Governing behind closed doors no longer acceptable, it’s not even clever

DEAR Taoiseach and Tánaiste, You probably don’t need me to tell you that this whole Reilly business is a terrible mess.

It has cost you one of your best Ministers of State.

It has undermined the entire credibility of the Government.

It has driven an unnecessary wedge between the two parties in government. It has given Fianna Fáil, of all parties, the chance to occupy (however precariously) a bit of high moral ground in relation to the issue of clientilism and stroke politics.

That’s some achievement! It’s likely to go on and on. And maybe the worst feature of the whole thing is that it has made the new politics look very like the old politics.

There’s every chance that in a year or so, people will look back on the controversy of the last few weeks and wonder what the hell it was all about. But there’s equally every chance that they’ll look back and realise it was a turning point in the life of the Government.

I certainly had a moment of déjà vu during the week, when I heard you, Tánaiste, telling the Dáil last Thursday you had met the Secretary General of the Department of Health, together with the head of the HSE, to get confirmation that what the Minister for Health was telling you was true.

It brought me back immediately to another controversy, back in 1994, when it was suggested that Irish passports had been given to a wealthy Arab family called Masri in return for a large investment in the petfood firm of the then Taoiseach, Albert Reynolds.

Dick Spring was Albert Reynolds’ Tánaiste at the time. In an effort to deal with the widespread assumption that Reynolds had benefited from the sale of Irish passports, he asked to see the Minister for Justice and the Secretary of the Department, and established from them that nothing untoward had happened in relation to the issue of the passports. No representations had been made by Reynolds or on his behalf.

Dick Spring’s assertions to the Dáil at the time drew a pretty dusty response from the opposition. Deputy Michael McDowell (remember him?) referred to the entire episode as squalid, and described Dick Spring as “morally brain-dead”. To make matters worse, Spring’s efforts to reform the “passports for sale” scheme were repudiated by Reynolds himself.

It’s worth noting, of course, that no evidence ever emerged that there was any corruption in that transaction. To this day, there is no reason to believe that Albert Reynolds was guilty of any impropriety surrounding the issue of those passports, even though he undoubtedly benefited from the investment made.

But that’s not really the point. That incident was a turning point in the life of that government because it was a moment when the Tánaiste realised he couldn’t take the Taoiseach’s word at face value. It was the first moment of mistrust, and that mistrust ultimately destroyed that government.

I’m not saying the current situation is entirely the same. It may just be the case that both of you, Taoiseach and Tánaiste together, came to the conclusion that the minister was incapable of digging himself out of his own mess.

After all, you may both have listened to the debate in the Dáil the night before, when Minister Reilly summed up the decision-making process with the following piece of pure gibberish: “I have laid out the criteria for the deputy three or four times. The criteria are quite extensive and because all of them act in different ways it is a bit like a multiplier. One and one makes two and two and two makes four but four by four makes 16 and not four and four which makes eight, and so it is with this. It is a logistical logarithmic progression. There is nothing simple about it.”

Anyone who approaches a political crisis with a summation like that clearly needs all the help he can get. Indeed, apart from all the other considerations, if that’s the way he chooses to express himself, at precisely the moment he needs to be offering reassurance, you could well conclude that he is more of a liability than an asset.

But there is a bigger picture to all this. It comes back to what I said at the start. This affair makes the new politics look like the old politics. Whatever about the substance, if you keep going on in this style it will simply tarnish the entire Government, and make it impossible to maintain unity in the face of really difficult decisions up ahead.

I know both of you are taking a long view — in a sense, you’re both gambling your political futures on the prospect of economic recovery two or three years from now. But you should remember Albert Reynolds for another reason too — his famous expression — “it’s the little things that trip you up”.

Albert Reynolds’s first mistake was to fail to recognise that when you talk about transparency, you have to mean it. I believe you need to accept what the Reilly affair offers you both is an opportunity, to really make a change to new politics. Out of this mess, make transparency meaningful.

Accepting, publicly and privately, that the reason this entire business of primary care clinics got out of hand was because it was done behind closed doors. That’s not what you promised us in the programme for government.

THERE is page after page in that document about political reform, and it’s all underpinned by a spirit of change. You referred to it in the opening line of the programme, when you talked about the democratic revolution represented by the election.

You said, very specifically, “But the old ways, the old politics that created the crisis from which we seek to release ourselves from, will not do … With this in mind new ways, new approaches and new thinking will form the constant backdrop to the coalition’s style of governance.

“In all the major areas of public life this determination to modernise, renew and transform our country will be evident over time …”

In the technological age it’s actually easy to put everything online, and to do it in advance of making decisions. The criteria for selection, the evidence base, even all the representations made — everything can be published.

People can know not just what decisions are made, but how they’re made. Smaller organisations, without a fraction of your resources, do it all the time.

All you have to do is decide that in future, transparency is going to mean what it says. If there is one lesson from the Reilly affair, it is surely that trying to govern behind closed doors is simply no longer acceptable. And it’s not even clever.

But you both knew all that before you took office. It’s what you meant when you talked about the things the Irish people wouldn’t accept any more. It’s time you put those principles into real and lasting effect. As you said yourselves in the programme for government, there isn’t a moment to be lost. And you’ve already lost too many.