Cowen huffed and he puffed and... he blew it

NOT so much the Night of the Long Knives, more like the Night of the Living Dead.

Step forward our thrusting, fresh-faced new ministers Pat Carey and Tony Killeen with a combined age of 119 years between the two of them.

Margaret Thatcher used to refer with glee to the opportunities offered by Cabinet reshuffles as “slicing the turkey”, but Brian Cowen was merely content to recycle his turkeys.

A rush of frenzied rumour swept through Leinster House in the half hour before the announcement as the grand old Georgian mansion buzzed with wild claims the shake-up would be surprisingly radical.

But when it came, it went down as a missed opportunity squandered like Ireland’s hopes for the Triple Crown.

As expected Mary Coughlan was punished for her disastrous role at Trade and Enterprise, but it is the children of Ireland who will now really suffer for her mistakes in that economic portfolio as she becomes Minister for Education.

We look forward in awe to the fresh numeracy initiatives from a minister who can’t add up how many commissioners each EU state has, or the impetus she will bring to Irish as a fluent Gaelgóir who mixes up the name of her partners in coalition by calling the Greens, “the Vegetables”.

But at least Mr Cowen had the good sense to take science away from the education brief’s title, thus saving the blushes of the new minister who notoriously had such trouble differentiating between Albert Einstein and Charles Darwin.

The demotion of Social and Family Affairs Minister Mary Hanafin was the biggest surprise of the day and the consensus view was it was down to personal animosity on the part of the Taoiseach rather than any quantitative evaluation of her political performance as a minister for him.

The same appears to have worked in reverse for Batt O’Keeffe who often appeared embattled at the Education Department but was promoted to Enterprise nonetheless. Batt is a close buddy of Mr Cowen, Ms Hanafin certainly is not.

Éamon O Cuív was not only saved from the ministerial scrap-heap many expected for him, but actually elevated to Ms Hanafin’s old role, now renamed Minister for Social Protection – meaning we can all sleep safe in our beds knowing that we are being socially protected by the former Gaeltacht supremo.

And despite all the talk of this being a reshuffle to put job creation at the heart of Government, amazingly, the word “employment” actually disappeared from any Cabinet minister’s title.

Government loyalists insisted titles meant nothing, but if that is the case why did the Taoiseach specifically move the word “tourism” to the lead role in the re-jigged Tourism, Culture and Sports Department if it was not meant to emphasis the importance of foreign visitors to the economy?

Titles clearly do mean a lot in Cabinet, which means with the loss of a specific employment role at the top table, the jobless crisis still means nothing to the Cowen administration.

And the much vaunted reform of public services was cast aside to a junior minister already weighed down with many other responsibilities. So now the role will even more resemble the pointless Ministry for Administrative Affairs from TV’s Yes Minister.

The BBC satire was sharp because it was so accurate, as when it was explained to the hapless public service reform minister what the difference was between something being “under consideration” and “under active consideration”.

“Well, Minister, ‘under consideration’ means we’ve lost the file, ‘under active consideration’ means we’re trying to find it.”

Fianna Fáilers moaned loudly that the Greens were given the scrap of a second junior post after all the unseemly squabbling of recent weeks, but if the Greens had anything like as much political brazenness as FF they could quite rightly have demanded Cabinet seats for all six of their TDs, because without their support there would be zero FF-ers left at the top table as Gormley and co are the only means of visible support this administration has.

The downside of this leverage is that the vast majority of the country, according to the polls, desperately want rid of this Government and see the Greens as the dirty half dozen holding the rest of the nation to ransom – a situation which means the six deputies know they face almost certain annihilation if they pull the plug now and so are happy to wag their tiny tails at being thrown the bone of a second junior ministry.

This long-planned reshuffle was almost certainly Mr Cowen’s last, best chance to try and regain the political initiative and give his exhausted looking administration a game changing lease of new life.

He blew it.