Health clearly a job beyond even a deity
WE all know the story. Simon Harris was elected a TD in sixth class, became a minister when swotting for the Junior Cert and took on Health on the same day as his school debs.
Fast forward to the forlorn, slightly stooped man of indefinable age who takes to his feet in the Dáil to defend his lead role in the children’s hospital soap opera. It might have been cheaper to build a tunnel from Cork to Roscoff decorated with gold tiles and let the kiddies fend for themselves, but it is too late for that now.
Sunday’s disgraceful protest by the hard-of-thinking at his Greystones home will only have added to his sense of inner turmoil.
He must ask himself: why do I bother? On top of that, Harris has had to contend with a nurses’ strike. He would have known, and if he didn’t his handlers will have told him, that you can never win a public scrap with Florence Nightingale.
But he isn’t the first minister for health to enter the ring like a Tyson only to crawl back out like a moose hit by an Arctic truck.
The roll call of political heavyweights this ministry has reduced to a messy cadaver is impressive.
One-time incumbent Brian Cowen famously compared the department to Angola. The African republic successfully sued.
Micheál Martin ran that gauntlet too and emerged both bloodied and bowed, as did Leo Varadkar and Michael Noonan. Down through the decades health has seduced, feasted on and regurgitated the sharpest and most ambitious. The recently young Harris just happens to be the latest.
Which begs a question rarely asked: why do we keep blaming the incumbent minister when it is clearly a job beyond any man, woman or deity?
Because, of course, thrashing politicians is a fun blood sport and the soft option for the public and commentariat alike.
Admittedly, the reasons for eyewatering health budget overruns, fear and loathing in our A&Es and waiting lists do seem impenetrable.
But that doesn’t mean the answers aren’t hiding in plain sight. The reality is the HSE is choked by powerful selfinterest groups, from the professional elites at the top through to middle management, all underwritten by one sort of job-for-life cabal or other. They’re all vocal in their commitment to the patient, but only if they get their whack first. No government could eyeball them all and survive.
Then there’s non-accountable civil servants who will always want things done the way they were done yesterday because they don’t have the cojones to imagine tomorrow.
Not feeling the love for Harris yet?
Well, he’s also a new dad who’s probably getting two hours sleep a night and watching reruns of ‘Oireachtas Report’ at 2am while changing nappies.
Health? He must be sick of it.
Unimpeached day of romance never changes
DATING has changed so much since I chanced my arm and any wisdoms I could impart would fall somewhere between irrelevance and idiocy.
It was certainly much simpler being a seventies teenager. Tinder was stuff you put on the fire and ‘friends’ were real people you actually knew.
I wouldn’t swap that time for this any more than today’s teenagers now would give up their digital world of access all areas for what they would perceive to be the drabness of my ‘Reeling in the Years’ purgatory.
But Valentine’s Day, that terrifying rite of passage for adolescents, doesn’t seem to have altered a jot in the intervening decades.
Good on it. In this world of few constants it’s nice to know the core rituals of getting loved up remain unimpeached. Bless.