Tag Archives: Mooney on Monday

From top: Russian President Vladimir Putin during the G8 summit at the Lough Erne golf resort in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland in 2013; Dertek Mooney.

The most ridiculous and obsolete phrase you will hear in any Irish debate or discussion of the Ukrainian crisis is “… but Putin has a point.”  It is rarely uttered in isolation, but rather as the curt follow-up to an insipid denunciation of Putin’s blatant aggression. Suggesting that while Putin is doing the wrong thing, he may have understandable motives.

This is utter nonsense. The notion that Putin’s threat to his smaller western neighbour has anything to do with NATO or the prospect of Ukrainian NATO membership is absurd. There has been no major expansion of NATO membership in recent years, indeed only two counties have joined NATO since late 2009 and both of those are well over 1400Km south west of Ukraine’s western border: Montenegro in 2017 and North Macedonia in 2020.

The biggest expansion in NATO’s membership happened back in 1999 and 2004 when ten countries, including three Baltic states that were once part of the Soviet Union and several former Warsaw Pact states, joined.

Are we to believe that Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was so distressed by this 2004 move that it has taken him 18 years to regain his composure and respond?

In reality, the threat to Ukraine has nothing to do with the possibility of NATO membership and has everything to do with that country’s very gradual, even faltering, emergence as a modern democracy that looks to the West, not its overbearing eastern neighbour.

There are other factors too. Not least of these is the long-running dispute over the Russian gas pipelines that stretch across Ukraine carrying much of Europe’s natural gas. Ukraine has been charging higher and higher transit fees, so much so that Russia has developed Nord Stream 2 a 1,200-kilometre undersea pipeline from Russia to Germany. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky called Nord Stream 2 “a dangerous political weapon”. Others agree, though not the German government, which is heavily dependent on Russian natural gas.

Putin’s NATO expansion claims and fears are bogus. They are a deflection. An effort to conceal the real purpose by diverting attention to a fake one. It is just one tactic, one of the smoke and mirrors ploys from the Soviet era Maskirovka military handbook. Maskirovka loosely translates as “something masked”, well-practised deceptions that include the infamous: false flag.

We see this in operation this week as official Kremlin approved media repeat the ludicrous claim by Putin’s Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov that: “Russia has never attacked anyone over the course of all its history”. This will come as news to the Hungarians (1956), Czechs and Slovaks (1968) and Lithuanians (1991), to mention a few.

The same Putin approved media outlets claim that Russian the build-up, by land and sea, around Ukraine is only to protect the pro-Russian residents of the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine from alleged shelling attacks from the Ukrainian military. So the Putin logic is that Russia is ready to reluctantly invade Ukraine to stop Ukraine from invading Ukraine? This includes a Russian military build-up along the Belarus/Ukraine border, which up to 1000km away from Donbass, but only 200km from Kyiv.

The false flag is one of Putin’s favourite political tactics. Indeed, he may possibly  owe his tight and long-lasting grip on high office to a vicious and blood curdling false flag operation. A false flag that is said to have been perpetrated against Russian civilians. A false flag that very few of those who imagine “Putin has a point” might care to acknowledge.

One of the great question marks about Putin’s meteoric political ascent at the very end of 1990s was: why him? Where did he come from and how did a former secret service boss with no previous political experience or history emerge as Boris Yeltin’s final Prime Minister and his chosen successor as President?

By late 1998, a year before Putin’s nomination as Prime Minister, Yeltsin’s presidency seemed doomed. It was beset by a wave of domestic and international scandals, including accusations that members of his family had accepted kickbacks from a Swiss construction company. Yeltsin’s Kremlin was losing political ground to a new political alliance centred on former Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov and Moscow Mayor, Yuri Luzhkov.

It was a war, with Chechnya, which enabled Yeltsin to seize back the initiative. On August 7, 1999, 2,000 assorted Chechen, Dagestani, Arab and Wahhabist militants invaded Dagestan. On 9 August 1999, President Yeltsin nominated Putin as one of three First Deputy Prime Ministers and acting Prime Minister of the Government. Putin had just served 5 months as Secretary of the Security Council, and barely a year as Director of the Federal Security Service, the FSB, the successor agency to the KGB.

Less than one month later, between September 4-16, explosions destroyed four apartment blocks in Moscow, Buynaksk, and Volgodonsk. The bombings, which targeted innocent civilians, killing more than 300 and injuring well over a 1000, rocked Russia.

Putin, who was still not well known to the wider Russian public, acted decisively and firmly. He quickly blamed the bombings on Chechen rebels. He vowed swift and immediate revenge and assumed personal direction of the attack that was to become known as the Second Chechen War.

Things were now happening fast in the Kremlin. As Putin pursued his military action against the Chechen rebels, Yeltsin announced on December 31 that he was resigning immediately as President, six months before the end of his term, and that Putin would succeed as acting President.

Within hours Putin had signed a presidential decree granting Yeltsin and his family immunity from any corruption or bribery investigations. He later granted similar immunity to Oligarchs who had prospered corruptly under Yeltsin.

Putin, who by now had become immensely popular for his firm resolve, seized the political initiative. The Presidential election planned for June 2000 was brought forward to March and Putin, a political unknown only two years earlier, was elected with 53% of the vote.

As David Satter, an author and Russia scholar has set out very many times in various articles and books and in testimony to the US Congress House Foreign Affairs committee; from the very start there were doubts in Russia about who planted the bombs.

Yeltsin’s political opponents, who had thought themselves poised to take power at the June 2000 election immediately suspected that the whole thing was a false flag calculated to protect Yeltsin and his entourage by ensuring that Putin, who would protect Yeltsin, succeeded him.

There was more than just their misgivings fuelling the doubt. Within days of the four apartment block bombs exploding, a fifth unexploded bomb was found in another Moscow apartment block. Though initially thought to be the work of the same Chechen terrorists, local police quickly discovered had actually been planted by FSB agents.

Nikolai Patrushev, a Putin loyalist who had succeeded him as FSB head, eventually conceded that his men had planted the bomb, which he claimed was a fake, and insisted that it had been planted there as part of an FSB training exercise. A public training exercise carried out during a terrorist attack on Moscow?

It was not the only inconsistency. By March 2002, the Noviye Izvestiya learned that Gennady Seleznev, a supporter of Putin and speaker of the Duma (Russian Parliament) had announced news of the Volgodonsk bombing on September 13. Three days before that particular bomb exploded.

Many of the those who have worked over the years shed light on truth behind the apartment bombings, including Sergei Yushenkov, Yuri Shchekochikhin, Anna Politkovskaya, and Alexander Litvinenko have been murdered. And while we understandably focus on Putin’s threat to Ukraine, we risk forgetting that the latest in a long line of Putin political opponents, Alexei Navalny is once again on trial, after spending a year in a maximum-security prison.

So, where are the big public protests outside the Russian embassy? It seems that the peace protesters who can find their way to the US Embassy in Ballsbridge for an instantaneous protest… blindfolded… cannot locate the Russian Orwell Road compound. You’d imagine all the folks who usually organise those Ballsbridge protests might remember how to find their way back to Orwell Road?

Let’s hope the Russian Ambassador can find his way to Iveagh House to receive a well-earned carpeting if Russia does invade Ukraine. And that his is able to find his way back again there again in the event of cyber attacks on critical Irish infrastructure… assuming he hasn’t been sent home by then.

Derek Mooney is a communications and public affairs consultant. He previously served as a Ministerial Adviser to the Fianna Fáil-led government 2004 – 2010. His column appears here every Monday. Follow Derek on Twitter: @dsmooney

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From top: Leader of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) Jeffrey Donaldson (left) with Taoiseach Micheál Martin at Government Buildings in Dublin last August; Derek Mooney

The latest intrigues of Jeffrey Donaldson and the DUP bring to mind the adage:“You can get an awful sting from a dying bee.”

We may well be watching the final throes of Unionist ascendency as the DUP struggles to deal with a fraught situation entirely of its own making.

Last year’s celebration of Northern Ireland’s centenary reminded us how the net impact of five decades of Unionist rule was to undermine the very hegemony that brought it into existence. When Northern Ireland was established in 1921, around 62% identified as Protestant and 34% identified as Roman catholic. This figure remained steady up to the late 1960s when the proportion of Catholics began to increase.

By 2011, 41% were identifying as Catholic and just 42% identifying as Protestant share. A major shift. It was one of two shifts. The other was the emergence of a third category, one where people did not identify as being from either community background, a category that measured 17%.

A decade later, the June 2020 study, Political Attitudes at a Time of Flux, found that this “neither” category was now the biggest of the three categories of political identity, with almost 40% identifying as neither unionist nor nationalist.

Before I go any further let me explain that I dislike using the labels protestant/catholic when talking about political identity. It is a crude measure of political fealty, but you find yourself having no real alternative when trying to draw comparisons over time, especially in what was a sectarian state.

