Martin back in firing line over nursing home fiasco

MINISTER Micheál Martin’s efforts to shake off the nursing home charges controversy suffered a serious setback yesterday when a former ombudsman excoriated the Oireachtas committee that cleared him of responsibility.

Ex-ombudsman Kevin Murphy also strongly questioned Tánaiste Mary Harney’s position that the blame for “systemic maladministration” in the Department of Health lay with civil servants alone.

Last night it was also being interpreted as a strong rejection of Mr Martin’s refusal to accept any political responsibility for the scandal.

In a clear rebuttal, Mr Murphy, himself a former senior civil servant, said that such corporate failures were “clearly” the collective responsibility of Government.

He also pointed out that a clear convention had developed over time of individual ministerial responsibility for the administration of their particular department.

“Failure by the Government to consider its responsibility where serious and protracted illegality by a department has taken place is failure to perform its constitutional duty,” he argued.

Mr Murphy was delivering a speech, Democracy in Ireland, to coincide with the launch of a survey on democracy by Tasc, the Think Tank for Action on Social Change.

Turning to the committee which considered the Travers Report, Mr Murphy said he was appalled that, after 80 years of parliamentary democracy, the Joint Committee on Health and Children could say in its report that there was an “urgent need to clarify the responsibilities of ministers”.

The clear implication of his remarks was that ministerial responsibility had been well established over 80 years of democracy.

In a cutting dismissal of the committee’s finding, he said: “I think the great parliamentarians of the past will be turning if not squirming in their graves.”

He reiterated his view that the Dáil and the Seanad had “neither the capacity nor the willingness to hold the Government responsible to it”, as provided for in the Constitution.

He said this was because TDs display greater loyalty to their parties than to the Dáil “despite the great privilege of their being elected to it”.

When the committee published its report on Travers earlier this month, it was heavily criticised for failing to assign political responsibility for the issue.

Neither Mr Martin, nor any of his junior ministers while he was at Health, were criticised although opposition members of the committee had wanted to do so. That forced a split along partisan lines.

Mr Martin responded yesterday by saying that former Forfas head, John Travers, also an esteemed public servant, had come to his conclusions on where responsibility lay and his findings were there for all to see.