Health chief takes the rap, but successive ministers are to blame

THE revelations from the Travers Report this week into the nursing homes debacle could be a worthy episode from Yes, Minister, except that the title would have to be changed.

No, Minister, you did not know about the illegal overcharging. No, Minister, you were not shown the file. No, Minister, you were not told about the overcharging on two occasions.

Michael Kelly says otherwise - but he’s no longer secretary general of the Department of Health for the simple reason he was wrongfully shafted over the revelations in the report.

At this stage, nobody - and certainly not the Government - has a clue what the scandal over the nursing homes is going to cost. It could be anything from €500m to two or three billion euro.

What we do know is that Michael Kelly was not responsible. He may have been the most senior civil servant in the department but he was there only for five years.

The systematic robbery of elderly people in nursing homes was carried out in a calculating fashion for 30 years.

John Travers, the former Forfás chief, who conducted the investigation, said that if a proper appraisal had been carried out and presented to ministers over 30 years ago, it was difficult to believe that appropriate action would not have been taken.

I wish I could share his optimism.

The report found that the department was in possession of a string of legal warnings going back almost 30 years, all of which indicated that the charging of people in long-stay care in health board institutions through the deduction of pensions was illegal.

“These concerns were expressed by legal opinion external to the department, by legal opinion provided to the health boards, by officials within the department itself and, not least, by the department’s own legal advisers,” said the report.

A veritable tribunal of lawyers both inside and outside the department knew about it; officials within the department knew; the health boards knew about it; even the attorney general knew.

But the minister didn’t. Is it any wonder that we have a broken-down health service which is now costing e11 billion?

The Tánaiste admitted there was a conflict of evidence between the then Health Minister Micheál Martin and Michael Kelly, but she declined to adjudicate on the matter.

Despite this, Mr Kelly has gone from the department, but holds onto his €166,000 salary - the equivalent of €1,000 for every TD in the Dáil.

He is adamant that he twice told Micheál Martin of the illegal charges. The minister flatly contradicts this.

There is also the question of the missing file, which the minister denies he was ever shown, or asked to comment on. Maybe that particular file slid down behind the mountain of reports that Mr Martin commissioned while at the department. Now if the two men hardly saw each other from one end of the year to the other, it might - just might - be understandable that there could have been a communication problem.

But Michael Kelly was the secretary general of the department and his office adjoined that of the minister.

They had to meet occasionally, and the idea that such a serious problem was not mentioned to the minister by the head of his department is preposterous.

If that’s the way it happened, then it’s even more preposterous that Mr Kelly was simply moved to the Higher Education Authority and allowed retain his huge salary.

Let’s be under no illusion about the vulnerability of the 300,000 people who were affected.

They were old, they were poor, they suffered from mental illness, they had intellectual disabilities, they were physically disabled. That’s how our Tánaiste and Minister for Health, Mary Harney, described them.

Let’s not forget this went on for about 30 years - these most vulnerable people, who could least afford it, being ripped off by the state.

Even before the Travers report was published, the civil servants and officials in the Department were being fingered.

LIKE the kiss of death, the Tánaiste remarked recently: “Since September, I have met many professional and dedicated people throughout the Department.”

Then she added that she accepted there were “grave issues” to be addressed and that certain “minimum standards” of care were not adhered to in the way the charges were levied.

That was to state the glaringly obvious - so obvious that legal advice on it had existed for years - but successive governments did absolutely nothing.

Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny has demanded the resignation of Micheál Martin, now Minister for Enterprise.

The minister is claiming the Travers report has exonerated him, but he’s mistaken. Not matter what attempts are made to blame civil servants, the fact is that Micheál Martin and every minister from the Taoiseach down is to blame for as long as they were in power and allowed the situation to continue.

The principle of collective responsibility applies, and there is no way people will entertain the daft notion that civil servants kept such a potentially explosive issue under wraps for so long.

If they did, then that implies they would have been scared to inform the minister of the day of the problem and that, in turn, would be a shocking indictment of the way the day-to-day running of government was, and is, conducted.

In any case, it would defy even the simplest imagination to expect anybody to believe that 300,000 people could be robbed by the state over the course of 30 years and nobody in the Dáil knew about it. It says a lot about the intelligence of those we elect. It is another chapter in the Fairy Tales of Ireland.

Talking about that tome, the offer from P O’Neill to the McCartney family more than qualifies for inclusion.

When Justice Minister Michael McDowell described a situation as “bizarre” during the week, I thought, rather foolishly, he was referring to the Department of Health. No, he was referring to the decision of the IRA publicly to launch its contracts division this week.

And “bizarre” is the word to describe their offer to kill those responsible for the murder of Robert McCartney.

It was suggested to me that it was a ploy to give Sinn Féin a reason, finally and in public, to sever its links with the paramilitary organisation, and reinstate them to the peace process.

Such are the machinations involved, it’s impossible to know what to believe, but I don’t for one minute think the IRA are so naive as to lay themselves wide open to such odium without a purpose.

Bizarre? You’re right there, Michael, so you’re right.