“Religion” matters in Northern Ireland as a pointer to community background, not theological principle. But not every Protestant is a unionist. No more than every Catholic backs reunification. Though this is not equally true.

Polling, especially pre-Brexit, has showed protestant support for the Union, at much higher levels (90%) than catholic support for Irish unity (55-60%). The already mentioned June 2020 study found that more Catholics now self-identify as strongly nationalist than previously. While eight out of 10 nationalists believe a United Ireland is more likely because of Brexit.

So, while the number of “other/neither” grows; the number of nationalists increases slightly and the number of unionists steadily dwindles, the variances in commitment to the Union with Britain should still mean that Northern Ireland’s place within the United Kingdom remains secure for a few more years.

But Unionism – particularly the Jim Allister’s TUV and Donaldson’s DUP – won’t accept Yes for an answer – especially when that Yes is dependent on non-unionists. Rather than recognising how their push for a purist Brexit might alienate those in the “neither” and “nationalist” categories who were content for the North to remain part of the UK, the TUV and DUP march backward in search of a long-disappeared supremacy.

Instead of pursuing a Brexit that can work for Northern Ireland they chose to hitch their wagon to the Eurosceptic rump of a United Kingdom which, as DUP MP, Ian Paisley Jr., told the House of Commons last Monday, is currently led by:

“…Conservative and Unionist party that governs this nation is actually an English nationalist party that is concerned not about a border in the Irish sea but about a red wall on the mainland island…”

The DUP, which we were once led to believe was a disciplined, savvy, and astute political party that ran rings around its rivals, now shows itself to be a naïve rabble. The party of Paisley Sr is so diminished that it both willing to believe any old lie, once delivered in Etonian or Harrovian tones, and ready to destroy anyone in its own ranks who dares to recognise that it’s not 1950 anymore.

The current leadership of DUP must realise, just as the such leaders of loyalism as David Ervine and David Adams grasped over three decades ago, that Northern Ireland is not as British as Finchley (to misquote Margaret Thatcher’s Nov, 1981, parliamentary speech).

Not even she believed that. Her Northern Ireland Secretary, Peter Brooke declared in 1990 that the Thatcher Government had “no selfish economic or strategic interest” in Northern Ireland and that should the majority vote for unification, they would consent.

Thus the idea that the Protocol creates an Irish Sea frontier that never previously existed, is a fiction. There has always been a constitutional and legal frontier down the Irish Sea. The 1801 Act of The Union gave Ireland a separate and autonomous Exchequer, Courts of Justice, and civil service. The 1921 partition of the island maintained Northern Ireland as a separate constitutional entity. Even the 1972 introduction of “direct rule” never integrated the Six Counties fully within the UK.

Northern Ireland has always been different. Ask anyone who has flown from London to Belfast. I am old enough to remember the separate boarding areas and security protocols at London airports for Ireland and Northern Ireland only.

The DUP knows this. Indeed it depended on this very separation to have its restrictive laws on abortion and gay marriage. All the Northern Ireland Protocol has done is to superimpose a new layer on an existing constitutional border. A layer that the EU still endeavours to make as gossamer-thin as possible.

So, just at the point when Northern Ireland is set to reap the benefit of a special status delivered by Dublin and Brussels, one that gives the province access to the UK and EU markets, the DUP concludes that delivering a boost to the North’s economy is not as important as satisfying its own hardliners.

Why now? Because the DUP now has the TUV doing to it; what it did to David Trimble’s UUP, post-Good Friday Agreement. It has learned nothing from its own lived history.

Neither has it grasped the basic truth that it cannot have both a hard-line Brexit and strong Union with Britain in a province that voted to remain in the EU. The DUP is refusing to face up to the changed reality of today’s Northern Ireland and see that they need the consent and support of those who voted Remain to keep Northern Ireland in the United Kingdom and that they must accept compromises on Brexit to keep the previous Union.

They act and speak as if the last 50+ years had never happened. Over the past few weeks we have had the political obscenity of Sir Jeffrey Donaldson corrupting the consent principle that underpins the Good Friday Agreement and attempting to re-writing consent to mean that nothing can happen in Northern Ireland until it has the majority consent of unionism alone.

So Donaldson’s consent moves from being “the consent of a majority of the people of Northern Ireland”, as set out six times in the text of the Good Friday Agreement, to being the consent of a majority of a minority. A unionist veto over the majority. Almost Verwoerdian.

This poses a major headache for Dublin and one that will go on for some time. The collapse of the Northern Ireland Executive is just a very poor first act of a play that we know is going to end badly for unionism.

The second and third acts, the May Assembly election, and the post-election drama as the DUP sees its grip on power slip further, will be painful to watch. Though Unionism may attempt to cobble together a pact to give it a claim to the first Minister’s post, the legislation is clear:

(4). The nominating officer of the largest political party of the largest political designation shall nominate a member of the Assembly to be the First Minister.

(5). The nominating officer of the largest political party of the second largest political designation shall nominate a member of the Assembly to be the deputy First Minister.

Though the posts of First and Deputy First have the same power and the deputy First Minister is not subordinate to the First Minister, the symbolism of the title is important. Ironically the Good Friday Agreement envisaged the first and deputy First Ministers being elected on a joint ticket, but that was changed at the St Andrews Agreement, at the behest of the DUP. They must now live with the consequences.

Thus, it is impossible to see any speedy return of the institutions post an Assembly election, especially one in which the DUP comes back with fewer MLAs than Sinn Féin. In 2017 the DUP won just one seat more than the Shinners with the two parties only 0.2% apart. The latest poll has Sinn Féin about 5% ahead of the DUP, though this gap was 8% a few months back..

How does Dublin handle a situation where the institutions are again down and where it has no reliable or trustworthy partner in London? The Good Friday Agreement works best when both governments work together in partnership and trust. No one can seriously claim that there is any trust in Boris Johnson.

It is only a few weeks since Johnson’s government tried unsuccessfully to change the Northern Ireland Electoral Acts to the DUP’s advantage by allowing MPs to run for the Assembly.

Each week Johnson makes ever louder threats to trigger Article 16 and upend the Northern Ireland Protocol – though Johnson has over hyped this as offering his hard-line Tory and DUP Brexiteer allies an immediate relief. A political happy ending.

In reality, Article 16 does not allow either party to suspend provisions of the protocol permanently or in their entirety, indeed all Article 16 does is to commence a period of negotiation – of around three months.

Added to all of this is the complicated political situation here and in London. A bad May local election could see the Tories move against Boris – not necessarily a bad result for those wanting to see the situation in the North calm down – but it will still set the process back.

June and July are never easy times in the North during a political vacuum. A difficult marching season in which Unionism still reeling after a bad Assembly result could leave the two governments waiting until September to get people back into the same room.

But that leaves only a very small window until the preparations start in Dublin for the handover from Taoiseach Martin back to Taoiseach (we assume) Varadkar.

Will that handover see Martin return to his beloved Department of Foreign Affairs as Tánaiste, replacing Simon Coveney? Who knows? If it doesn’t, it will leave Fianna Fáil with no input into Northern policy – a situation that could only gladden the likes of Sen Ned O’Sullivan.

It is therefore vital that the Irish government in the person on An Taoiseach  immediately state its position, in terms that cannot be misconstrued or misinterpreted in the run up to the December changeover. A clear and unambiguous statement that firmly commits itself to the principles of the Good Friday Agreement and to getting the Institutions back up and running speedily.

Simply saying we are concerned, even deeply concerned, won’t be enough.

Derek Mooney is a communications and public affairs consultant. He previously served as a Ministerial Adviser to the Fianna Fáil-led government 2004 – 2010. His column appears here every Monday. Follow Derek on Twitter: @dsmooney

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From top Minister for Foreign Affairs Simon Coveney; Derek Mooney

After a decade of defence issues being pushed so far down the political agenda that you’d need a bathysphere and a decompression chamber to even spot them, they came roaring back up that agenda this week. With a vengeance.

Each day brought a new story. It started with the concern over the build up of Russian forces on the Ukrainian border and the not unconnected tumult over Russia’s plans to mount naval exercises in Ireland’s exclusive economic zone.

It then continued with the policy-making-on-the-hoof announcement by Taoiseach Micheál Martin and the Communications Minister Eamon Ryan that they plan to come up with a plan to close Cathal Brugha barracks and use it for housing.

This “plan” was quickly exposed as mere whim, when our part-time Defence Minister told the Dáil that while there would be a feasibility study, there definitely was “no predetermined outcome”, even if it is “…an issue on which the Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan, has firm views”.

Regrettably, our Defence minister lacks Ryan’s capacity for firm views, even when it comes to commitments he made. The Women of Honour discovered this during a disappointing meeting with Coveney. Hopefully this morning’s engagement with An Taoiseach will be more productive.

