the oxygen of publicity but in terms of Vatican redress for victims, she may have helped lose the war.