From top: Tanaiste Leo Varadkar on the RTÉ Six-One news last Friday; Eamonn Kelly

The week that was

The Merrion Hotel gathering dominated the news last week, along with the Olympics, where we learned it is not okay to thump a horse, but it’s thrillingly admirable to thump a female Brazilian boxer as a means of bringing home the gold.

It was an uncomfortable week too for the political class who went to ground, putting their heads together to devise some good excuses to explain the gathering in the Merrion Hotel, held to celebrate the almost successful crony bid to appoint Katherine Zappone into a UN position.

Leo Varadkar eventually emerged with a fresh haircut to appear on RTÉ news to explain, in his usual pass-the-buck way, why, as minister, he had somehow failed to alert the entire hospitality sector of the fact that it was now okay to host outdoor gatherings of up to 200 hundred people.

Blame

You would imagine that a minister for enterprise, trade and employment would be working night and day to ensure that the hospitality sector was kept up to speed on the changing interpretations of covid restrictions pertaining to social gatherings.

But somehow, in his RTÉ apology, Leo managed to blame the public for being “confused” about the guidelines, rather than blaming himself for confusing them. He even blamed the guidelines themselves for being unclear, despite the fact that he is the one who is supposed to make them clear.

He also blamed Sinn Féin for attempting to capitalise on the scandal by wrongfully suggesting that he, personally, actually drew up the covid directives for the hospitality sector; conveniently ignoring the fact that regardless of who draws up the actual details of the directives, it surely falls to the minister to be up to speed on the current interpretation of those directives, in order to relay this information, as quickly and as clearly as possible, to the sectors he represents.

A Simple Plan

Somewhere in the bowels of power a plan was hatched to have the attorney general interpret government legislation to forgive the Merrion gathering, and Leo assured us on RTÉ that the Failte guidelines were also “probably” rightfully observed too, somehow managing to give the impression that he too was a victim of his own failure as minister to offer clarity to the public on covid restrictions. This particular slice of fudge made it difficult to decide whether to commiserate with him or request his resignation.

When he did finally apologise, he apologised, not for confusing the entire hospitality sector and costing them potential millions, but for attending the Merrion gathering (the more the Merrion) which, he was quick to point out, was actually legal after all, thanks to the attorney general’s intervention, making it seem like there was actually nothing to apologise for and that the whole thing was really Sinn Féin’s fault for framing it as a “problem”.

This is a familiar song sung by this particular minister when he gets into potential resigning difficulties, which he manages to do quite regularly, making him seem unusually accident-prone. He casts around for someone to blame, and fudges the facts until he somehow ends up portrayed as a victim of circumstance, confusion and Sinn Féin.

Clarity and Fudge

On this occasion, the RTÉ apology demonstrated why the covid guidelines aren’t clear and why the public is “confused”. The lack of clarity is because Leo doesn’t do clarity, he does fudge, and he does it so well that he apparently can’t turn it off, even when he intends to be clear; resulting in the lack of clarity in defining covid guidelines for the benefit of the hospitality sector: an inadvertent fudging that had the effect of putting him in a pickle once again, where his only solution was to produce more fudge.

If the Merrion gathering wasn’t illegal, why then did the minister for enterprise, trade and employment, not immediately shout it from the rooftops to a struggling sector that it was now legal to host outdoor gatherings of up to 200 people?

Either he didn’t know, which means he wasn’t on the ball as minister; or, the interpretation of legality by the AG was politically motivated, as many suggest, and the Merrion gathering was illegal after all.

Whichever way you look at it, the failure is the minister’s.

He was either being elitist in placing himself above the law by attending the Merrion gathering; or he was incompetent in his role as minister for trade, enterprise and employment, by failing to clearly communicate beneficial changes in covid directives to the hospitality sector.

Integrity

Unfortunately, and ironically, all of this is likely to be over-shadowed by Portland Row’s Kellie Harrington’s brilliant, against-all-odds, gold medal win at the Olympics, which will likely serve as a smokescreen for another resignation situation to be successfully evaded by Leo.

But congratulations to Kellie on her gold medal win. And congratulations to her also for managing to punch her way out of Irish working-class obscurity, in a rigged socio-political system where the privileged elite, time and again, lily-liver their way out of accountability for their corruption and incompetence.

In his failure to stand accountable for his responsibilities as minister, both in this case and in previous political controversies, Leo Varadkar continually demonstrates, for anyone who cares to see, the manner in which elitist political cheats cheat us all.

Eamonn Kelly is a Galway-based  freelance Writer and Playwright. His weekly round-up appears here every Monday.

Previously: Eamonn Kelly on Broadsheet

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