The Holohan affair shows this government is in thrall to the status quo
WHEN ancient, revered and absolute monarchies faced calls for reform and bread for the masses they often found themselves so dysfunctional, so entrenched in their selfaggrandising little worlds that they couldn’t change.
After two decades of bad harvests, drought and death in late 18th-century France, Louis XVI – and his wife, Marie Antoinette – could have accepted a reform package proposed by his controller general, Charles Alexandre de Calonne, that included a universal land tax from which the privileged classes would no longer be exempt. But he was the grandson of Louis XIV, the Sun King, who said: ‘L’État c’est moi,’ [I am the State]. He didn’t accept any reform. The grandson of the Sun King had his head chopped off as part of the French Revolution.
Back to modern-day Ireland: Our coalition Government – faced by a populist opposition in Sinn Féin, which promises to democratically tear down the status quo – offers only, in response, the status quo. We see this week a perfect example of this.
In a modern, developed democracy it is outrageous that senior civil servants be permitted to oversee the awarding of high-paid, prestigious jobs which are, in some cases, invented in the lunchrooms of government departments.
This week, we saw how the higher echelons of the public service – senior civil servants and ministers – now operate.
DR TONY HOLOHAN, a civil servant who has performed well in his job for the last two years, was given a university position without consultation with anybody bar a small coterie of similarly highly paid civil servants at the Department of Health. Cabinet ministers I spoke to said that Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly was not consulted on the nature of the job. If Mr Donnelly wasn’t told, then we believe the Taoiseach, who moved on Friday to pause the secondment, wasn’t either.
Until that intervention, Dr Holohan was to retain his publicly funded €187,000 salary and public service position, while taking up a role that we know nothing about, not its terms, conditions or required duties.
Crucially, had the appointment continued, he would have kept his full – and, we assure you, eye-watering – pension entitlements.
Following Mr Martin’s intervention Dr Holohan decided his future lay outside of the public service – and in a shock announcement yesterday, said he was retiring as Chief Medical Officer.
For ministers to now say they were ‘blindsided’ by Dr Holohan’s appointment, or that they are ‘unhappy’ with the process is a cop out – and disrespectful to their own high offices. What they were hoping was that the controversy would blow over and that Holohan would head off to his academic gig, draw down his salary and pick up his pension in due course.
That hope was destroyed with Dr Holohan’s announcement – and there is still plenty of fallout to go around.
Originally, the move was sold to the public (and Cabinet ministers, they tell me) as if he was retiring from the public service, giving up his State salary and post and moving to an entirely new post. This was not the case then, although it is the case now.
The idea that a report carried out by secretary general at the Department of Health Robert Watt would explain a decision committing €187,000 of the Health vote to fill a position in Trinity College without any oversight of an elected person is naive. Even if the policy were accepted to be wise, could the Cabinet allow such decisions to be made without ministerial knowledge?
There was a blindingly simple and wonderfully rapid solution to this: the Taoiseach could have ordered Stephen Donnelly to reverse the decision.
Now Dr Holohan has made the decision for the Taoiseach and the Minister for Health, and both are diminished.
Yes, there is anger among ministers and acknowledgement of damage to the Government from the controversy. But the real scandal lies with dereliction of ministers, who are elected to rule and have full executive power over the entire Government.
YOU could, perhaps, if you were naïve, accept the explanation that ministers gave me, privately. They tell me that they were fearful of publicly humiliating Holohan, by forcing him to resile from this highly unusual move. They claim he is popular. Opinion polls may have shown that he was, but this popularity will never be tested in an election. And, more importantly, tackling unpopular problems is the job of government.
There is another explanation touted by politicians in private briefings. That is that the civil service, after two years of seeing unelected officials like Tony Holohan make arbitrary decisions that affected millions, closed down or opened up an entire economy, are emboldened. This, I don’t accept either. In a parliamentary democracy, power comes from the people at elections. Our constitution and the parliamentary oversight of government departments means authority can be reasserted in an instant.
In this whole affair, we have a glorious example of an odd phenomenon that I have come to understand after years covering the beat in Leinster House. It is that politicians become institutionalised. Micheál Martin is the Taoiseach, the boss. He is 61 and became a full-time politician when he was elected to Cork County Council in 1985 – 37 years ago. He was elected to the Dáil in 1989, when Charlie Haughey called a snap election. He became a Cabinet minister in 1997 and spent the next 14 years as one. From 2011 he has been leader of Fianna Fáil and has spent almost the last two years as Taoiseach.
He knows nothing but the status quo. That status quo, the establishment, has a small, secretive club at the very top, that is made up of Cabinet ministers, secretaries general and other senior civil servants. They believe that they are entitled to give one another positions, secure each other’s salaries and pensions. And if one of them feels that they no longer want to do a certain job for whatever reason, they are found another. That could be an academic post, an ambassadorship or one of the many lucrative jobs in Europe that are part of
the club’s gift. Not so long ago this was somewhat accepted. Phil Hogan could become a deeply unpopular environment minister, but Enda Kenny ‘promoted’ him to the Croesus-like rewards of the European Commission. And, way back in Fianna Fáil’s golden era, Cabinet minister Micheál Martin could appoint Celia Larkin, the former partner of then-Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, to the National Consumer Agency and Fianna Fáil would still be elected back into power in 2007.
The Irish electorate, shorn of innocence by an economic crash, and made cynical by years of governmental failure will not tolerate what they stood for in 2005. This Government knows this, it learned it directly in the furores over the appointment of Katherine Zappone as a UN envoy, and their former attorney general Séamus Woulfe to the Supreme Court.
But they, like Louis XVI, cannot change. Because they cannot accept that they, the establishment, needs to fundamentally reform. As to do so would be to accept that there is something inherently rotten. The problem for politicians is that, unlike modern kings and secretaries general, they are held accountable to the public.
The ongoing crises in housing and health – and now the cost of living – will see politicians who accept such outrageous behaviour from the permanent government reap not a violent end, as in the French revolution, but a no less democratic one.