Then, to finish off a week of difficult defence headlines, the front page of the Sunday Independent led with: Defence Forces admit they cannot meaningfully defend Ireland.  A story based on some extracts from the Commission on the Defence Forces draft report.

The one thread that connects all the above is the decade long denial of political attention to both the Defence Forces and defence policy. We see this in the way the story about the Russian military exercises emerged and played out.

It has long been the custom and practice for the Defence Forces Chief of Staff of the day to start off the year with a cup of tea and a sponge cake with the individual members of the diplomatic corps.

Even calling these encounters “meetings” is to overstate their significance. There were simple courtesies extended by the Defence Forces to the various Ambassadors based in Dublin. An opportunity to say hello and exchange pleasantries for a organisation that values its role in UN peacekeeping.

They are non-controversial engagements. They should still be. The fact that the Russian ambassador saw fit to widely publicise his meeting, tells you a great deal more about the Russian embassy’s “active measures” agenda here, than it does about the Chief of Staff

Simon Coveney has done almost four years as Defence Minister and is now on his third Chief of Staff. He knows about these courtesy calls at the Chief of Staff’s office at McKee Barracks, so there is no excuse for him telling theFine Gael parliamentary party meeting that he was “surprised”.

I have no doubt the Minister was embarrassed when the photo appeared online courtesy of the Russian Embassy’s Twitter account. I am certain that he was truly scarlet when his Fine Gael colleagues took him to task over it. That said, I bet he was not nearly as disconcerted as the Chief of Staff and his senior officers were when they saw it.

Nor as perturbed as the officials in the Minister’s twin departments of Foreign Affairs and Defence were by their own failure to anticipate that the Russians would use and abuse a courtesy call on the eve of announcing a major naval exercise in Irish waters.

Rather than further embroiling the Chief of Staff in what everyone now accepts was an unwise engagement, perhaps Coveney might focus his ire on the behaviour of the Russian embassy. If he needs any pointers on dealing with the Russians, he could do worse than consult with Brendan Byrne of the Irish Fish Processors and Exporters Association, whose own encounters with the Ambassador delivered results worthy of the Sopranos.

While the Minister focused on the minutiae, the Russian exercise has focused attention on the glaring gaps in our ability to monitor, never mind protect our waters and the critically important infrastructures that pass under them.

Three years back the 2019 Defence Force Review (which I have discussed here before) highlighted the fact that three quarters of all the transatlantic cables in the northern hemisphere pass through or near Irish waters. Cables that deliver over the vast bulk of all data and information transmission. What has been done since? Nothing. In fact, Defence Force preparedness is lower now than it was then with half the naval service’s nine ships regularly out of service due to staff shortages

Not that all the blame attaches to Minister Coveney. Though an ineffectual minister at best, he still tries, in his own words:

“…to look after the interests of the Defence Forces”.

Can we say the same about An Taoiseach, Micheál Martin? The evidence does not favour him. After committing, in opposition, to appointing a full time Defence Minister and giving defence policy the political prominence it merited, Martin blithely forgot all that when the seal of office was handed to him and defence was push back down the political agenda.

How else can you interpret his telling the Housing for All update press conference last week that:

“I’m pleased to confirm we have now agreed to conduct a feasibility study for the use of the Cathal Brugha Barracks site in Rathmines, Dublin to provide housing”.

Who, apart from the father of this idea Eamon Ryan, imagined it would make sense to deflect attention from real progress in delivering on the Housing for All plan, to talk about some notional scheme to close a working barracks that would take years the guts of a decade to only deliver 1000 houses? (Minister Ryan’s estimate, not mine)

Not Housing Minister, Darragh O’Brien, that’s for sure. This is the second time the ebullient pharaoh of Fingal has had to silently stand by as his party leader sabotages news coverage of the work he supposedly wants to promote. last September I discussed Martin’s petulant upstaging of the Housing for All press launch.

Cathal Brugha Barracks in Rathmines is not some unused vacant site. It is home to the 2 Brigade headquarters plus the 7th Infantry Battalion, as well as the Cavalry Squadron and a range of 2 Brigade combat support, combat service and training units. Not to mention the Defence Forces Reserve, the Army School of Music, the No 1 Army Band and the Military Archive.

Assuming that the Taoiseach wasn’t hoping the Defence Force personnel retention problem would look after it, to where was he planning to move the thousand plus troops, while his hoped for building work goes on?

Has he forgotten how long it took for the barracks closed in 1998, including Murphy barracks in Ballincollig, to be redeveloped? Clancy Barracks in Islandbridge, which looks well now and shows how listed military buildings can be incorporated successfully in a modern residential and commercial setting, still sat idle for the best part of 14 years. And that was a wholly private development.

It’s the equivalent of declaring that you plan to develop the St Vincent’s hospital site for housing, before giving a single thought to where you’ll put all the staff and patients.

I was reared in Rathmines. I know Cathal Brugha barracks well, but I am not so emotionally attached to the facility that I cannot imagine it as anything other than a barracks.  I once even fostered the notion of moving the entire military establishment from Cathal Brugha to a modern barracks at Casement Aerodrome in Baldonnel, but only after first moving an enhanced and expanded Air Corps to a new purpose-built facility with longer runway access at Shannon Airport.

But, until I could identify where you would find the extra 100s of million Euros needed to pay for all of this expansion, I kept the notion as that: just a notion.

What a pity the Taoiseach and Minister Ryan hadn’t the cop on to do the same. A single Euro spent now on their planned feasibility study would be a Euro wasted – and given how the last few governments have cut defence spending to the bone, that is not something to brag about.

In a few weeks we shall hopefully see the full report of the Commission on the Defence Forces. I look forward to commenting on it when it is published as it will offer the best opportunity, since the 2000 White Paper, for a grown up conversation on how we create a Defence Force that’s resourced to meet the modern threats we face and project the type of country we wish to be.

Derek Mooney is a communications and public affairs consultant. He previously served as a Ministerial Adviser to the Fianna Fáil-led government 2004 – 2010. His column appears here every Monday. Follow Derek on Twitter: @dsmooney

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From top: Fine Gael’s Minister of State for Local Government and Planning Peter Burke (right) with Minister for Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, Paschal Donohoe during the 2020 General Election; Derek Mooney

In politics, the things you don’t say, or hesitate over saying, can say more about what you are really thinking than the things you do say. You can hear a near textbook perfect example in this short clip from a BBC Radio Devon interview with local Tory MP, Simon Jupp.

Asked if he thinks Boris Johnson will still be Prime Minister and Tory Leader this time next month, Jupp – a former BBC journalist and senior Tory party communications adviser – responds with… nothing. There are three or four seconds of silence, before he finally struggles to say he probably will.

Setting aside the schadenfreude of hearing a former press officer who may in his time have scolded ministers on their dire media outings, delivering an even worse one, Jupp’s performance highlighted the scale of the peril facing Johnson.

Though he now holds what was once a safe Tory seat, Jupp was still a beneficiary of the Boris bounce in 2019 and is one of the new in-take of MPs, whose personal loyalty to Boris would be presumed. Incorrectly, it seems.

That said, Jupp may well be right. Though Johnson is clearly damaged goods and a potential liability to the Tory party, he will probably limp through the coming month, and several months after that, before the 54 letters needed to trigger a no-confidence motion are submitted to the famous 1922 Tory Backbench committee.

It is being suggested that early May could provide such a trigger point with Local elections due on May 5th in London, parts of England, and all of Wales and Scotland. This may also be the date of the Northern Ireland Assembly election, but given the febrile state of politics at Stormont, and the clear willingness of Johnson’s government to do anything it can to halt the DUP’s electoral decline: RTÉ news: Plans for temporary return of ‘double-jobbing’ for NI politicians condemned who can say for certain?

Heavy Tory losses in those UK Local Elections would send any wavering MPs who were clinging to the forlorn hope that Johnson might still be an election winner, scurrying to grab their pens and submit their letters demanding a heave, or as it’s known in Australia, a Spill (Can we start a campaign to get using the term Spill here?).

Even at the best of political times, council/local elections held at the mid-point of a government term can be a problem. Though political scientists class council/local and European elections as second-order elections as voters view them as less important, it is this “less at stake” attitude that makes them potential career enders for national politicians as voters use their ballot, more often than not, to punish the governing parties.

For most governments the midpoint also marks its polling lowest point. Positive outcomes of promises made at the last general election have yet to be felt, while the less pleasant impacts of tough decisions taken early-on are still biting.

