As always, Harris will make zero difference
IT SHOULD have been a great week for our presumptive taoiseach Simon Harris, enjoying his ‘moment’ as Fine Gael’s new leader and excitedly anticipating his election to the highest office in the land on April 9.
Life is good for the 37-year-old Wicklow TD, left, who has been in government – as minister for Health, Justice and Higher Education – since 2016. Not bad for a man who dropped out of college to focus on serving the people. But things are never that simple, are they Simon?
This week has produced the most profoundly negative assessment of Mr Harris’s time in government. And that’s not just because of the general blame he shares on the basis of collective Cabinet responsibility – it’s very particular to him, especially in respect of the health crisis.
The story of how 65-year-old Martin Abbott from Shannon died after falling from a trolley in the busy emergency department at University Hospital Limerick in December 2019, when Harris was health minister, is as shocking as it is disgraceful. The trauma Mr Abbott’s family have been forced to endure has been magnified by suggestions that the poor man may have lain unattended for perhaps an hour before he was discovered.
If anything illustrates the dreadful state of our health crisis, this is it. The health system is even worse now, which is a tragic calibration of the difference Mr Harris made in the Department of Health during his time there. Which was no difference at all.
It was the same in Justice when he stepped in for Helen McEntee. In May 2023, as minister, Mr Harris assured us that the Garda Commissioner had enough resources to deal with escalating anti-immigrant, far-right violence. What a cock-and-bull story that was in light of the Dublin riots last November, and arson attacks all over the country since.
And then there’s the housing crisis with increasing numbers of people in emergency accommodation. Harris and others have been promising solutions for so long now to these wellidentified crises that their words have, to borrow from Bob Dylan, turned into a meaningless ring. Harris will put a new face on the office of Taoiseach. Unfortunately, experience tells us that nothing else will change.