So, when is a U-turn not a U-turn, Dr Reilly?

DISABLED people are valued and respected by the Taoiseach and his Health Minister — but only as long as they are in London winning medals at the Paralympics, and not making a nuisance of themselves at home by demanding basic levels of dignity.

Enda Kenny has spent the week banging off messages of congratulations to gold, silver, and bronze medallists at Olympic Park in Stratford, gushing about how “fantastic” the disabled competitors are and how the nation “cherishes” their achievements.

If James Reilly’s cack-handed €10m personal assistance care cuts had gone through, would congratulatory messages have gone out from Government Buildings to vulnerable and elderly people in Tipperary or Clare thanking them for remaining in soiled adult nappies for several hours because there was no one available to help them anymore? Because that would have been the grim reality of the cuts that were so cavalierly imposed by the Coalition.

It took an all-night demonstration by disabled people distraught at the threat of having a semi-independent life snatched away from them to make ministers change their mind.

But, arrogant to the last, Reilly insists no such U-turn has occurred.

When is a U-turn not a U-turn, Dr Reilly?

Oh yes, when it’s a complete shambolic carnival of confusion and chaos of your own making.

And in the contorted world of Enda Through The Looking Glass, the Taoiseach praised Reilly’s “courage” for reversing the cuts — but strangely there was no mention of Reilly’s stupidity for imposing them to begin with.

“He is to be admired for doing so quickly and effectively and ending the confusion and fear,” Mr Kenny announced to bemused onlookers.

Erm, Reilly’s the one that sparked the confusion and fear in the first place Enda.

As foul-mouthed spin doctor extraordinaire from BBC’s The Thick Of It, Malcolm Tucker would no doubt put it if he saw Kenny and Reilly approaching him: “Laurel and fucking Hardy! Glad you could join us. Did you manage to get that piano up the stairs OK?”

And this from the same Fine Gael and Labour parties who routinely lambasted the “cruelty” of the Fianna Fáil/Green administration for lashing out at the most needy in society when emergency cuts were plucked out of the air, and for being unable to communicate a coherent message as to why such measures were necessary.

The drive-by contempt of the personal assistance cuts is merely one aspect of the mess, as €17m worth of frontline cuts in areas like home helpers are still being rammed through.

If the Coalition can make such a fine mess of finding a relatively pilfering €27m worth of cuts, we can only imagine with fear the omni-shambles rolling towards us as they slash public spending by €2.3bn in the run-up to the December Budget.

How quickly Fine Gael has morphed into the arrogance of Fianna Fáil, and Labour the irrelevance of the Greens.

Brendan Howlin, the Minister for Smugness, sorry, Public Sector Reform, even insisted this week that the cuts were a matter for the HSE, not the Government.

Yes, the very same Howlin, from the very same Labour Party that used to rail against Mary Harney for “disassociation” from whatever mess she had got the health service into that particular week by hiding behind the HSE.

But then one of Reilly’s very first decisions as Health Minister was to re-hire Harney’s spin doctor — so much for the “new politics”.

Not that Reilly should ever have been appointed Health Minister in a functioning democracy anyway.

Regardless of his abilities, or otherwise, for the job, there is a clear conflict of interest in someone having investments in a private care home and also presiding over the closure of hundreds of public care beds.

Reilly says he tried to get rid of the investments, but he clearly did not try hard enough, as he still has them, and that has led to the other reason why he should not be a Cabinet minister — he has been named and shamed as a debtor in Stubbs Gazette and failed to comply with a High Court order.

How can the Cabinet have any moral authority, or insist that “the little people” pay all they owe and respect the law when one of the most important ministers is a debtor and ignoring one of the highest courts in the land?

Even if Reilly was doing a good job, it would be totally inappropriate for him to remain a minister, but because Fianna Fáil is such a poor excuse for an opposition, because Labour is so spineless within the Coalition, and because Mr Kenny needs him as a human shield against future heaves, there he stays.

Reilly left it to officials to slip out the cuts nine days ago, appeared briefly for a few minutes the next day, then went into hiding until his deeply unimpressive appearance on Prime Time on Thursday.

The Taoiseach breathlessly messaged the Paralympics last Monday, stating: “You are a credit to Team Ireland and your families, and I look forward to a fantastic week to come.”

That “fantastic week to come” saw disabled people forced into their own endurance event at the gates of Government Buildings where they fought as emphatically as Katie Taylor for their rights to be treated with dignity and consideration.

They did not get a gold medal, just a partial climb-down allowing them to keep some of the basic levels of help that allow them to live semi-independently at a fraction of the cost to the taxpayer that being shunted back into care homes would require.

Reilly has not just shown himself to be unable to cut with compassion, but also unable to communicate at all.

In fact, as Mr Tucker would put it: “He’s like a clown running across a minefield.”