Ministers of substance marked by ability to break through bureaucracy

WE now have a three-tier ministerial system. At the bottom are the soon-to -be-announced ministers of state. At the top are finance, health, education, justice and transport. In the middle are the others, widely interpreted, since Brian Cowen announced his cabinet, as of minor importance, offering damn-all potential advancement to their holders, and awarded either as punishments or consolation prizes.

Hence the view that Micheál Martin, since peace has broken out in the north, will do a lot of foreign travel, achieve the sum total of zilch and become largely invisible. This view, articulated in the week that up to 100,000 people died in a cyclone in Burma and a million more were robbed of their homes, clothes, food, property and sanitation, would suggest that Ireland’s much-vaunted neutrality extends to standing idly by while a dictatorship effectively wages war on its own people.

Goal’s John O’Shea wants the international community to “go in” to what its rulers call Myanmar, to ensure the military junta can’t: a) steal aid intended for the dispossessed and b) prevent it getting to those who desperately need it.

On the one hand, O’Shea’s rants fly in the face of international law. You can’t invade a country because you don’t like the way it treats its own citizens. On the other hand, he’s got right on his side. How can a vast and vastly powerful entity like the EU, committed to peace, prosperity and the dignity of the human being, simply watch while Burma’s rulers massacre their own people by inaction and corruption?

The aid NGOs clustered at the Burmese border maintain that in the absence of immediate action, children and the elderly will die in their thousands.

It is, of course, possible for the new Foreign Affairs Minister to claim that he’s not in a position to do anything about it. That he’s reading himself into his brief. That no mechanisms are available to him to change the situation. If he were to take this position, it would have little in the way of personal political fallout, since TV stations, starved of footage, are already abandoning the Burma story and coverage has dropped away, in sharp contrast with the way media focused for so long on the handling of the aftermath of America’s Hurricane Katrina.

It is unlikely that Martin will take that quiescent view. Because, although he loves the consultative process, he also has a capacity to take on the impossible and achieve it, as proven by his anti-smoking legislation.

That capacity, which allows any minister to turn an also-ran ministry into a lasting success story, can emerge at any age and against any background. Martin Cullen, for example, is at an age and stage of his career when he can make the choice between happy survival around the cabinet table and the odd photo opportunity, or re-positioning sport in the public mind as a lifelong active habit.

At the moment, sport is the pursuit of the young, who get taken to training sessions by their mothers driving emission- rich 4x4s, when they could contribute to their own fitness by cycling to the training grounds. Once those kids hit their 20s, sport for them is something watched from the couch with a can of beer.

Ministers who make a difference tend to have one defining characteristic: they don’t buy into the idea of continuum. They don’t see themselves slotting into a seamless line of perfect policy they are mandated to advance, like runners in a relay race taking hold of the baton for a while and then passing it on. Ministers who make a difference tend to be sprinters without a reverence for what’s happened up to their arrival.

IN this context, it will be interesting to watch Batt O’Keeffe. He is a contradictory bundle of molecules. Former students of his adore him and see him as kind, clever, supportive and caring. Political opponents regard him as a street- fighter who can be both savage and subtle.

He’s had enough interruptions to his own career progress to have developed resilience while learning that he’d better make the most of what he has while he has it, because you never know the day nor the hour. He’s been long enough in the role of junior minister to know how all the systems work and — hopefully — develop a healthy disrespect for them.

Batt might usefully read a little paperback published a few weeks ago by Currach Press, called Unfulfilled Promise, about the life of one of his predecessors in Marlborough Street, Donogh O’Malley.

O’Malley’s name tends to carry an explanatory line with it: he was the man who brought in free education. What has been forgotten is how unorthodox was the introduction. Limerick author PJ Browne recounts how, on September 10, 1966, without warning, O’Malley simply told a bunch of journalists that free post-primary education was going to become available to all families in Ireland.

The inestimable TK Whittaker, secretary of the Department of Finance at the time, was livid. “It is astonishing,” he wrote, “that a major change in educational policy should be announced by the minister for Education at a weekend seminar of the National Union of Journalists. This ‘free schooling’ policy has not been the subject of any submission to the Department of Finance, has not been approved by the government, has certainly not been examined from the financial... aspect.”

The minister to whom Whittaker reported, Jack Lynch, was just as furious.

“If the proposals of the Minister for Education are to be approved,” he said, “there will be no alternative to the imposition of new taxation; this may have serious economic reactions.”

While his own government and civil servants were enraged, Archbishop John Charles McQuaid actively resistant and the opposition mad as hell, O’Malley, buoyed up by public reaction, sailed ahead, delivering a defiant speech in the Seanad.

“No one is going to stop me introducing my scheme next September,” he told senators. “No vested interest or group, whoever they may be, at whatever level, will sabotage what every reasonable-minded man considers to be a just scheme.”

Today, we view the introduction of free second-level education as a catalyst in every aspect of the radically changed Ireland in which we now live. Of course Whittaker was right: this was not the proper way to do it, and it is arguable that its precipitate introduction made it more costly than it would have been had a more orderly approach been taken. But O’Malley didn’t have the time for order. Sixteen months after the announcement, he was dead. While he couldn’t have known he was going to die at 47, he acted as if he did.

New ministers like O’Keeffe might take a leaf out of the O’Malley book, battering through the bureaucracy as if they had but a short time to live, a short time to change things for the better, a short time in which to lay down a legacy.

Because the people who create the systems of the future tend to reject, rather than respect, the systems of the present.