Terry Prone: His authenticity is entertaining but Robert Watt is not an entertainer

The one thing Robert Watt delivered in front of the Oireachtas committee was authenticity. He didn’t pretend not to be the combative personality he is.

SOMETHING happened to Dublin’s traffic on Thursday afternoon. It stopped and stayed stopped. 

After 20 static minutes on one road to the port tunnel, I followed the example of several other drivers, U-turned and went further into town. This availed me nothing. 

I found myself parked, engine off, surrounded by other cars, buses, and vans, going nowhere. But I had a laptop and could work.

Then my car was hit by something that rocked it on its wheels. Not fore or aft. The assault came from above. It was as if someone had dropped a small horse on the roof. Or maybe two small horses, because whatever had landed then had a screaming match, so it had to be plural.

Not only did the surrounding drivers enjoy this tremendously, but several of them gave me thumbs up as if I deserved credit for providing the entertainment.

I half-rolled down my window in response to a man in an old Saab rolling down his. “Seagulls,” he explained. I quickly rolled the window back up. If there’s one thing I don’t need to see, it’s the concentrated evil of a seagull’s face in close-up.

Only when I got the engine started and prepared to move under a reasonably low bridge (the one new bus drivers occasionally and unsuccessfully challenge with double-deckers) did the two combatants fly off.

When I eventually arrived home, I discovered a natural law applying to seagulls and possibly other contentious birds. They defecate in battle. For all we know, this is part of the battle.

As a result, the roof was thick with birdshit, some of which had dripped down the windows the way a lemon drizzle cake is decorated. But that wasn’t the worst. 

When I got into my house, I found that every window, right around the building, was coincidentally decorated from the outside with more of the stuff. Between the car and the windows, I had enough guano to fertilise a decent-sized farm.

It was at that point that the radio broadcast Leo Varadkar’s smackdown of Robert Watt. 

You will remember that Watt — the most senior civil servant at the Department of Health — didn’t think much of the 20 or so recommendations in the independent report into the proposed secondment of former chief medical officer Tony Holohan to Trinity College Dublin and made it clear to an Oireachtas finance committee that he had damn all intention of implementing them.

Leo Varadkar has said that Robert Watt, as a civil servant, is expected to implement the recommendations.

Varadkar wasn’t having any of that. In a scrupulously unemotional soundbite he explained that the Government view was what mattered here, that the Government had bought into the recommendations and he was sure Watt, as a civil servant, would implement each and every one of them.

Yet another slam dunk for an Oireachtas committee. Such committees are widely regarded, particularly by their members, as exemplars of democracy at its best.

They come, those committees, clothed in past glory. Older people remember a committee that helped expose some early bank scandal.

But rigorous examination of the performance of most of the committees tends not to produce many comparable examples subsequent to that. 

What the committees do, mostly, is afford their more vociferous and necessarily opposition members a platform to access dozens of other platforms with outraged soundbites — here’s one they cooked up a little earlier.

The questioning — as evidenced in the Robert Watt appearance — tends to be emotive and pejorative rather than carefully sequenced to reveal the whole truth of any issue.

Not infrequently, that questioning has become frankly and personally abusive to the representative of a government department, a public service body, or a charity. That is hugely productive for the politician doing it. Great for social media and early morning mainstream media headlines with consequent invitations from Morning Ireland, Clare Byrne, and Pat Kenny.

But it does tend to create a sense, among those potentially in receipt of a request to attend, that they’re being asked to participate in the equivalent of the seagull-fight on the roof of my car. Defecation and all.

Those who have the choice may — and do — refuse point blank. Those who have no choice often attend marinaded in resentment and fear, believing the main purpose of the politicians present is to damage their personal reputations and those of the organisations or departments they run.

It’s fair to assume that the secretary general of the Department of Health belongs in the second group.

He had no choice but to pitch up, so pitch up he did. But, a bit like a relative turning up to a First Holy Communion without an envelope stuffed with legal tender, he arrived minus an opening statement.

Oireachtas committee opening statements tend to have the limpid fluency of setting cement, to be so peppered with bureaucratese as to be understandable only on the fourth reading, and to be as subtle as a thrown brick in their attempt to pre-empt all criticism and posit the proposition that God’s in her heaven and all’s well with their particular world.

Robert Watt skipped all of that. Did he get a vote of thanks? Are you kidding?

It greatly irked members of the committee, possibly because traditional opening statements allow committee members to get their heads and papers together.

They found themselves in a situation akin to schoolteachers expecting homework who encounter a student who can’t even be arsed to claim that the dog ate it.

Watt just arrived and looked at them. When the committee members rallied and asked questions, he answered them. That said, one fact is indisputable: He was not amending his beliefs or personality in any way to please either the committee, the observing media, or those watching the TV feed.

This wasn’t Robert Watt, buffed and de-horned for likeability purposes. This was Robert Watt, red in tooth and claw, without smarm or charm. Indeed, some would hold, without much of the civility expected of a senior civil servant. But he was authentic. Of that, there can be no doubt.

A kind of national consensus suggests that authenticity is what we all want. We particularly want authenticity in our politicians and in our civil and public servants. Well, consider this. 

The one thing Robert Watt delivered in front of the Oireachtas committee was authenticity. He didn’t pretend not to be the combative personality he is.

Yet this very authenticity enraged the TDs and turned most commentators off.

For those who deal with him on a daily basis, the reality is that this is how he operates. They knew it beforehand. They just had it confirmed in front of the committee.

One of them anonymously told Jack Horgan-Jones of The Irish Times, that behind the scenes, Watt is exactly the same as he was in the Oireachtas “but with more bad language”.

Watt’s inflammatory authenticity is highly entertaining. The problem is, he’s not an entertainer. A more contained return match might benefit the committee, the general public — and Mr Watt.