It’s a universal political truism… well… it is in the places that practise liberal democracy. Thus “second order” elections are defined as having three classic characteristics:

  • Lower turnouts (than for national parliamentary elections).
  • Losses for the national governing parties
  • Larger parties do worse. Smaller parties do better

The forthcoming May elections would have been a big political test for Boris Johnson’s relationship with the British voting public without the almost daily revelations of rule breaking, partying and hypocrisy at Number 10. With them, it is hard to see how he survives much beyond the May results.

Meanwhile, though faced with their own respective travails here, Leo Varadkar, Micheál Martin and Eamon can all heave (not in the Spill sense) a sigh of relief that there are neither Local nor European Elections scheduled here until May 2024.

Or can they?

The former Labour British Home Secretary, Jack Straw once infamously said of his department that it was a place where many industrious civil servants were quietly working away on projects that could destroy a minister’s career at any moment.

The project that could end the electoral peace that Varadkar, Martin and Ryan are hoping will continue through 2022, and to 2024, is not that secret. Even more ominously, the one working industriously on its delivery is not a civil servant, it is a giver minister… well a Junior Minister.

That Junior Minister is Fine Gael’s Peter Burke, and the project is not some pet plan of his, but rather a firm commitment agreed by all three leaders and included on page 118 of the 2020 Programme for Government, Our Shared Future:

‘We will pass legislation to allow the first directly elected mayor in Limerick to be elected in 2021. We will support the first directly elected mayor with a financial package to deliver upon their mandate.’

It is not the Junior Minister’s fault that the 2021 target has been missed. To be fair to almost all concerned, there is an acceptance that it would have been difficult to organise and hold an election during a pandemic. But on the flip side there is concern in Limerick that it is now 1000 days since the people of Limerick voted to create the position of directly elected mayor. The election of Mayor is not much closer to reality now than it was in 2019, 2020 or 2021.

Again, this is not the Junior Minister’s fault. It is only nine months since he announced that the cabinet had given approval to drafting the necessary legislation. It is just three months since he told a local Limerick paper that he hoped the election would take place by next Summer”.

And it is just a week since he went on to tell the Irish Examiner that he was taking the recommendations made during the pre-legislative scrutiny report released by the Joint Oireachtas Committee and ensuring that the role will have ‘real power’ when its first holder is elected sometime later this year.”

So, can we be certain there will be an election for a directly election mayor of Limerick during the mid-point of this government and in the run-up to its revolving Taoiseach turning point?

I somehow doubt it.

The main party leaders, and their pollsters, will be very reluctant to press ahead with a mid-point, second order election that could see candidates from the three government parties not just defeated, but badly so. Imagine the deep political problems or awkward leadership questions that could follow a Limerick election result where the Fine Gael or Fianna Fáil candidate came fourth… or worse? I am assuming here that both parties would field their own candidates. It’s a normal assumption, as having one of the parties opting out, or to propose a joint voting pact would raise questions whose consequences were even worse than coming a poor third.

As I have explained here before, I am not totally opposed to the directly elected mayor model, except where it involves an area that hold almost a third of the State’s population. Having a directly Mayor for the greater Dublin area raises major issues of scale.

But while the citizens of Cork and Waterford voted narrowly not to have a directly elected mayor, the people of Limerick voted for it – and their wishes must be respected. This is the point made by such prominent Limerick figures as the former Department of Finance Secretary General, John Moran.

Just before Christmas, he posted concerns online about “…some even suggesting it might have to wait another 1,000 days at least – 6 full years” a reference to some whispers that the election could be postponed further to coincide with the 2024 local elections, to make the term of office of mayor and Council coterminous.

I have no idea if this is a serious risk. If it is then then its advocates will need to take a bottle of Tippex to the Programme For Government and a restraint for Peter Burke, who has bravely staked his political fortunes on delivering this project.

In the meantime, one way to determine if the government parties are serious about holding this election (be that immediately before or after the Summer), is to see if they start making the necessary political preparations, particularly the selection of candidates, anytime soon. We have to assume that they will want their challengers’ names in the field at least a few months in advance.

Derek Mooney is a communications and public affairs consultant. He previously served as a Ministerial Adviser to the Fianna Fáil-led government 2004 – 2010. His column appears here every Monday. Follow Derek on Twitter: @dsmooney

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From top: Sinn Féin President Mary Lou Mc Donald (centre) after giving her address to the Sinn Féin Ard Fheis at the Helix Theatre, Dublin last September;  Derek Mooney

Something unusual, though politically significant, happened during the first 10 minutes of last Friday’s “Gathering” on RTÉ Radio 1’s Claire Byrne Today show.

We have become so accustomed to hearing Sinn Féin spokespeople sticking carefully to their talking points and holding the party line, that hearing one utter even the vaguest criticism of their leader, is jarring.

Yet that is what Sinn Fein’s Louise O’Reilly did when she said that she “wouldn’t use necessarily the words that Mary Lou used…”. The words to which O’Reilly was referring, which she also called “inelegant”, had come from an Irish Examiner interview in which the Sinn Féin leader said of the need for public sector reform:

“But we have, in many respects, a system that is constipated, a system that is slow, and a system that needs to be jolted… “

It’s not often you hear a Sinn Féin spokesperson upbraid their leader in public and get away with it. Louise’s move was politically bold and strategically wise.

Her disavowal of McDonald’s ill-considered comments came at the start of a discussion where O’Reilly saw that she had to disassociate herself from the specifics of Mary Lou’s “inelegant” phrasing, if she was to have any hope of doing what her leader had failed do to – namely, to make the entirely fair point that there are systemic problems with the speedy implementation of government decisions.

The wisdom of her move was quickly demonstrated as others on the show, including Fianna Fail’s Jim O’Callaghan and former nursing union boss Liam Doran, focused in on the inopportune timing and the annoyance that McDonalds’s comments had caused to many in the public sector.

Doran, not a man to shy away from lambasting senior management, made it clear that the civil and public service had, over the past 20 months, demonstrated the ability to change and be flexible, stressing that this had happened at all levels, from top management to front line staff.

But while there has been justified anger directed at the language used by McDonald, that is a secondary concern, for now. The key question is why has it taken Sinn Féin over a decade to even see that there is a problem?

The systemic problems with government efficiency and implementation that Mary Lou has only now discovered were clearly identified, in the wake of the global economic collapse.

These were described and catalogued at the time as including, the lack of effective parliamentary scrutiny and oversight, the effective unaccountability to the Oireachtas of senior officials, the paucity of state regulation, the under-funding and under resourcing of regulatory bodies, the fact that money rarely follows the decisions, hence the inexorable lethargy which besets the implementation of many decisions.

These arguments even popped up during the 2013 Seanad abolition referendum, where both Fine Gael and Sinn Féin together pushed for the abolition of the Seanad. One of the counter arguments to the abolition campaign was that the economic crash had taught us that we needed more systems of checks and balances in our governmental system, not fewer.

The public accepted this and rejecting the political chicanery of both Sinn Féin and Fine Gael. The pity is that every government since, including the current one, has declined to proceed with meaningful Seanad Reform or to increase parliamentary scrutiny and oversight.

Just before Christmas I spoke here about the need for a re-establishment of the all party Dáil committee on Covid, saying that:

One of the most churlish of the current government early decisions was to allow the dissolution of the committee on Oct 8th, 2020, shortly after it published its first report.

The irony is that the current Taoiseach Micheál Martin, was one of the first political leaders to speak openly about learning the lessons of the crash and implementing the vital changes needed to ensure that we do not slip back into the old way of doing things.

In his 2012 Fianna Fáil Árd Fheis speech, he told the public that:

We made mistakes. We got things wrong. And we are sorry for that.

But he did something much more important. He committed himself and his party to learning the lessons of that failure, saying:

This is a crisis which is just too serious to think it can be solved without a complete reform of our public life. For too long, this has been a political system which only discusses fundamental issues when they become a crisis. It concentrates nearly all power in the hands of 15 people sitting at the cabinet table…

…If we are really to learn the lessons of the past, if we are to have a political system which can deliver long-term growth and stability, then reform isn’t an optional extra – it’s absolutely essential.

This realization informed his thinking and his approach for the following years. The pity is that he lost sight of it sometime in 2018 or 2019, perhaps when it dawned on him that he might get a turn to briefly hold the levers of power, At this point he switched to the cause of managerial minimalism.

But that’s an issue for Fianna Fáil. I am here to talk about Sinn Féin. The positive news for them is that they have come to the same realization, at all. The fact that it’s a decade after everyone else and comes with language that obscures how they define the problem, is bad, but the reality that they are offering no solution, is worse.

If you look to the part of the island where Sinn Féin is not only in government but one of its most senior ministers, Conor Murphy, serves as Northern Ireland’s minister for Finance and Personnel, and is responsible for public sector reform, you will not find much hope.

The only “reform” I can find associated with Sinn Fein’s holding of this office since 2016 has been changing its name from Finance and Personnel to just Finance. This does not suggest that they have not much interest in the civil and public service reform part of the portfolio.

