‘Desperate’ to get a break, after 37 days

The PUP scandal suggests the ministers rushing off for six weeks’ holiday have an odd view of the rest of us, writes Gene Kerrigan

THE fun thing about this three-cornered Government is the way the phases of excitement and scandal merge into one another.

I was still blinking at the speed with which Barry Cowen got sacked when the centre of political entertainment shifted from Fianna Fail to Fine Gael.

And I was still making notes on the PUP scandal when I looked up at my laptop to see a large speaker almost crease Paschal Donohoe’s skull. And Eamon Ryan stands there unmoved, like he’s trying to count the dust particles on a distant windowsill.

Spook-eeee.

And, through it all,

Leo Varadkar pops up everywhere, so we don’t forget him while Micheal Martin plays pretendTaoiseach, so Fianna Fail has something to show for keeping Mr V in office.

I like this Government. It’s got lots of entertainment potential.

The squabbles over who got which Cabinet position will simmer on. The winners dig in, the losers gird their loins in the hopes Barry Cowen won’t be the only casualty to open up a vacancy from which they can benefit. We heard a lot from — and about — people genuinely upset that they didn’t get appointed to the Cabinet, or didn’t get the precise position that they longed for.

Most of these people are little use to the rest of us. People of no real experience, people who have never expressed any notable political vision. What they have in abundance is a strong sense of their own status and entitlement.

Irish politics is full of people who display no sense whatever of public service.

For them, political positions exist not as strategic platforms from which to effect change for the betterment of the community. They are trophies to be won. They are positions of rank and consequence.

And those positions pay very, very large salaries, expenses and pensions.

What was especially notable on this occasion was the flagrant and shameless me-me-me of it all.

And amid those already swaggering around the Cabinet table, we have seen unusually blatant evidence of a lack of quality.

As an image-weaver, Simon Harris is second only to Leo Varadkar. Both can speak fluently, convincingly, giving positive impressions of ability. The hiccup comes in actually doing stuff.

Neither of them, as minister for health, even attempted the major reforms so long needed. Harris watched helplessly as the cost of the proposed children’s hospital shot up.

His recent jarring moment came when he publicly ruminated about the “18 other coronaviruses” that preceded Covid-19.

The evidence that Harris was unfamiliar with the basic terminology was surprising, given he was the person then in charge of marshalling the health resources of the State, four months into the pandemic.

There was a similar odd moment from Varadkar, when on RTE Sarah McInerney asked him why American tourists can come here when we’re banned from the USA. Varadkar — erstwhile Taoiseach, current Tanaiste — demonstrated that he simply doesn’t know if Irish people are banned from entering the USA (they are).

Such unexpected fumbling — suggesting a sense of detachment from the job — were mere squibs to what followed when Varadkar and Heather Humphreys were caught messing with the rights of citizens.

The Pandemic Unemployment Payment (PUP) scandal emerged from their obsession with a basic right-wing belief.

It’s a touchstone of the political right that they and their like — the “people who get up early” — work hard. For some weird reason, they seem to believe the rest of us hate working. We’re constantly on the lookout for ways to ‘game the system’.

The truth is that most of us need to work, for the money, and like to work, for all sorts of reasons. We are social creatures, we are people who like to do things in co-operation with others.

We are not the scheming layabouts of Varadkar’s nightmares.

When the coronavirus hit us, the State had to close down jobs that threatened to be a breeding ground for the virus. It could not do that without providing a basic income to those made unemployed.

Apart from fairness and need, people might not have co-operated so well with the measures needed to protect public health.

Other broadly left-wing measures — the freeze on rents, and the ban on evictions — were troubling enough to those with rightwing obsessions.

But the PUP grated. As early as May, after the first wave of the virus had peaked, both Varadkar and Humphreys publicly fretted about people receiving €350 payments.

The numbers receiving PUP had almost halved, but Varadkar and Humphreys were deeply hurt that

€350 was more than some people had been paid while working.

This, they both said, was “not fair”.

An odd point of view. A huge number of people had jobs where they were paid less than the State reckoned people needed to sustain themselves.

Yet, for Varadkar and Humphreys, the unfairness in this was not that so many are routinely underpaid in the economy they govern. It was that those people were now slightly better off on an emergency income than they were when in their jobs.

The State has a right to protect its money from fraud, and does so effectively. The PUP had to be put into effect quickly; the State needs to ensure it’s not abused.

No problem with any of that.

Why were people on State payments being hounded by gardai? Why was the State using methods some consider to be unlawful?

The PUP scandal grew from the nagging notion that some people were being paid more than they’re worth — and they were taking actual holidays.

The cover story on this changed as time went on.

It was at first because people were going on holiday while they should be “actively seeking work”.

This was nonsense. They gave us all the green light to holiday abroad in Latvia or Greenland. They’d no objection to people going to Killarney on holiday.

This is not 1992. “Actively seeking work” does not require you to print your CV and hawk it around local businesses. You can more effectively seek work through your phone, on the internet, while sipping a cocktail outside a bar in Berlin.

Anyway, the notion of “actively seeking work” in a pandemic, with mass unemployment and whole economic sectors shut down, is silly.

They then claimed they objected to people on PUP disregarding “travel advice”. It was about our health, supposedly. This was a desperate, risible grab for credibility.

Varadkar went on The Week in Politics and claimed to be getting “information from the airports”. Those “not genuinely seeking work” would have payments stopped, he said.

Farcically, someone then had to sneak into the departmental website and — post hoc — adjust the

PUP criteria to fit the Fine Gael cover story. People were being punished for not observing rules they didn’t know existed. Rules never revealed to the Dail, rules never publicised.

Over the first seven months of 2020, the Dail sat for 37 days. An anonymous Cabinet minister was quoted in this newspaper last Sunday — they were “desperate for the summer recess”, he or she said.

They’re now on holiday for six weeks. When they return in mid-September they’ll work three months. Then they take a month off for Christmas.

Meanwhile, the army of “advisers” grows. Don’t hold me to this, but I’ve a small suspicion that when we find out what they’re paid, it will be somewhat more than €350 a week.

‘We are not the scheming layabouts of Varadkar’s nightmares’