Mandarin who leads charge for colleagues
AS HE waits patiently for his new €292,000 job to be confirmed, the ongoing furore surrounding Robert Watt is just the latest example of how one of the country’s most powerful civil servants, even prior to securing his most unusual salary, has been a most unusual mandarin.
Generally, the ideal top civil servant is a grey man who is rarely seen and never heard. But unlike most mandarins who like to run the country from behind the curtains, Watt prefers not to hide his brilliance from public view.
His rise was precipitous and closely dovetailed the period of austerity, when Watt took the knife to the feather-bedded pay and conditions of the public sector. This coincided with the happiest marriage between minister and mandarin, for Watt and Labour’s Brendan Howlin represented the ideal meeting of personalities.
Both were utterly self-assured about their respective abilities, with a combative instinct and a talent for hard work.
During this time Watt, the flamboyant Wolsey of the new Department of Public Expenditure and Martin Fraser, the cerebral Thomas Cromwell-style boss of the Taoiseach’s Department, were perceived to be in competition to be the actual boss of the civil service and, by extension, the real government.
There was only going to be one winner in such a contest and the runner-up now has a new €292,000a-year post in the back-office Department of Health.
In truth, Watt’s lower portfolio and higher salary has been coming for some time.
During the last government, he was increasingly tolerated rather than loved by Paschal Donohoe who, diverted as he was by the simultaneous holding of Finance and Public Expenditure, tended to prioritise Finance.
The sense was also growing among the political classes that Watt had simply become a little too big for his boots. The mandarins may essentially run our politicians, but the unwritten deal is that while they run the country, they do not make too much of a show of it and ensure our politicians get the glory.
His star was also seriously damaged by the Children’s Hospital fiasco while the new, far more selfcontrolled – and ruthless – Public Expenditure Minister Michael McGrath, is most definitely a minister who values invisibility when it comes to his senior mandarins.
A route out of the gathering impasse had to be charted and a route was found where Watt and his unusually huge pay package essentially became the canary in the coalmine for those few who believe our top civil servant mandarins are underpaid.
The happy dénouement of all this, well except for the taxpayer, is that whatever about the State, Watt’s successful securing of the €292,000 mandarin post will be of serious service to his fellow mandarins.
The beachhead has been breached and now a posse of civil servants are preparing to pour through.
Watt is, of course, now expected to take on the HSE as part of his unofficial reward.