Martin debt to Fawlty Towers

A COLLEAGUE watched Pat Rabbitte in the Dáil this week unleash his formidable verbal armoury in the direction of the Government benches.

“The greatest High Court judge the Four Courts never had,” he said.

Mr Rabbitte was on the boil, and for once, Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny wasn’t far behind. Both opposition leaders let it rip all week, accusing the Government of a cover-up by refusing to publish the Travers Report.

When the report was finally published on Wednesday, they changed tack. Both leaders spoke cogently about the repeated and multiple failures of Department of Health officials to grasp the nettle of nursing home charges over the years. But the nub point Mr Kenny and Mr Rabbitte made was that Mr Martin must go.

The buck must stop with the minister, said Mr Kenny. On Thursday, Mr Rabbitte came up with the best one-liner of the week: “Micheál Martin is like Manuel in Fawlty Towers. His defence is ‘I know nothing’.”

The problem for the opposition was the vituperation was straight from the Shut Stable Door school. Travers had played itself out by the time the report was published. Michael Kelly had carried the can. Mr Martin had survived.

In reality, the ‘I know nothing’ defence was the only one that Mr Martin could rely on to survive. If the report concluded the cool clean hero was aware of the huge financial and legal implications, he was a goner.

The word ‘vindication’ was bandied about again this week. Remember another minister whipping up that treat earlier this year at the time of the Quigley Report. This time, Mr Martin’s use of the word was justified.

If you were to rely on the report alone - he emerged unscathed, unwounded, unhurt, undamaged, unsullied, untarnished and, yes, vindicated.

Mr Martin was still vulnerable to a wider charge. Okay, the problem and its messy consequences might never have been spelt out to him by his officials. But he didn’t need to be a sleuth to be aware. There was loads of information already in the public domain. The legality of the charges had cropped up when medical cards were extended to everybody over 70.

The Ombudsman also flagged the problem, as had the South Eastern Health Board, as did the minister’s briefing before the December 2003 meeting. On top of that, two junior ministers, as well as Mr Martin’s two special advisers were at the meeting.

Tim O’Malley, who at least read the briefing notes, told Travers that he was aware of the massive implications. But for whatever reason, none of the four told Mr Martin about the big embarrassing hit for which the department would have to brace itself.

That said, the overarching point that emerges from Travers is that the responsibility for informing the minister ultimately lies with civil servants. Martin clung to this like a life raft.

The vindication he sought was contained in this line: “Absolutely no documentation was made available to me to demonstrate or to indicate that the minister had been fully and adequately briefed by the department.”

Of course, Mr Kelly said he had verbally briefed Mr Martin twice. Mr Martin, in effect, said Mr Kelly had not, or if he had, it was so fleeting and superficial as to be insignificant. The only documentation was the famous missing file seeking the AG’s legal advice - that went missing after the secretary general received it.

This file assumed a huge significance in the Travers inquiry. Mr Kelly knew that. Over five days, he revised his statement three times. In his final statement, he said he thought he passed the file to the minister’s office. If that were true, it would have grave implications for Mr Martin, as it would have shown he would have known - or should have known- about the problem.

Another official in the department told Mr Kelly he saw the actual file in the outer office of the minister’s secretariat in early 2004. This is crucial because it would have corroborated Mr Kelly’s belief he transferred the file to the minister’s office. But this line of inquiry does not seem to have been pursued by Travers.

Nowhere in the report is it stated that that official was asked directly whether he saw the file or not. For the sake of completeness it should have been included, if only to bolster Martin’s ‘I know nothing’ defence.