THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE HOUSING MINISTER – HOW OUR COVID CABINET PERFORMED
It’s been a rocky f irst year for the three-party coalition government, but which ministers best took the strain of pandemic politics?
Summer recess always has an end of year feel, but this year it is also just past the first anniversary of the
Covid Coalition’s foundation. And with the Dublin Bay South by-election results adding to the overall need to reflect on how things are going, our columnist John Lee gives his Cabinet performance ratings.
Jack Chambers, Chief Whip, Minister for Sport
FORMER Tory leader William Hague admitted last week he and many of his party did not fully realise the extent of the change that was required to make them electable again. The Tory party, after years of failure, eventually went for David Cameron to take on Tony Blair. Cameron had no previous Cabinet experience – he had served in no government role. Fianna Fáil must take the Cameron precedent to survive. If Chambers is to be that man, he couldn’t have set himself up better for an outside run at the leadership.
He is chief whip, so spends all day every day interacting with those who will decide the future. He also secured the position of Junior Sports Minister. So while others are sloping around closing pubs, Chambers is striding around Croke Park and the Aviva waving at returning crowds.
8/10
Simon Coveney, Minister for Foreign Affairs
COVENEY is the last man one would expect a hotel concierge to find with Miss World sprawled on his hotel bed covered in bank notes. However, the same question that was asked of George Best could now be asked of the Foreign Affairs Minister: ‘Where did it all go wrong?’ A long-time leading competitor for leader of Fine Gael and despite holding a great office of State he seems strangely peripheral.
Perhaps Coveney, inset, is beavering away behind the scenes on the EU Digital Covid Certificate. But behind the scenes doesn’t matter in modern politics. The UN Security Council and Brexit do not matter to the Irish masses. He would have gone to the European Commission in August had party pooper Ursula von der Leyen not insisted on a woman. One of a number greedily eyeing the private sector.
5/10
Stephen Donnelly, Minister for Health
DONNELLY was always going to stand or fall on the vaccination programme. And the rollout is going gangbusters. He can divide opinion – which is never a desirable trait for a politician. His media profile must improve, but that’s him, unfiltered. He reminds me of the type of fellow you would meet in a rugby club, a bit of a know-it-all, and slightly condescending, but he’s aware of these character traits and is willing to self-deprecate. Say it quietly but Donnelly is popular across the party as he is unexpectedly helpful to the lowliest of backbenchers. He has been a tireless administrator during the deepest crisis to face the State and can absorb complex data and understand what he’s reading.
8/10
Paschal Donohoe, Minister for Finance
DONOHOE’S reputation has been damaged significantly in Fine Gael, because in his role of Finance Minister he has refused to pull a Fianna Fáil pre-2007 and spend like a drunken property developer after a 50/1 winner at the Galway Races. But really it’s down to Election 2020, an event that has destroyed more reputations than an Oireachtas Golf Society outing. Donohoe has taken the blame for incoherent candidate selection and the decision to centre a campaign around Brexit. He’s been lashing out money. But still, the severity of impending lockdowns could decide whether we are bust or not.
5/10
Norma Foley, Minister for Education
KERRY remains a stronghold of the rare corncrake and Norma Foley is sighted about as often. We know Ms Foley has some good people around her, like former journalist Eoin Murphy. But if she believes that it was not vital for an Education Minister to be ubiquitous in reassurance during the current crisis, she is wrong. The effects of
Covid-19 on the education system and on young people will reverberate for decades. Modern politics has an unwelcome but vital need for communication and visibility. Nevertheless, Foley, left, has kept the schools open most of the time.
Simon Harris,
Minister for Higher Education
IT WAS said of the greatest practitioner of politics, Lyndon Johnson, that he could find power and rise to the top in the most unlikely of situations. When Harris was moved to Higher Education some saw it as a demotion, but he has prospered there. His communication skills means he tops the popularity stakes. Harris attracts envy and criticism in Leinster House, particularly in his own party, mainly because he plays the game better than most of them.
He certainly works harder than anyone. His enemies will say that his position of Dublin Bay South by-election director of elections will damage him. But can you name a director of elections in a previous by-election? Watch Varadkar bring him closer as other powers fade.
9/10
Heather Humphreys, Minister for Social Protection, Acting Minister for Justice
MS HUMPHREYS has been underestimated since she came into the
Dáil in the 2011 new wave. However, she has proved unflappable and astute since a Cabinet promotion in 2014. She has advantages others don’t. In a parliament embarrassingly unrepresentative of women, she is one of the stand-out performers of her gender. Humphreys, above, also represents a significant Protestant community in CavanMonaghan, who won’t vote for anybody else. In an increasingly volatile political landscape she sits on a sureseat. Covering for the new mother Helen McEntee, but you won’t hear her complain of the additional work.
6/10
Catherine Martin,
Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media
THE Media Minister is bizarrely disinclined to interact with that sector. Despite frequent entreaties, her advisers refuse to inform political journalists in advance of her media appearances. We can’t find out when and where she is holding press conferences. As Minister for Tourism, Culture and Arts she has presided over the collapse of these sectors. Again communication with these areas of Irish society has been incoherent. She has been part of an unsuccessful fifth column against leader Eamon Ryan and been outmanoeuvred at every turn. But she has been proactively supportive of the Irish language and this improves her rating. Also as a relatively inexperienced frontline minister she will improve.
5/10
Charlie McConalogue, Minister for Agriculture
WITH the sackings of ministers Barry Cowen and Dara Calleary within a month of each other, the Department of Agriculture was a tractor driven by a 15-year-old, with a disintegrating trailer, weaving all over a boreen, hurling slurry everywhere. Now it is a top of range John Deere, maintaining a steady load of sweet-smelling hay, with a driver at the wheel who is actually a farmer.