It isn’t the only negative sign.

Back in 2015, When the Northern Ireland executive was faced with the political burden of implementing the bedroom tax, a Tory cut to welfare payments, rather than addressing the issue head-on, Sinn Féin joined with the DUP and the Alliance Party and voted to return welfare powers back to Westminster. They handed the power back to the same Tory government whose policy was hurting those less well off – the people; Sinn Féin continually tell us they want to defend.

In his book “Burned”, billed as: the inside story of the North’s “cash on the scandal and Northern Ireland’s secretive new elite, Sam McBride details how the North’s Sinn Féin Finance Minister, Máirtin Ó Muilleoir was (quote Page 267):

“…in constant contact with unseen – and therefore publicly unaccountable – senior republican figures about the complex legal question”

So here we had the Sinn Féin Finance Minister taking weeks to secretly seek the permission of backroom figures, some linked to the Provos, before agreeing to impose cost-cutting measures on the RHI scheme that would save tens of millions with other ministers and senior civil servants. So much for Sinn Féin’s operational belief in public openness, transparency, and accountability.

Late last year, despite widespread criticism of the performance of Capita (the private company contracted by the to deliver Personal Independence Payment (PIP) Assessment Services in the North) a Sinn Féin Minister, Deirdre Hargey, renewed the company’s contract for a further two years, without going through any procurement process.

Mention any of this to Sinn Féin and their stock answer is that the British government is responsible for what happens in the North and that they are powerless.

Well, how could they be other than powerless with Sinn Féin MLAs voting away what few powers they have rather than exercising them.

Willie O’Dea accurately summed up the Sinn Féin policy approach to every problem and every question in a six second line: lads the answer is yes, now what was the question?

It was a neat summation of their approach, but as the latest polls show, attacking Sinn Féin for its blatant populism alone is not sufficient.

The desire for a change in how we do things is real. People do not feel their government grasps the scale of the problems they daily face.

Sinn Fein is riding the crest of that wave, and there is nothing wrong with that. But it will take more than just surfing on the surface for that wave to wash them into government.

Mary Lou’s Examiner interview showed that she has the facility to echo the publics concerns back at them, but the carelessness of her language on such a crucial issue shows that she neither grasps the nature of problem, nor understands how difficult it will be to drive through the necessary reforms.

That glaring vulnerability will not cost her in the polls… for now. There will be no major dent in Sinn Féin’s potential support levels until one, or two, of the main government parties make the changes necessary to show voters that they both understand the scale of the problems and have the ambitious and detailed plans to address them at that scale.

I believe at least one of them can do this. And will. The question is when. The risk is that they wait too long.

Derek Mooney is a communications and public affairs consultant. He previously served as a Ministerial Adviser to the Fianna Fáil-led government 2004 – 2010. His column appears here every Monday. Follow Derek on Twitter: @dsmooney

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From top: Tanaiste and Fine Gael leader Leo Varadkar  (left) with Taoiseach and Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin; Derek Mooney

Political commentators hailing a minister who was on maternity leave for half of 2022 as their politician of the year tells you a lot about the state of Irish politics.

Not that I particularly object to their choice of Minister Helen McEntee. Her absence from the cabinet table at a challenging time did nothing to diminish her public profile, while the positive media treatment of her return, did much to enhance it.

Minister McEntee is one of the few recognisable names and faces around the Cabinet table. She has become a political figure in her own right, albeit one who is still untested – a point I made here last February.

This is not something you can say about all her colleagues. While some do stand out as individuals with thoughts and ideas of their own, most come across as either politically shapeless or just innocuous. Mercifully the Taoiseach and Tánaiste have not required certain ministers wear nametags at meetings, if What’s My Line ever returns to our TV screens, the panel would have some trouble discerning precisely what the Minister for Children or the Minister for Agriculture do for a living.

(Disclosure: that gag about ministers wearing nametags at meetings is a shameless recycling of a joke I wrote for a Fianna Fáil Árd Fheis warm up speech almost two decades ago. The original, a put-down of the Fine Gael front bench, went: “The FG front bench is so anonymous that Enda Kenny has insisted they wear nametags at meetings.”

Slightly fuller disclosure: This was the cleaned-up version. The original was: “The FG front bench team are so unknown that they spend two hours together every Tuesday trying to figure out which one of them is Olwyn Enright*.” (*Olwyn became a spokesperson within weeks of her election as a FG TD. She quickly proved herself an effective communicator).

Looking at the current cabinet line-up could almost make one yearn for such colourful or animated characters as Shane Ross, Katherine Zappone or even Charlie Flanagan.

Stop. I see what I did wrong there. I went too far… way too far. Let me go back a step or two.

Throwing a Shane Ross type figure in to this Cabinet would not help matters. Though he understood political communications and had a greater penchant for attracting attention than some of the current crew, this cabinet’s problem is not just one of communications. It is the direction, or lack of, of the government as a whole.

Blame for this lack of cohesion and direction lays with the ones at the top of the three parties… the ones who decided which ministers should sit around the table and what portfolios they should hold.

The fact that political pundits are now openly touting Minister McEntee as a possible next leader of Fine Gael, is instructive. Where it may be due in part to her youth, her gender, or her being clearly identifiable, it has probably more to do with her being one of the few ministers not immediately associated with either failure or ineptitude – her association with the Justice Woulfe appointment saga notwithstanding.

It is a sad reflection of the state of centrist Irish political leadership that simply not being associated with failure could be perceived as a qualifier for the top job.

So, while we wait for the two main government parties to come to their senses and tackle their leadership issues, it is interesting to see those same two leaders trying to turn the tables.

Over the past few weeks both the Tánaiste and Taoiseach have both spoken about the chances of a reshuffle. The Tánaiste got the ball rolling in mid-December telling his parliamentary party that he intends to reshuffle the Fine Gael team when he becomes Taoiseach again next December.

“Leo has put the ministers on warning that if they don’t deliver their agendas for next year, decisions will be made next December,” a most helpful Fine Gael source told the Irish Examiner.

While Varadkar may have framed it as a strong leader pushing back against Paschal Donohoe’s alternative vision for Fine Gael, as set out in his Irish Independent interview, others saw it differently. What they heard was a hollow threat from a leader whose own survival seems in increasing doubt as the #leotheleak investigation rumbles on without conclusion or exoneration.

Not content to stand idly by and watch the Tánaiste do a solo reshuffle fumble, An Taoiseach decided to get in on the act. Late last week Micheál Martin told the UK Times Irish edition that he is unlikely to undertake a reshuffle when he becomes Tánaiste at the end of the year, adding:

“I am of a view that consistency of policy and delivery is important… Chopping and changing all of the time might look good for a day or two, but nothing can beat the substance of getting real change.”

He does have a point… but mainly as a counter argument to some imagined call for a state of perpetual reshuffle. No one is suggesting that. The mid-point of a term of government is an eminently sensible time for leaders to briefly take stock and review if their policies are being delivered consistently, if at all.

Government mid-point is a natural inflection point, one that the revolving Taoiseach model, which Martin has backed so enthusiastically, has elevated into even greater significance.

As I pointed out here before, the only other place where this revolving premiership model has been tried, Israel, also rotated other key ministries at the mid-point. Will Ministers McGrath and Donohoe rotate portfolios next December too? Or will the government post December 2022 have both a Fine Gael Taoiseach and Finance Minister?

Where Fine Gael TDs and Senators detected a strong element of there “terrors for children” in Varadkar’s reshuffle warning, Fianna Fáil TDs heard near deafening echoes of Martin’s passive late 2018 renewal of the confidence and supply arrangement with Fine Gael.

Those same Fianna Fáil backbenchers, including many who have never publicly uttered a word of criticism of Martin, also heard the current leader firmly close the door on their individual hopes of promotion. It seems that Martin thinks keeping his current ministerial team content is far preferable to keeping them on their toes.

It’s a novel approach. It may even appear to make sense in a party where the 14-member ministerial team is just four critical votes short of a simple majority in the Dáil parliamentary party which has 36 members (38 minus 2: Ceann Comhairle and the unwhipped Marc McSharry).

But if one, or two, of the critical four conclude that Martin’s continuation as leader is injurious to their personal advancement, then Martin will pay a price. Today’s Oireachtas Committee Chairs are not always content to remain next year’s Oireachtas Committee Chairs.

Martin has several capable and determined former front bench spokespersons (pre 2020 election) languishing on his back benches. They are rarely, if ever, asked to officially represent the party on media gigs and have found the party’s Leinster House corridors a cold place.

So, is turning it into an even colder place really the wisest move for a leader who hopes to lead the party in the next election? Martin may believe punters will interpret this as a strong leader being resolute and ruthless. I think they will see it for what it is… a weakened leader trying to act tough by pushing compliant colleagues around, while retreating from showdowns with his real political enemies.

