O’Keeffe: Medical card fiasco was collective cabinet error
Education Minister Batt O’Keeffe moved to shield Ms Harney from growing resignation calls as he admitted the Government must take the hit. “I don’t see any reason why she would go. The decision was a collective cabinet decision. All of the items were put on the table and any mistakes that were made, we shared that mistake collectively,” he said.
However, Mr O’Keeffe was noticeably more ambiguous when assessing the damage the crisis had done to Brian Cowen.
Asked if the beleaguered Taoiseach’s authority had been damaged, the minister was more circumspect.
“I wouldn’t have thought so. Look, I’m around a long time in politics and I’ve seen issues like this come and go and we have a famous phrase in politics, ‘Next business’,” he said.
Mr O’Keeffe was also coy regarding a cabinet row when the issue was first raised. “You hardly expect me to comment on any discussions that might have taken place in cabinet but this matter was discussed in detail at cabinet,” he said. Mr O’Keeffe strongly backed the new medical card regime.
“You’re only talking about 5%, people who will exceed the limit and [the cabinet are] obviously satisfied that the money that they wanted to achieve out of it will be achieved, that’s €100 million in savings, and obviously we welcome that and we were always very conscious of the fact that we caused a lot of anxiety for older people.”
He said the mistake was made in the first place because the Government was trying to reduce numbers on what he called the “Gold Card”.
“In the execution of that, we certainly didn’t communicate that properly to people and we did cause a lot of anxiety to older people,” he said.
Mr O’Keeffe appeared to be taken aback by independent TD Finian McGrath’s decision to withdraw Government support over the issue.
“I can’t understand it, because I met Finian just after he got a briefing from the chief whip and he congratulated me on the education budget, the fact that there was an increase in capitalisation, the fact that the building fund had been maintained and generally seemed to be satisfied with the provisions by the Government.
“Now, he has signalled over the last number of days his unhappiness on the over-70s issue and obviously as a government we’d be disappointed to lose any level of support but hopefully into the future he may look again at this issue,” he said.
Mr O’Keeffe, who is leading a Irish trade delegation to China, admitted he took constituency criticism on medical cards.
“Over the weekend, yes, there was quite an amount of pressure. Sometimes in politics we make mistakes, that we don’t communicate our message well, in terms of this particular issue I think we certainly failed to communicate properly.”