Charlie McConalogue has been a talisman for Micheál Martin. Charlie, right, had taken over the family farm upon the untimely death of his father. But like Roman General Cincinnatus, with the empire under threat, he left his plough to fight the 2011 General Election and won a surprise seat in Donegal in an isolated positive. With Fianna Fáil seats under threat once more (everywhere) he’ll hope he doesn’t return to his plough as rapidly as Cincinnatus.
7/10
Helen McEntee,
Minister for Justice (currently Minister without portfolio)
HELEN MCENTEE worked up until the day before her first child was born. A young woman would face, in a good year, enough challenges at the Department of Justice, the graveyard of Fine Gael ministerial careers. Yet, shamefully, she also had to deal with an unseemly panic to organise maternity leave, still somehow not on a statutory footing 100 years after the foundation of the State. In that time before she took her ad hoc maternity leave she had marshalled the Department well.
She managed to pass the most draconian laws (Covid necessitated) ever imposed on personal freedoms here without significant political damage. Splendidly, she saw off the Old Boys’ Clubs’ attempts to pin the Justice Séamus
Woulfe fiasco on her.
8/10
Michael McGrath,
Department of Public Expenditure and Reform
MICHAEL MCGRATH is the man with the key to the Exchequer, he will be the next finance minister. Like the gaffe-prone bulldog in Tom and Jerry, Micheál Martin has said of his protégé, proudly ‘that’s ma boy!’ Usually that would be enough for him to be a shoo in as a future leader. But if Fianna Fáil was to turn to Mr McGrath – dilitics. gent, intelligent, and likeable – it would be a desperately misguided move. We are in a post-history period where few of us have the ready answers to questions posed by incredible technological and sociological global changes. McGrath is not Fianna Fáil’s answer. Yes Mr McGrath has performed well, but he must improve in pushing himself to the forefront of the Government narrative and wield more forcefully his power.
6/10
Darragh O’Brien, Minister for Housing
THIS column has been critical of successive housing ministers. Darragh O’Brien was Fianna Fáil’s Housing spokesman while the party supported Fine Gael housing policy in Government since 2016. And his party voted confidence in Eoghan Murphy in December 2019, two months before the general election. So the ‘it was broken when I found it’ excuse doesn’t wash. Our criticisms have only added to a chorus from not only the ESRI, but our own Central Bank and the Department of Public Expenditure of O’Brien’s policies over the past year.
However, the most damning criticism of housing policy comes from within Government. When this newspaper revealed a Cabinet briefing document said that the Government will not reach its own humble building target of 33,000 housing units a year until 2025. Housing will be the rock this coalition founders on in the next election. As the marshal of the coalition’s response, O’Brien will hold huge responsiblity for that.
2/10
Roderic O’Gorman, Minister for Children
O’GORMAN, left, would compete, along with Catherine Martin and Ossian Smyth, in the Green ministerial low-key stakes. In his one significant exposure, the Mother and Baby Homes Report and Commission, he and the Government failed. Not only was the matter mishandled, a Government leak of aspects of the report backfired. As a journalist I would rarely criticise leaks, but in a few rather sensitive historical areas it can be counterproductive. And this one certainly was. Another who did not proactively and competently perform in the area of public message management.
5/10
Eamon Ryan,
Minister for Transport, Environment, Climate and Communications
RYAN is the Columbo of Irish poliLike the legendary TV detective, Ryan wanders around inoffensively, muttering absentmindedly and just when you think he’s failed to get to the heart of the matter he says, ‘just one more thing’. Beneath the scatty, sometimes eccentric exterior is a razor sharp mind and ruthless, efficient operator. Only he and Micheál Martin have survived long-term in politics at the highest level after the wreckage of the 2007-2011 coalition. Ryan, above, has seen off challengers in his own party repeatedly over the last year with a casual inoffensiveness that has belied the crushing defeats he has imposed on Catherine Martin and her supporters. Environment is at the centre of Government policy and the cycling greenways spreading across the land are a physical manifestation of the smaller party’s influence. They may let him bring back the wolves yet.
7/10
Leo Varadkar, Minister for Enterprise and Employment
ERNEST HEMINGWAY said of his own brilliant longevity in his career: ‘The great thing is to last and get your work done.’ Leo Varadkar is one of the more enduring and influential figures we have had in public life. He is a survivor.
Since becoming leader of Fine Gael he has not delivered his principal pledge: electoral success. His curious but fatal failing in the area of election management has damaged his party. Though Donohoe was blamed for it, the 2020 election failure was the then-Taoiseach’s. Yet he endures and, unlike Mr Martin, will be Taoiseach again. Unlike Martin, he will lead his party into the next election. He has been beset by two crises – the Woulfe and LeoLeaks controversies – yet there is no real sign of him being ousted. Like the Big Lebowski, the Dude abides.
7/10
Micheál Martin, Taoiseach
NAPOLEAN BONAPARTE said ‘a leader is a dealer in hope’. Micheál Martin, below, has achieved much. He is one of the most decent men in politics. But hope for the Fianna Fáil party’s future is diminishing. People will say that the Dublin Bay South result will damage Jim O’Call-aghan – not half as much as the leader. The Taoiseach’s real battle is to make it to the end of his term as rotating Taoiseach (December 2022). For reality says he cannot be Tánaiste.
Alan Kelly’s success as Labour leader shows that a new boss can turn around a dysfunctional party. Mr Martin has led the country through the last year with dignity, diligence and competence. For this he rates higher than his party travails would indicate.
6/10