RIP the SCU. But they haven’t gone away, you know...

THE Taoiseach looked angry and frustrated offering up his most venerated political possession in the Dáil during Holy Week. Letting go of the Strategic Communications Unit hurt him much more than giving way to other faux outrages from the Opposition.

He believes that know-nothing cynics have sabotaged a significant innovation in the management of his government’s communications.

On Thursday, he told the Dáil that the 15 civil servants of the SCU would be dispersed to other departments by July.

That is how the Taoiseach would like the parable of the SCU to be remembered. But a different narrative delivers the same ending:

The SCU lost its way because the Taoiseach was blinded by political opportunism. And it was funded by taxpayers and marshalled by the country’s most senior civil servant to kick-start the Taoiseach’s ambition.

Veteran civil servants watched the rise and fall of the SCU with morbid fascination: they marvelled at its spectacular ascent – but certain it would crash and burn, sooner rather than later.

The civil service instinctively resists change and neutralises any person or idea that threatens the status quo – and the Tall Poppies of the SCU were alien to the culture and required cutting down.

THE die was cast when John Concannon, a pitch-perfect marketing executive, met Leo Varadkar. They came up with a plan for the SCU and sold their idea to Martin Fraser, the head of the civil service. Back then Mr Fraser had the added responsibility of giving recently elected Leo Varadkar a crash course on how-to-be-Taoiseach.

Mr Concannon and the SCU were subsumed into the civil service under Mr Fraser’s watchful eye in the Department of the Taoiseach. And as this newspaper reported, Mr Fraser and Mr Concannon met 22 times last year, with four of the sessions in the run up to the launch of the SCU in July.

Segregating the civil servants of the SCU from politics must have been as difficult as keeping the Taoiseach from tinkering with Fine Gael. Potential contamination of the civil service by the SCU was always a worry for Mr Fraser.

No matter how hard they try, cocksure public relations hustlers cannot be convincingly disguised as career civil servants, I was told. And the ethos of the civil service will always be compromised when civil servants are paid to promote politicians.

And, of course, Opposition politicians cannot bear to see their rivals in government getting perks from public relations professionals pretending to be civil servants.

Project 2040, the Government’s €116bn plan for the next generation, was to be the SCU’s finest hour but proved to be its undoing. A tsunami of complaints labelled the campaign as government propaganda and the Government was inundated with Freedom Of Information requests.

The end of the SCU was inevitable even before the Government lost a vote on its future in the Dáil. And when the most senior civil servant in the State was asked to submit a report on its prospects, it was RIP SCU.

The SCU was guilty of nothing but being a distraction to the main business of government, said Mr Fraser in a report that recommended it be wound up in July.

John Concannon, who designed the SCU, can’t go home: a woman, Tania Banotti, was appointed to his former position as director of Creative Ireland. And be sure that the Taoiseach is instructing Mr Fraser and other power brokers in the public service, to find a safe bolthole for John Concannon.

Friends of the SCU will wink and say ‘they haven’t gone away, you know’ – and if the Taoiseach has his way, John Concannon will keep his security pass for Government Buildings. After all the spooky speculation about who advised the Taoiseach on expelling a Russian diplomat last week a clue emerged from the records of the Dáil last year...

Both the gardaí and the Defence Forces have in-house intelligence units to guard the nation’s security and secrets but we have an even more exotic team of spies known as the ‘secret service’.

Few bother to ask about our secret service, an outfit that is so hush-hush that they don’t have a specific title or even have a capital ‘S’ on their generic name.

The secret service’s annual €1m budget pays the expenses for which the gardaí and Defence Forces find it difficult to account – it’s cash-for-touts, according to sources.

And according to Pascal Donohoe, the Minister for Finance, our ‘secret services’ are low maintenance and each year they return unspent money to the Exchequer.

Last year he told the Dail: ‘To date in 2017, on foot of requests for funding, €300,000 has been transferred to the relevant authorities to fund secret services. As set out in the appropriation account each year, where the surplus to be surrendered differs from the amount the Exchequer grant undrawn, this is an amount due to or from the Exchequer.’ He added: ‘This is then reflected in the Exchequer Issues in the following year.’

When their articles were filed from Belfast after the rugby rape trial verdict last Wednesday some of our most eminent women journalists decided to go for a drink. It was never going to be a celebratory cocktail and they looked around for suggestions about which hostelry would best match their sombre mood. One of the women who had travelled up from Dublin blurted out ‘Ollie’s’, the nightclub in the posh Merchant Hotel named in evidence at the trial. It was decided to give the nightclub a ‘miss’.