Ministers allocated funds exactly the way their voters would expect

SO, ANOTHER political scandal.

According to the radio over the weekend, and some newspapers since, two ministers succeeded in persuading the minister for health to fast track projects in their constituencies.

In Brendan Howlin’s case it was an upgrade to Wexford General Hospital, and in Phil Hogan’s case the upgrade was to St Lukes Hospital in Kilkenny.

Inquiries are to be demanded, and there is anger and concern among opposition deputies. The Fianna Fáil spokesperson on health, Billy Kelleher, described the revelations as disturbing. In fact, in one of the most delightful sentences you’ll read anywhere this year, this newspaper yesterday reported Mr Kelleher as saying “Quite clearly the Minister for Health and other Ministers see the HSE capital budget as a slush fund for electoral gain”.

It really would make you long for the days of someone like, say, Abraham Lincoln, a man of the highest principle, a man who would never compromise his values for political gain.

Oh wait, hang on a second. As the movie Lincoln makes clear (and what a brilliant movie it is, by the way) Honest Abe was perfectly capable of using any skullduggery he considered necessary to achieve his objectives.

He bought votes, he exerted immense pressure on people, he blackmailed where necessary to change people’s minds, he kept his cabinet in the dark about some of the things he was doing, and he was, in the elegant phrase, economical with the truth. Of course, he did all this to try to bring slavery to an end — surely the highest moral purpose imaginable. And he made no bones whatever about the fact that in this case, the end justified the means.

Abraham Lincoln would, I’m thinking, have found it very hard to survive modern scrutiny. Luckily for the whole world, he succeeded, and his place in world history is secure.

Of course, there’s no comparison whatever between the ending of slavery and the pursuit of constituency advantage. But equally, there’s no doubt that if this weekend we had discovered that Phil Hogan and Brendan Howlin had passed up an opportunity to copper-fasten already planned and needed improvements in their local hospitals, both ministers would be under extraordinary pressure as a result.

Here’s a cautionary tale. When Dick Spring became Tánaiste at the end of 1982, he had high ambitions. He chose to be Minister for the Environment because he wanted to do something about local authority housing. To ensure that he could really make a difference, he insisted in the negotiations on the programme for government that there would be a contingency fund of £100m in the department’s budget. (They were the days that £100m was an awful lot of money.)

When he arrived in the department, however, it was a different story. Not only was there no possibility of a contingency fund, the department was effectively bankrupt, as was the country. Within days he was confronted with the possibility that 4,000 local authority workers would have to be laid off unless he agreed to the imposition of local authority service charges.

For the next four years of that government, Dick Spring and his colleagues struggled with an economic crisis of immense proportions. Stagnant growth, high unemployment, record emigration and mounting debt were just a few of the problems. Side by side with that, they grappled with the worst of the troubles in Northern Ireland. They came into office in the aftermath of the H-Block deaths, and left after concluding the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985. They dealt with the start of all our abortion controversies, and they tried and failed to introduce divorce, in several bitterly divisive referendums. But the one single issue that probably consumed more of Dick Spring’s time and effort, and that bedevilled his first term as Tánaiste, was Kingdom Tubes.

Kingdom Tubes was a Tralee company, started through German investment in 1960 to manufacture tubes — plastic and metal. It employed around 300 people, and had always been regarded as a steady and reliable employer. It got into difficulty because of trouble in the German market, and its closure was announced in the same month that Dick Spring became Tánaiste.

In short, Spring had no responsibility for whatever troubles had forced the closure of the company. But the people of Kerry, and especially Tralee, were having no truck with that. Led by the local trade union officials, and supported (naturally) by such doughty opposition members as Tom McEllistrim of Fianna Fáil, the demand grew that he would personally save the plant, and if that wasn’t possible, that he would provide something identical in its place, in the teeth of a national and international recession.

If Spring could have, he would have. If there was any public investment capable of being fast-tracked to the Kerry region, it was. The IDA’s life was made miserable by the Tánaiste’s office in the search for replacement jobs. Public meeting after public meeting in the town piled on the pressure.

It was to no avail. Four years later, after endless unremitting work on behalf of the constituency and the country, the first Tánaiste Kerry ever elected hung onto his seat by the skin of his teeth.

I’m not saying that this is the way things ought to be. It just the way things are. When we — Irish voters — elect a TD, we expect them to work for us. If we’re lucky enough that one of those TDs becomes a member of the Cabinet, we don’t feel any sense of extra honour. We just feel they need to deliver more.

OBJECTIVELY speaking, the health capital programme, just like any other investment by Government, ought to be allocated by reference to greatest need and transparent priorities. Constituency pressures ought not to play a part, unless everything else is equal (and it almost never is).

But they do. The minister who insists on everything being above board and utterly transparent gets admired by the media for a day and a half, and is then forgotten. The minister who lets his constituency down is punished — and the punishment sometimes never ends.

If you want to change that, you have to change the entire system. We give out constantly in Ireland about the constituency system and how it discriminates. But we also want access to our TDs. We want to know them by their first names. We want them to be there when we need them. And we want them to deliver for us, because we elected them.

There are times when none of that works in the broader national interest. There are many other times when there is no conflict whatever. If the presence of a minister results in extra houses being built, or schools or hospitals getting upgraded, that’s only a bad thing if other areas are egregiously neglected. The reality is that neglect can and does happen. That’s why the system has to be changed. The dilemma is that only we the people can change it. Who was it who once said that democracy is the worst possible system — apart, of course, from all the others?