Martin’s approach is not one you will find mentioned anywhere in Prof Gary Murphy’s superb biography of Charlie Haughey. While people will disagree on what he did with it, no one can deny that Haughey understood the exercise of power. In Chapter 15 Murphy offers an insight into Haughey’s approach to both power and people management with a story from his first few days as Taoiseach.

According to a senior civil servant, Haughey quickly moved to reassure senior officials that his legendary ruthlessness was reserved for his political enemies alone, saying:

“I may be rough and demanding of civil servants… but I am never ruthless. I am ruthless with my political enemies because I have to be to survive, but I am never ever ruthless with public servants and civil servants.”

Micheál Martin take note. And while you are at it, also take note at how badly your party HQ’s latest wheeze is going down. As revealed in last weekend’s Irish Mail on Sunday, Fianna Fáil has engaged former Fine Gael minister and media pundit, Ivan Yates as a communications adviser, inviting him to coach Fianna Fáil representatives, including ministers, on sharpening their political message, no less.

We are just four days into 2022 and already is has not been a great start to your final year in office.

Derek Mooney is a communications and public affairs consultant. He previously served as a Ministerial Adviser to the Fianna Fáil-led government 2004 – 2010. His column appears here every Monday. Follow Derek on Twitter: @dsmooney

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From top: Home for Christmas at Dublin Airport on Saturday; Derek Mooney

In his hefty 2011 tome, The Better Angels of Our Nature, cognitive psychologist, Prof Steven Pinker argues that the lesson of history is a society that has become less violent. His central premise is that there has never been any time, in the history of mankind, when we were less likely to die at another’s hand, than now.

It’s an uncommonly positive and optimistic analysis of the state of the world. Right now we need as much of that as we can get. Pinker’s outlook is not unique to him. Many others have reached the same conclusion. This is no surprise. The statistics are convincing.

Life expectancy across the globe is more than double what it was 100 years ago. While 10% of the world’s population still lives in extreme poverty, two centuries ago the figure was over 80%. Over the same period, and in a not unlinked development, the level of world illiteracy has fallen from 88% to 10%.

Globally, we have created more wealth over the past forty years, than we did in in all human history before that (the share-out is still problematic). War, disease, and natural disasters now claim fewer lives than ever, even allowing for Covid-19. Child mortality (dying before the age of five) is 4% today. That’s a tragically high rate, but only a fraction of the 50% rate that prevailed two centuries back.

In his book Pinker speculates on what he calls the “source of our strange idiom: To Cut Off Your Nose To Spite Your Face.” Citing sources from the late medieval period onwards, he says the cutting off someone’s nose was a prototypical act of spite. This was done as “an official punishment for heresy, treason, prostitution, or sodomy,” but also as “an act of private vengeance.”

But as gross and inhumane as medieval behaviour was, even they were rarely moved to self-harm as a way to spite others. In these more advanced, enlightened, and more peaceful times, neither are we.

Opinions polls, surveys, and actual votes, conducted across Europe show that two-thirds of us broadly support and back government imposed Covid restrictions. In a heated and fraught referendum held at the end of November, 62% of Swiss voters rejected libertarian claims that the government’s Covid certificate “implicitly induces a forced vaccination”. It was the second time this year that Swiss voters have backed governments measures to restrict Covid.

This does not mean that they like the measures or that they believe that the particular measures represent the very best the State can do. It means that people will follow guidance and protect themselves and others by following the same guidance as everyone else. They will not cut off their nose to spite their face… or, the government of the day. They act for the greater good.

Neither does it mean that voters believe that their governments are doing all that they can to counter the disease, but it does point to people understanding the severity of the potential threat and seeing the restrictions, curfews, lockdowns, and circuit breakers as not unreasonable responses.

Though they do not have the pub and restaurant curfews we have, publicans and restauranteurs across the UK report significant fall-offs in bookings, with the people deciding not to wait for Boris Johnson to act. They are deciding to voluntarily curfew themselves. Friends of mine report that their local pubs are almost empty after 7pm.

Are British voters content with Johnson’s government not giving them the advice that our government is giving us, and is allowing them to decide for themselves?

Is the fall-off in support for the Tories that we see in the polls and in last Thursday’s North Shropshire by-election due to public dissatisfaction at the government’s handling of the Covid response? Or, is it a more general despair at Johnson’s bumbling style of leadership? It is hard to know for sure.

I suspect most voters, in most countries, feel their governments could be doing better, or more, especially as they see what is happening elsewhere.

Saturday’s announcement, by the Dutch government, of even stiffer Covid restrictions was seen by some here as a vindication of what our own government had done, with more than a hint of the “there but for the grace of God, go we.”

But is that a fair assessment? Many think not. Including Prof Anthony Staines, who I also quoted here two weeks back. Responding to the news of the Dutch decision on Twitter, Prof Staines said they were now doing the right thing, but that was because The Netherlands public health response has been as weak as ours…”

This is the real issue for the Dutch, Irish and many other governments is not the scope or pace of their responses via curfews, lockdowns, or restrictions, it is the seeming paucity of their substantive preparedness to cope with a threat… albeit a threat that history tells us will abate with time.

So, I think the fundamental question facing our government, and many other governments, is this: If, over a year after you first imposed a lockdown to halt the spread of a virus, you find yourself doing the same thing again; to stop what is essentially the same virus; and despite an impressive vaccination campaign, then isn’t there something seriously wrong with your response?

Identifying this “something”, this key missing element, is in all our interests.

This is not a party-political point. While the main opposition parties have been vocal in calling for “more”, they have been less robust in expanding on what that “more” might be.

In fairness, the opposition – and many backbench government TDs and Senators – have rightly identified the gaps in the State’s approach, specifically how the departments of Finance, Public Expenditure and Health have managed to leave us with 30 fewer ICU beds than planned just three years ago. By itself, this is a stunning failure of basic statecraft.

Listing the problems and failings is not a difficult task. There are plenty to choose from. The general problems with contact tracing, including the NPHET advice to stop contact tracing in schools from 27 September; the early mistakes made in nursing homes; the mixed messaging on Antigen testing; the confusion around Covid-19 advice for migrant communities, and this is before we get to the long-standing issues of recruitment and retention of nurses and consultants.

No, the key policy issue is to identify which of these items are understandable errors by a system that is progressively getting to grips with the situation, and which are fundamental failures of structure, of policy or of understanding.

One of the best decisions of the last government was (on May 6th, 2020) to establish a Special Dáil Committee on Covid-19 Response. One of the most churlish of the current government was to allow the dissolution of the committee on Oct 8th, 2020, after it published its first report.

I can see why some officials might utter a sigh of relief at seeing the oversight of the State’s response diffused across a number of Oireachtas committees, rather than to just one. But why would their political masters go along with it? The elected politicians who agreed to dissolve the committee have metaphorically cut off their political noses to spite their faces.

It was a bad move. It should be fixed ASAP. The committee should be re-established, with a remit to tackle the question I posed above. It will do us all an enormous service – and prove that an all-party political approach can work – by helping identify the something, or things, we to should do to help avoid going through this merry-go-round again when the near inevitable next wave comes.

May I wish you, and yours, a very Merry Christmas and a happier and New Year. History tells us that – in all likelihood – 2022 will be better and more peaceful than 2021. I believe in history as strongly as I believe in science.

Derek Mooney is a communications and public affairs consultant. He previously served as a Ministerial Adviser to the Fianna Fáil-led government 2004 – 2010. His column appears here every Monday. Follow Derek on Twitter: @dsmooney

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From top: Taoiseach Micheál Martin and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson at Hillsborough in 2020; Derek Mooney

If you haven’t seen it already, then do yourself an enormous favour and check out the glorious blackboard scene from the second series of Derry Girls. Actually, just go and watch all of Lisa McGee’s deeply affectionate and wildly funny account of life in 1990’s Derry.

In the blockboard scene, Fr Peter invites teenagers from a catholic girls’ school and a protestant boys’ school, brought together for a cross community weekend, to suggest examples of things they have in common. These are then written down on a blackboard.

While they struggle to come up with things they have in common, they have no such problem listing their differences: Catholics watch RTÉ; Protestants love soup. Catholics love statues; Protestants hate Abba. The ‘differences’ blackboard is soon overflowing. The similarities one remains bare.

While I’ve no doubt it wouldn’t be anywhere near as funny, ask a group of Irish people what Boris Johnson and Micheál Martin have in common, and they’d struggle to propose much for the similarities one.

It is hard to imagine two more dissimilar political leaders when it comes to outlook and style.

While Johnson relies on bombast and flummery, Martin is an assiduous worker who, for all his flaws, doggedly puts in the hours.

