Leo and his gang of political nerds were caught rotten
HIS elite Strategic Communications Unit (SCU) probably advised the Taoiseach that Thursday evening was a good time to bury an embarrassing climbdown. The announcement reforming the SCU was sandwiched between the first snows of Storm Emma and the British prime minister’s muchanticipated Brexit plan.
It was a mea culpa, an admission that the SCU had leaned on newspapers to present advertising features promoting the government’s Ireland 2040 project as independent editorial coverage.
Varadkar’s new rules insist that any future Government-sponsored advertising feature is clearly identified as such.
He also asked the secretary general of the Government to oversee the reforms and to review the SCU.
Emails reveal how newspapers were pressurised to disguise the government’s sponsorship of the advertising features for Ireland 2040 as independent articles.
The SCU’s tactics blurred the line between civil servants’ traditional political neutrality and Team Leo, the Government’s re-election crew. Some €1.5m of taxpayers’ money was spent promoting the Government’s €116bn Ireland 2040 infrastructure plan.
The SCU team also commissioned a glossy cinema advertisement to promote the 2040 project.
Presenting paid-for advertising features as pristine editorial content is an embarrassing definition of Fake News for our right-on Taoiseach.
MARTIN FRASER, the head of the civil service, is expected to anticipate the wiles of gauche politicians and naive civil servants and he must have known about the SCU’s plan. Politicisation of the civil service, by design or default, would demean this Republic and Fraser could give chapter and verse on the reasons why. He might say that compromising the civil service is a toilet stop on the road to subverting democracy.
And if the Taoiseach didn’t know that the SCU’s behaviour was unethical, shouldn’t the secretary general to the Government have known?
Transport Minister Shane Ross was the first member of Government to break from the Greek chorus of ministers denying that the SCU’s advertising strategy was dodgy.
On Thursday, Ross described the campaign as ‘absolutely wrong’ and that ‘bad mistakes’ had been made.
In Friday’s statement, Varadkar is basically asking Fraser to put manners on the SCU and review their advertising debacle.
Yet the 15 civil servants of SCU have been working out of the Department of the Taoiseach,where Mr Fraser is also secretary general. But it unfair to shift the blame for the SCU’s foolish stunts on to Fraser and give Vardkar a fool’s pardon. And it is also important put the SCU fiasco in perspective. The Taoiseach didn’t suborn the judiciary or lock up his opponents. The advertising budget paid from public funds was €1.5m (the cost of 20 corrective surgeries for scoliosis in a top private clinic). The opposition saw the advertising as the launch of Team Leo’s re-election plan.
It was the sort of political stroke that appalled Varadkar in opposition. And when it was exposed, his initial reaction was a truculent denial.
THE Taoiseach and the SCU are political nerds fascinated by the intrigues of geeky spindoctors in West Wing dramas on Netflix. And their Ireland 2040 media strategy was puerile – it is not an imminent threat to home-grown democracy but devalues and undermines it.
Heroic advertising promoting and paid for by the Government is a common practice in nasty third world countries but it should be anathema for a mature member of the EU.
Blame doesn’t stick to the Taoiseach. Many younger voters give him the benefit of the doubt because he is not seen as a traditional politician; it is his most precious political asset.
But the longer he is at the epicentre of Irish public life, always on radio and television, the quicker his novelty value will fade.
There will be whispers in Fine Gael that it was his secretary general’s duty to save the callow Varadkar from himself.
But the buck stops at the Taoiseach’s desk. STORM Emma was put in context on Friday morning in a text from a friend channelling the famous last words of Antarctic explorer Captain Scott: ‘I’m just going outside (to get a loaf of bread); I may be away some time.’ THE lives of the recently dead plundered for celebratory obituaries are ideal reading for Storm Emma curfews.
When he was offered the job of directing the fifth film in the James Bond series, the gifted yet modest director Lewis Gilbert turned it down: ‘I would be like Elizabeth Taylor’s fifth husband,’ he said.
‘I would know what to do but wouldn’t know how to make it any different.’