Competent? For FG, that ship has sailed

THE most common delusion among ministers is an unswerving belief in their own competence. With the Department of Health engulfed in crisis, I suspect that Simon Harris no longer suffers from this particular shortcoming. Just as the scandal that the cost of the National Children’s Hospital had spiralled by hundreds of millions of euro showed no sign of abating, in drops a grenade that the Health Minister knew of the overspend months before he said he knew.

And as if things were not bad enough, workers are lining up behind the striking nurses, with the psychiatric nurses joining the push for better pay.

The old rule of three strikes and you’re out comes to mind.

The nurses’ strike has raised serious questions about the Government’s competence.

Simon Harris’s performance on the cost overruns at the children’s hospital has jeopardised the Government’s agreement with Fianna Fáil – and nudged a manageable problem towards a grave crisis.

FACING serial disruption in the public services and anger from Fianna Fáil, the Taoiseach may even have to ditch his reckless young Health Minister as the price of continuing in office. With the nurses’ strike running in tandem with the incredible excuses for overspending at the National Children’s Hospital, Leo Varadkar’s personal credibility is also on the line.

When you’re explaining, you’re losing, and Minister Harris needed a dig-out from Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe in the Dáil and Communications Minister Richard Bruton on Morning Ireland.

As more details of the overspend emerge, the administration is appearing increasingly deceitful.

Making a silk purse from a sow’s ear requires more than a concerned manner and comforting words. And Government ministers would have been better served by speaking to the nurses than talking to each other through their own public relations machine.

This week the Government’s battalion of advisers will seek to concoct a calming antidote to the five days of hell in hospitals scheduled to begin tomorrow.

But the first problem for the Government, if it goes for a U-turn on the nurses’ strike, would be telling the public why it is now right to do now what they said was wrong last week.

THE Taoiseach is painfully aware that losing the argument with the nurses would accelerate more pay claims in the public sector, undermine Paschal Donohoe and put Fine Gael’s return to power in doubt. Fine Gael sees – and promotes – itself as the party of low taxes and economic discipline that gets things done. But that pitch of super-competence has been contradicted by the current double-whammy of crises in the Department of Health.

The stereotype caricature of the two major parties through the past three generations cast Fianna Fáil as flawed yet competent and Fine Gael as ethical but fussy.

Before the crash, Fianna Fáil spent most of its time in government because voters believed the party to be more capable. But its reputation for competence was shattered by the State’s near-death experience in the banking crisis.

Fine Gael and Enda Kenny won the trust of voters in 2011, then again in 2016, and the opinion polls have been positive for Varadkar since he was elected leader in June 2017.

When most people vote, they do not choose an ideology and judge a candidate or a party on their capability. What they want from their government is competence – an administration capable of managing their civic business with fairness and foresight.

And this Government’s competence was a major casualty in the current fiasco in the Department of Health.