Ministers should be exercised about Reilly’s perceived bias

WHAT does it say about our political system when the minister who publicly rails against cronyism, and raises concerns about the failure of government to deliver its pre-election promises, is the one being treated like a pariah by her colleagues?

Speaking in Mar 2011, following the publication of the final report of the Moriarty Tribunal, Taoiseach Enda Kenny gave a fiery speech to the House in which he extolled the long ignored merits of ethics and probity and lambasted the culture of “arrogant, mercenary and immoral politics that almost ruined [the country]”.

Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore was also a firebrand on the subject, telling delegates at this year’s Labour party conference, “the surest way to keep corruption at bay is to lead a new kind of politics in our country. Politics with one single, unwavering principle: to serve the people, all of the people, and only the people.”

One would have thought, considering their impassioned pleas for a new kind of politics, both men would be aghast by the revelation that Health Minister James Reilly intervened to ensure two towns in his constituency mysteriously leapfrogged onto a priority list of primary care centres.

Strangely, Mr Gilmore, at least, seems entirely nonplussed by the disclosure and, on Monday, declared himself to be “satisfied the decision was taken on a balanced basis” and was insistent a “variety of criteria were taken into account”, although, he failed to reveal if one of those criteria was geography.

Minister of State at the Department of Health, Róisín Shortall, had drawn up the original list using the metric of economic deprivation to determine which areas were most in need of primary care teams, but the reason that she settled on this grading mechanism hasn’t yet been expounded on.

A 2001 report by the Institute of Public Health, entitled Inequalities in Mortality, collated half a million deaths in Ireland between 1989 and 1998 and found, shockingly, that the mortality rate for the poorest in society was 100% to 200% higher than the rate for the richest.

So, for example, that translated as a 120% higher mortality rate from circulatory diseases, 100% higher for all kinds of cancer, 200% higher for respiratory diseases and 150% higher for injuries and poisonings.

The difference, when it came to mental and behavioural disorders, was an incredible 1584% while mortality rates from alcohol and drug abuse were found to be, respectively, 1689% and 1589% higher.

Ruth Barrington, a former director of the Health Research Bureau and a current VHI board member, in a 2004 report entitled Poverty is bad for your Health, estimated that more than 5,400 people die prematurely every year because of inequality.

“If the public was fully aware of the burden of preventable illness and premature death borne disproportionately by those on low incomes in our society, and if there were a coherent set of initiatives to address the problem, it is hard to believe that it would not motivate sufficient people to want to do something about it,” she concluded.

One imagines that Ms Barrington is today feeling pretty pessimistic about her previously expressed faith in humanity considering the eagerness of the Health Minister, who has all of the scarifying statistics at his fingertips, to blithely dismiss deprivation as just one “narrow criteria” with which to delineate services.

Instead, Mr Reilly preferred to rely on other, more nebulous, factors, like advice from the department, the HSE and his ministerial colleagues — although, how his colleagues are remotely qualified to assign health services to specific areas remains another baffling mystery.

Maybe they were all playing a rather convoluted game of pin the tail on the donkey at one of their more boisterous cabinet meetings and, hey presto, the revised list was the result. Or perhaps its creation involved a particularly high-stakes game of rock, paper, scissors. One Fine Gael TD who did talk long and hard with the minister about the list was Frank Feighan whose own career was, sadly, looking pretty precarious after the party reneged on a pre-election promise to retain emergency services at Roscommon County Hospital.

One imagines he’s now feeling much more upbeat about his political future after the minister managed to include Boyle and Ballaghaderreen in the priority list — after both towns leapfrogged at least 200 other locations.

Whatever about the decidedly opaque manner in which Mr Reilly devised the additional sites to add to Ms Shortall’s original list, one thing that is certainly crystal clear is that he doesn’t give a toss about anything as trifling as mere public perception.

In an extraordinarily bullish interview on RTE’s News at One on Friday, Mr Reilly was adamant that he had absolutely no regrets about his actions and said he had the authority to do whatever he liked before, as jaws presumably dropped all over the country, deciding to embark on a party political broadcast and tell his constituents in Balbriggan and Swords that their health centres were as good as built.

While Mr Reilly and Mr Gilmore can’t see anything wrong with a Minister cynically using his office to unfairly advantage his own constituency, when the interference could literally mean the difference between life and death for people, at least Transport Minister Leo Varadkar’s moral compass is more finely attuned.

Disproving the truism that politicians are unable to give a straight answer to a straight question, he intervened in the row on Sunday to rather bluntly state that Mr Reilly’s dubious actions looked like stroke politics and he wanted to know more about the selection process — comments that make Ms Shortall’s isolation, within her own party especially, even harder to understand.

IF Mr Varadkar, with whom the only thing most Labour party members have in common is a pulse, can see the obvious conflict of interest in the minister’s actions then why has Eamon Gilmore, lemming like, rushed to publicly declare that he retains his full support?

Politicians’ predilections for abandoning their principles when its most personally advantageous is nothing new but, ultimately, isn’t it in the Labour party’s best interest to demand accountability when it appears that the old discredited culture of cronyism is creeping back into the cabinet? Mr Reilly may arrogantly trumpet that he’s the minister, and can do whatever the hell he likes, but Ms Shortall was given a particular job to do within the department and will ultimately be held responsible for the success, or failure, of the scheme.

Therefore, her insistence that primary care centres be provided in a transparent way, and in a manner that will most benefit the most needy in society, seems entirely reasonable.

This administration swept to power citing a change agenda, but its term has instead been notable for embarrassing climb-downs and equivocation. Mr Reilly’s conversion to clientalism is just the latest example of this.

Instead of excoriating Ms Shortall for having the temerity to question the minister’s motives it seems to me that her cabinet colleagues should be far more worried about the extremely damaging impact of Mr Reilly’s perceived bias and demand that he clarify his reasons for so crudely amending the original list.