Where Martin sees himself as a master of detail, never missing an opportunity to show how much he knows, and remind you of his ministerial experience, Johnson burbles vague generalities, with the odd classically inspired, rhetorical flight of fancy, when the questioning gets tough.

I could go on for hours listing their differences, indeed there’s the material for three or four blackboards of them on appearance, presentation, and diet alone.

But they do have several things in common. Quite important things. Things that speak to their fundamentally flawed leaderships.

The biggest similarity is that both prefer to appoint the compliant and shun the gifted.

One of the great management truisms is that A’s appoint A’s and B’s appoint C’s.

It applies to leaders too. The best leaders surround themselves with people of equal stature and ability. They do not feel threatened by having people around who know how to do the job. Rather they see that having capable and effective lieutenants can elevate them.

Weak leaders appoint even weaker deputies and ministers. Selecting your cabinet team on the basis of their acquiescence and ability to answer every question with “yes boss” may make life easy in the short term, but it won’t make an inherently weak leader look strong. Even by comparison.

Inevitably, the problems that your weak ministers are either too meek or too unqualified to resolve wend their way to the prime ministerial in-tray. Suddenly, but predictably, the weak leader is overburdened and publicly exposed.

The latest question marks over Johnson’s ability to hang on as Prime Minister and Tory leader stem directly from decisions he made with days of securing the leadership. His disdain for having anyone on his front bench who was not on the same page as him, or who might fail the absolute loyalty test has now come back to bite him on the arse.

Having such incompetent B and C class characters as Raab, Patel and Dorries, not just in Cabinet, but in key ministries is hurting Johnson. Though it is not as if their loyalty to him is so unswerving that they would not be prepared to ditch him in favour of a Sunak or a Truss, in a heartbeat.

Their loyalty is of the variety which Sir Humphrey (paraphrasing François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld) described in Yes Minister, as “…the lively expectation of favours yet to come.”

While it would be deeply unfair to hail any of Martin’s ministerial picks as being as imprudent as Johnson’s baser appointments, it would also be a major overstatement to declare every single one of his surviving ministerial appointees as coming from the stronger end of the spectrum.

In an insightful piece a few weeks back, the Examiner’s Daniel McConnell talked about the growing Fianna Fáil disquiet with the performance of the Ministers for Health and the Minister for Education, saying:

“…some ministers say Martin is more than happy to be seen as the Minister for Education, the Minister for Health, and Taoiseach, all at the same time.”

I have no doubt that the ministers who told Danny that are 100% correct.

I also have no doubt that Martin and his inner circle of Merrion and Mount St., advisers see themselves as having to carry not just these ministers, but their colleagues, their T.D.s, and the entire party on their backs, as if they, and they alone, know and understand everything.

But these sherpas have got what they wished for. The folks who think themselves burdened by those they now brand incumbrances, are the ones who ensured the “incumbrances” be appointed. As you sow, so shall you reap. [Galatians VI].

Though they may be at different stages of the process both Johnson and Martin are set to pay the price for valuing amenability above talent and acquiescence above ability.

While the threat to Johnson’s leadership is not imminent, it has become very public with even the usually pro-tory Sunday papers turning on him. It could all speed up very quickly though if the Tories were to lose this week’s by-election for the seat vacated by the disgraced former Northern Ireland secretary Owen Paterson.

In Martin’s case, while the threat to his leadership is very far from public – it may be more imminent that he may care to acknowledge. One hard fact that is very public is that he has just 1-year and 2 days left as Taoiseach. On December 15th next year, Martin will cease to be Taoiseach. Forever.

That will be it. And while Deputy Martin and his inner circle may believe they can move seamlessly from the Taoiseach’s suite to the Tánaiste’s with life going on as before, they are the only ones thinking that.

As 2022 progresses even the most compliant minister and back bencher will start to wonder what’s in store for them when the change comes. They won’t be waiting for the change to come to start thinking it either. It’s not a long road from them thinking about it, to their talking to others about it – off the record, of course.

Unless something major changes for, or to, either of them, it’s impossible to see either Johnson or Martin leading their respective parties into another election.

Yet another thing they have in common.

A post script. Before any Martin-ite takes to Twitter or Facebook to tell me how the poor man had so little choice when picking his ministerial team… might I remind them of two things.

First, some of his most experienced and resourceful pre 2020 spokespeople still languish on the back benches.

Second, Martin and his HQ lackies had a decade to identify and cultivate talented and electable candidates. I can think of several very able people who should now be on the Fianna Fáil Dáil benches but were passed over, by the powers that be.

Regrettably, the side-lining of those who think differently or have the courage, or imagination to question the current Fianna Fáil policy or organisational orthodoxy extends beyond cabinet selections. There is a general sense of dismay and discouragement right across the party from the shrewdest stalwart to the newest recruit.

The political loyalty and discipline that was once the Fianna Fáil organisation’s greatest strength and hallmark is now being turned against it. Raise your concerns about the party’s direction, its future or even its relevance, and you risk being seen as disloyal, or even favouring a heave.

That said, while its disconcerting and dispiriting, it’s still all very petty stuff. None of it is on a par with the high stakes, but often vicious carry-on, that Prof Gary Murphy chronicles in his biography of Charlie Haughey. Though this, I suppose, is itself an indicator of how enfeebled and diminished Martin’s party has become.

Derek Mooney is a communications and public affairs consultant. He previously served as a Ministerial Adviser to the Fianna Fáil-led government 2004 – 2010. His column appears here every Monday. Follow Derek on Twitter: @dsmooney

RollingNews

From top: Minister for Health, Stephen Donnelly and Taoiseach, Micheál Martin TD; Derek Moonery

Many years ago I was asked to help in the re-structuring and re-invigoration of a voluntary organisation. I was one of a group of outsiders. Each tasked with reviewing key aspects of the organisation’s work, operations, and structures.

Each of us brought a different skillset to the mission, HR, communications, fund raising and organisation. Towards the end of the assignment they brought us together to compare notes.

Governance had been a major issue in the organisation with the odd board member accused of crossing the line and getting involved in the day-to-day operations. So, we were all interested to see and hear what the person looking at organisation and governance would recommend.

We were expecting him to come with a set of complex system of checks and balances. He didn’t. His analysis was remarkably straight forward. He succinctly delineated the roles and responsibilities of elected board of directors versus those of the full-time management, with a simple phrase: Management proposes, board decides. Management implements, board oversees.

It’s a comprehensive statement of the fundamentals of good governance.

The same key principle applies when it comes to government, but with more significant consequences. One of those, the delineation paradox, was neatly summarised in the opening line of a 2007 OECD paper entitled The Delineation of Responsibilities Between Ministers and Senior Civil Servants. It says:

“democratic regimes find themselves having to balance two values that can be in some tension: (1) fair and non-politically partisan public service delivery and, subject to the law, (2) the responsiveness of public servants to the policies of the current executive.”

So, just as democratic accountability demands that an incoming political administration is able to change the direction of government policy – i.e. Board decides, public servants need protection against being misused for partisan purposes – management implements.

Avoiding any crossover between this separation and delineation is critical. While some stepping across the boundaries may suit the passing whims, or lethargy of a given Minister or Secretary General of the day... it is damaging in the long term. Today’s operational convenience can all too easily become tomorrow’s policy impediment.

Or, to put it another way using one of my late father’s favourite sayings, you can’t sit on the swing and push. But all too often that is what we see and hear from NPHET.

This is not a criticism of their latest set of recommendations. I have neither the expertise nor the knowledge to meaningfully critique them, but I can comment on how they convey them. And on how it all too often seems that ministers get to hear what may be coming from NPHET via the media.

NPHET is there to advise. It is there to propose – management proposes, but it is not there to decide on them – either by casting the deciding vote or by encouraging public pressure on ministers to act. That is the prerogative of politically accountable element of government.

This is not to let ministers off the hook. They are the ones who have most to lose by any blurring of the delineation boundaries, so they have both a responsibility and a duty to ensure their strict observation. Telling the Sunday papers that you plan to put manners on NPHET is both a dollar short and day late.

Having NPHET as a handy scapegoat for tough decisions is political cowardice. Not alone that. It is politically naïve to imagine you can scapegoat any organisation, be it private or public, and they will just meekly and quietly absorb it.

This is too small a country with too politically savvy a polity for that to happen.

Blurring the lines hurts both – a point that was well illustrated in Richard Chambers’ book on the government response to the Covid crisis A State of Emergency.

Of the very many interesting insights and observations in that book, the one that resonated most with me comes from October 2020. Explaining the decision not to directly contact the Taoiseach to forewarn him of the lockdown recommendation, Dr Holohan’s colleagues at NPHET told the author that Holohan had said that If Martin Fraser found out I was ringing the Taoiseach just off my own bat… they already think we have ideas above our station.

