Political World
Hobson’s choice for Reilly – stay in Angola or shift to the backbenches
World of Politics with Harry McGee – harrymcgee@gmail.com
Brian Cowen coined the phrase ‘Angola’ to describe the Department of Health when he became the minister there in the 1997 – because, politically, this huge sprawling hard-to-control department was full of landmines.
You still hear Angola being repeated from time to time – but mostly to describe claimed third world conditions in our health services.
There is no other department that is as tough or has an equal attrition rate on its ministers. Michael Noonan was there in the 1990s and his and his department’s poor handling of the Brigid McCole case blighted his subsequent short leadership of Fine Gael. Mrs McCole was a woman who contracted Hepatitis C from a contaminated blood product. The Department fought tooth and nail – and in a very legalistic fashion – in defending itself in court against her. She died before the proceeding could come to an end.
Mícheál Martin was also there for almost five years and had a mixed innings. He created the Health Services Executive replacing the old health boards, such as the Western Health Board. But the problem was that merging all these organisations into one led to huge duplication and overlap.
The result was a terrible fudge – eleven health boards with different set-ups and different ways of doing things (and different emphases of service) coming together to create an ungainly, inflexible and unwieldy behemoth.
One of the big controversies around that time was the introduction of the PPARS payroll system, which would replace the different systems that had been in operation in each health bord and bring some uniformity.
The difficulty was that not alone were the payroll systems different, employees at similar grades in different health boards had different take home pay, working conditions, holiday arrangement and hours, because of localised deals that had been made.
In the end, the cost of introducing PPARS assumed biblical proportions, running into hundreds of millions of euro before the Comptroller and Auditor General said stop.
Mary Harney went into the Department with an ambitious reform agenda. Her big long-term plan was to locate private hospitals on the grounds of public hospitals to create an unashamed genuine two-tier health system.
Some of her early innovations did work. The National Treatment Purchase Fund was designed to reduce waiting lists for non-emergency operations.
There were anomalies that sounded a little unjust. A person waiting for over a year or perhaps two years for a surgeon to perform a procedure on the public system could get seen by the same surgeon in short order if the NTPF crossed his palm with euro. Some patients were sent abroad.
It was costly but it worked.
Another major creation of Harney’s was the Health Information Quality Agency, under Dr Tracy Cooper, which has ensured qualitative improvements in the standards of care in hospitals.
The recent HIQA report about University Hospital Galway’s treatment of Savital Halappanavar when she was in its care is a case in point. It was explicit and comprehensive in outlining the litany of shortcomings evident in UHG.
Despite a promising start, it became increasingly obvious that faced with the massive challenges in health, Harney had lost appetite.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
World of Politics with Harry McGee
Academically, politics is described as a science. But in the real world, it’s more of an art – and one of the big decisions a Government has to make is to decide when to call an election.
Will they see out the full term, or will they go early – either to mitigate the damage they will ship, or to secure a victory before things go awry, or the economy takes a dip, or some kind of controversy erupts?
Timing is everything.
And there’s a bit of art to that – not to mention a lot of luck. If you call it early and win big, you’re a genius. If you call it early and lose, you are the political version of the village fool.
Charlie Haughey was a poor judge of the public mood. Twice he called snap elections and on both occasions they backfired. Haughey succeeded Jack Lynch as Taoiseach in late 1979 and did not – technically – have his own mandate. He tried to remedy that by calling an election in 1981. But it recoiled. Ray MacSharry warned him not to hold it during the H Block hunger strikes when republican prisoners were dying each day. He did not listen to the advice and found himself out of office.
After his return to power in 1987, Haughey tired of presiding over a minority government that kept on losing votes in the Oireachtas (the opposition won nine private members motions).
So he called a snap general election and it backfired. Fianna Fáil lost seats and had to broker a coalition deal with the Progressive Democrats and his long-standing political adversary Dessie O’Malley.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
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World of Politics with Harry McGee
I was cycling down Mount Street in Dublin on Tuesday. It’s a wide esplanade that links the Grand Canal with Merrion Square. The street is a mixture of fine Georgian buildings and modern office blocks.
About half-way down is the office of the International Protection Office, which deals with asylum seekers who have arrived in the country.
Needless to say, the office has been overwhelmed in the past year. Besides an estimated 80,000 refugees who have arrived from Ukraine, there have been about 20,000 people from other parts of the world who have arrived into Dublin (mostly) claiming asylum.
The numbers peaked around Christmas, but they have been falling a little. In January, more than 1,300 people arrived seeking asylum but the numbers fell back to 831 and 858, in February and March respectively.
They are still huge numbers in a historical context.
So back to my cycle on Tuesday. I knew that some asylum seekers were camping outside the International Protection Office, but I was taken aback by how many. There were six tents lined up on the pavement directly outside. Then on the ramp that led down to the basement carpark on the side of the building, there were about another 20 tents.
It looked like what it was, a refugee camp in the middle of Dublin’s business district. If you pan out from Mount Street, you will find tents here and there in nearby streets and alleys. There were a good few tents in an alleyway off Sandwith Street about 500 metres away.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App
Download the Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App to access to Galway’s best-selling newspaper.
Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
Or purchase the Digital Edition for PC, Mac or Laptop from Pagesuite HERE.
Get the Connacht Tribune Live app
The Connacht Tribune Live app is the home of everything that is happening in Galway City and county. It’s completely FREE and features all the latest news, sport and information on what’s on in your area. Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
World of Politics with Harry McGee
God that was a dramatic and historic weekend in England, wasn’t it? So much excitement, so much change, so much hype, so much out with the old and in with the new, and what looks like the coronation of a new leader. Yes, the local elections in Britain were something else weren’t they!
Apologies for not going on about King Charles III but the contract I signed when I became a lifelong republican forbids me to discuss the topic!
I know the British local elections sound a bit boring by comparison, but the results were stunning.
The Conservatives lost nearly 1,000 seats, the British Labour Party gained almost 500 and both the Lib Dems (with 350 gains) and the Greens (gaining over 200) also had amazing days at the polls.
It was Labour’s best day since 2002 but its victory was only partial. The Greens and the Lib Dems actually made gains at the expense of Labour in more affluent areas, and in parts of Britain where there were high numbers of graduates.
It was in the Red Wall constituencies in the North of England where the Labour recovery was strongest. These are working class constituencies with pockets of deprivation where people voted for the Labour Party forever. But all of those constituencies voted for Brexit and then voted for the Tories in the next general election. Labour is now winning back some of those votes.
Local elections are classified as second-tier elections which essentially means – from a national perspective – they are not life-or-death affairs, and not everything turns on them. Of course, it’s really important to have good local representation. But they are not an amazing weather vane for who rules the country.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App
Download the Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App to access to Galway’s best-selling newspaper.
Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
Or purchase the Digital Edition for PC, Mac or Laptop from Pagesuite HERE.
Get the Connacht Tribune Live app
The Connacht Tribune Live app is the home of everything that is happening in Galway City and county. It’s completely FREE and features all the latest news, sport and information on what’s on in your area. Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
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