Ministerial friction at health must end

WHETHER Health Minister James Reilly accepts it or not, perception is everything in politics, a timeless and universally accurate yardstick whereby politicians are measured by the man and woman in the street.

By most standards, Dr Reilly appears to be politically inept, especially in managing his relationship with a fellow minister in one of the most important government departments. The lack of trust and communication between him and Minister of State Róisín Shortall is so divisive it is politically damaging.

Despite surviving a Dáil vote of no confidence over his handling of the health portfolio, and securing a deal with consultants, he finds himself on the firing line once more.

Effectively, the confidence motion was decided by the size of the Coalition’s majority. An obviously unhappy Ms Shortall, plus a growing number of disaffected rank-and file members of the Labour Party, reluctantly supported him.

In Dr Reilly’s latest political blunder, it transpires that he intervened in an independent process, arranged by the HSE, to select 20 priority locations around the country for primary care centres. In an example of what is widely seen as blatant political self-interest, he added Swords and Balbriggan, neither regarded as priority cases but both towns within his constituency, to the list.

Not surprisingly, this scenario prompted Ms Shortall to wonder what criteria other than urban deprivation was used by her more senior fellow minister to justify adding 15 additional locations to the list. Indeed, in order to add Swords to the list, it was promoted above more than 100 other locations.

Dr Reilly’s defence of the indefensible smacks of an era when Fianna Fáil government ministers shamelessly cornered such developments for their own political backyards, dismissing out of hand the protestations from Fine Gael and Labour deputies on the opposition benches.

Equally unapologetic, Dr Reilly chose to ignore the exclusive yardstick of urban and rural deprivation as a criteria for selecting locations and included the new ones on the basis of such factors as competition and GP co-operation, arguably conferring commercial advantage on private interests in public-private partnerships.

Despite knowing that Ms Shortall disagreed with his decision, he is adamant that he would make it again tomorrow, adding thatm as minister for healthm he had “the authority” to do so.

No stranger to controversy, Dr Reilly figured at the centre of a storm last July over his investment in a nursing home project in Co Tipperary. He is also involved in a partnership that owns a separate site in Swords earmarked by the HSE as the “preferred location” for a primary care centre but not completed because one of the interests pulled out.

As Minister for Health, Dr Reilly has a regrettable tendency to fly in the face of reality. He claims, for instance, that the latest statistics, showing a big increase of people on hospital waiting lists, were “always there” but that people simply did not know “how to count them”. Similarly, he denied making a U-turn on cutbacks to disability services when his hand was forced by severely disabled protesters.

Potentially more serious, however, is the dysfunctional ministerial relationship at the Department of Health. Aside from ideological differences, that scenario goes much deeper than normal political friction. It is an untenable situation which, in the public interest, must be brought to an end.