Plain speaking and spin at the heart of dysfunction that’s stalking Ireland 2040
THE strange Janus-like function and dysfunction which characterises this Fine Gael-led Government was on show in all its glory this week.
A functioning government looks exactly like the National Emergency Coordination Group which did everything possible to ensure the safety of the people, given the snow which has crippled the country.
Heroic efforts to keep our society going by that muchmaligned group of people: public servants, including doctors, nurses, guards, emergency services, council workers and civil defence, ensured some level of normality amongst the strange panic-buying of bread and milk by the general populace.
There was a sense of the Government and its public services functioning as one to ensure public safety, notwithstanding the travel difficulties many endured.
The exception to this was the contradictory messages sent out earlier in the week about doubling the fuel allowance. First we had the Junior Minister for Older People Jim Daly on Tuesday urging people to keep their heating on 24 hours a day during the cold snap, while later the Taoiseach told the Dáil he could not write a blank cheque to pay for people to heat their homes and his Minister’s advice was not Government policy.
The hapless Daly was then sent out that evening to face the Six One on RTÉ to say that everyone in Government was on the same page, much to the incredulity of his interrogator Keelin Shanley and the watching public.
This was the same mantra used by the Minister for Social Protection Regina Doherty when she announced in an impromptu press conference at Government Buildings the following morning that a doubling of the fuel allowance would actually now take place, notwithstanding the announcement in our national parliament from our plaintalking Taoiseach.
Plain talking and spin is at the heart of the unreality and dysfunction which continues to stalk Ireland 2040, the Government’s plan to build the ‘Ireland of tomorrow’.
We can only hope that this Ireland – which we are told will have one million extra people and 660,000 more people at work, with four new funds totalling €4bn for rural and urban growth, climate action and innovation – works a bit better than the Government’s plans to sell it.
We had the rather bizarre spectacle of the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs, Katherine Zappone taking to Twitter on Wednesday to state that she was seeking urgent clarification regarding recent advertising deals about Ireland 2040, and ominously noting that ‘there can be no blurring of lines between news and advertising’.
A statement issued by Zappone and the Minister for Communications, Climate Action and Environment Denis Naughten, solemnly announced that they were seeking a meeting with Leo Varadkar about the controversy, and that if any such blurring of lines between adverts and editorial were to occur, it would raise serious questions around transparency, press freedom and compliance with advertising rules.
THE other Independent Minister at Cabinet, the intrepid Shane Ross, also voiced his concerns. All very well indeed, on the issue of blurring the lines between advertising and news, but the last time I checked, Zappone, Naughten and Ross, were part of the Cabinet that signed off on Ireland 2040.
This then begs the question as to what is actually going on in Cabinet when individual members have to demand urgent meetings with the Taoiseach about policies they were party to.
On Thursday, Varadkar announced he was seeking a review of the Government’s Strategic Communications Unit given the controversy that had arisen about what exactly was an advertorial and what wasn’t.
The SCU claimed it did not direct newspapers to blur the lines between editorial and advertisements amidst accusations that the advertisements were ordered by the agency to look like regular news articles, and featured Fine Gael election candidates.
Varadkar would be well-advised to take a leaf out of former Taoiseach Liam Cosgrave’s book. Cosgrave observed a scrupulous approach to the distinction between State and party. In the 1977 general election, one of the FG team, economist Brendan Dowling, discovered that FG, then in government, had no photocopier in their election HQ.
Dowling wished to use a government one, but Cosgrave and two of his ministers, Garret FitzGerald and Richie Ryan, were reluctant to use government machinery for party purposes. It was only when an official in Finance said that if it were FF, not only would it be machinery but also staff that would be used, did Dowling get the go-ahead to use a government photocopier. FG lost the election, but Liam Cosgrave’s antennae were right in this instance.
This week, the political debate about the SCU has been puerile, offensive and dispiriting in equal measure. In fact, nothing much has changed in Irish political debate in over half a century.
In a speech during the 1957 general election Fianna Fáil’s Seán MacEntee accused Taoiseach John A Costello of having ‘studied Hitler’s Mein Kampf and sat at the feet of the late Dr Goebbels’.
In March 2006, then-tánaiste and leader of the PDs, Michael McDowell, accused FG’s Richard Bruton of being the ‘Dr Goebbels of propaganda’ in a row over Garda numbers.
And this week we had Fianna Fáil’s Marc MacSharry accusing the Government of a ‘Goebbels-style launch’ over Ireland 2040, while Labour’s Alan Kelly compared its spend on advertorials for the plan as ‘akin to something from the Third Reich – Goebbels territory’.
This is deeply odious and those who use the name Goebbels should be ashamed of themselves. At least McDowell had the good grace to apologise to Bruton the following day.
The Holocaust is the greatest crime committed by a state in recent memory. The architect of selling it to the German people was propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.
His is a name that shames history and stains democracies. It has no place in political discourse whether in Ireland or anywhere else. Yes, our Government needs to get its act together when it comes to selling its message, but so does the opposition in its criticisms.