This suggests a worrying level of dysfunction at the top of government where key actors are more worried about the Secretary General at the Department of the Taoiseach resenting someone going over his head to the Taoiseach.

I have no idea whether the additional restrictive measures announced by An Taoiseach is the government acting with due caution or an excess of caution. But I have major qualms with the perceived vilification of the hospitality sector.

Maybe the prevailing political view is that people are content to see the sector continue to take it? There may be some validity to view with yesterday’s Irish Mail on Sunday/Ireland Thinks poll finding that 65% of people support the additional restrictions. But politicians should not confuse a public desire to see government taking firm action, with them accepting just any old action.

There may well be overwhelming and convincing evidence for having only six people at a table, or for a family of eight having to decide which ones to leave at home because they cannot book two tables of four… but I doubt it is as convincing as the evidence that we need more ICU beds, or that we need high efficiency particulate air filtration, i.e. hepa filter systems in indoor public spaces including classrooms, restaurants and venues?

Elected representatives across the Dáil should heed the other finding in the Irish Mail on Sunday poll, the one showing that 56% of 18–24-year-olds disagree with the latest measures.

Sometimes you require an outside perspective to help you to get a better grasp on what’s happening here. Which is why I strongly recommend watching last Friday’s BBC Newsnight. It contained a segment on Taoiseach Micheál Martin’s announcement that asked why the UK and Ireland were taking such different approaches?

This included a live interview with DCU Professor, Anthony Staines (see part of it here). Staines said he broadly supported the latest Irish government actions, saying that it “..has had the courage to say we need to step backwards.”

He rejected outright the notion that the scientists in the UK and Ireland are far apart in their assessments, saying that it was the political response to the science that was far apart. He told Newsnight’s Kirsty Wark that…

“…the price paid in your country has been high even by European standards. Most of Europe did not cover themselves in glory but Britain stands out in all the wrong ways.”  

But while Staines may back the latest moves by Irish government, his assessment of its overall approach was less than glowing. He said Ireland was in the mid-range of European countries when it came to the effectiveness of its response and compared unfavourably with countries like Finland and Norway.

Most significantly, in terms of the latest actions by the Irish government, Staines said

“The message from the science is clear. You do all the things you can to control this virus. And lockdowns and restrictions are the very last thing you do.

“So, before you do those, you wear masks, you use air filtration. Covid passports may be useful. Antigen testing. You ramp up public health, so we identify cases. We trace the cases; we trace their contacts. We support them on how to isolate. As soon as the vaccine becomes available you push it out as quickly as possible.” [my emphasis]

While the Irish government scores high marks on some of these points, it scores very poorly on others. The situation in hospital ICUs is pitiful. The average number of ICU beds per 100,000 of the population across the EU is 11.5. In Ireland it is just under 6.5.

In 2018, the Department of Health’s capacity review planned for a total of 330 ICU beds by the end of 2021. That not especially ambitious target was set pre-covid. If anything they should have increased the target when the pandemic hit. They didn’t.

That pre-covid target will be missed. Two weeks ago the Taoiseach told the Dáil that “we are at close to 300 or 301 ICU beds now”, and that “the intention now is to go, at a minimum, to 340 by the end of 2022”.

But fear not – we will not miss the target to close nightclubs, halve theatre capacity, or keep pub and restaurant tables to a maximum of six people.

We have been slow and confused on Antigen testing – this Twitter thread is a useful primer on the part Antigen tests can play in tackling covid spread, even though they are not as accurate a diagnostic tool as PCR testing. Yesterday the Scottish government’s national clinical director was advising Scots to “do LFD (lateral flow device/Antigen) tests on every occasion before socialising with others.”

To use Anthony Staines phrase, it is good to see NPHET step backwards a little on its hostility to antigen testing. It had to do something similar on mask wearing in mid-2020.

But this brings us back to the problem. There should not be the scope or space for idle chatter on what NPHET thinks about A; how The Tánaiste feels about B; or how the Taoiseach views C or D. As we discovered when we did a survey on attitudes to emergency preparedness back in the 2005/06, the public want to know that there is a plan.

There should be one clear government approach and one clear government message. If even there was a time for P.J Mara’s uno duce, una voce, it is now. Just as it is time, to paraphrase another great Mara saying, for NPHET, Martin, Varadkar, Harris, Donnelly et al to stop the “nibbling at each other’s bums.”

Derek Mooney is a communications and public affairs consultant. He previously served as a Ministerial Adviser to the Fianna Fáil-led government 2004 – 2010. His column appears here every Monday. Follow Derek on Twitter: @dsmooney

RollingNews

From top: Composer Stephen Sondheim; Derek Mooney

As you can tell from the title, this week’s column will differ from my usual offering. No politics this week. This is not the column I was planning on Friday afternoon. That one, which will likely resurface next week, dealt with my usual flair, Irish politics.

The news on Friday night that Stephen Sondheim had died, aged 91, changed that.

This is not an obituary, potted biography, mawkish tribute, or amateur analysis of Sondheim’s towering contribution. How could I compete the many great tributes that have appeared in recent days, including this excellent 2013 article by Frank Rich which the New York magazine re-ran on Friday?

What I offer instead is a personal reflection, an explanation of why Sondheim’s music and words has made me laugh and cry more easily and more frequently than almost any other writer, never mind composer.

Though I had kinda’ known in my late teens there was an American composer by the name of Sondheim, he was someone I imagined was, like Oscar Hammerstein, long dead. An impression due, in no small part by the success in 1977 of Side by Side by Sondheim.

The show, a musical revue built around the songs of Stephen Sondheim, had a Dublin run in the Gaiety theatre and starred Gay Byrne as the show’s narrator. I assumed it was some sort of posthumous tribute. It was a few years before I realised the man was very much alive and still producing lyrics that both encapsulated and celebrated the disappointments, joys and constant inconsistencies of life.

My entrée to the Sondheim oeuvre (how about that for a self-fellating phrase) was his comedic songs, starting with The Little Things You Do Together, from the show Company. It includes this delicious line, sung by Joanne, a cynical and frequently divorced older friend of the main character Robert, as she comments on the curious things their mutual friends do to make their marriages work:

It’s the little things you share together

Swear together

Wear together

That make perfect relationships.

The concerts you enjoy together

Neighbours you annoy together

Children you destroy together

That keep marriage intact

The first time I heard it was on Bob Monkhouse’s 1980s BBC chat show, where Monkhouse performed it as a duet with Julia McKenzie. The breezy innuendo, snappy lists and sharp wordplay had me in stitches.

It was a few years before I realised the song was not a duet, but an ensemble piece with folks talking over and across each other. Not that any of this detracted from the comic impact of the song.

It was also a few years before I realised that Company contains several more great Sondheim comedic songs, including the tour de force which is “Getting Married Today” in which a panicked Amy pleads with the audience to go away as she prepares to jilt her lover just before they walk down the aisle

Goodbye! Go and cry

At another person’s wake

If you’re quick, for a kick

You could pick up a christening

But please, on my knees

There’s a human life at stake!

There is also the great “The Ladies Who Lunch”. But, like “Getting Married Today”, it is unfair to list this as just a comic song. Like much of Sondheim’s work the comedy is tinged with both tragedy and poignancy. The lines are funny, but the plot has shades of both reality and sadness – which are often the same thing?

That said there are some Sondheim songs that are just pure unadulterated comedy. One such is: “Everybody Ought To Have A Maid” from his first solo effort as both composer and lyricist, the wonderfully titled: A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum.

This musical, which opens with the great comedic anthem “Comedy Tonight,” is based on Plautus’s ancient roman farces and centres on Pseudolus “the lyingest, cheatingest, sloppiest slave in all of Rome”. The superb Zero Mostel played the part in both the original Broadway production and the movie version.

Another such song, though not from a musical but a revue, is the hilarious camp parody of Antonio Carlos Jobim’s Bossa Nova classic: “The Girl from Ipanema” called “The Boy from…” – or – to give it its full title: The Boy from Tacarembo La Tumbe Del Fuego Santa Malipas Zatatecas La Junta Del Sol Y Cruz.

Sung breathily, it contains a strong hint that the singer’s love for her Spanish idol will go unrequited:

Why are his trousers vermillion?

Why does he claim he’s Castilian?

Why do his friends call him Lillian?

And I hear at the end of the week

He’s leaving to start a boutique

Other great Sondheim comic lyrics include these lines from “Hello Little Girl”. (from the show “Into the Woods”) sung by the Big Bad Wolf to (and about) Little Red Riding Hood:

Think of those crisp, aging bones

Then something fresh on the palate

Think of that scrumptious carnality twice in one day–!

There’s no possible way to describe what you feel

When you’re talking to your meal!

While the song “A Little Priest” from Sweeney Todd features a torrent of puns and outrageous trick rhymes as the murderous Todd plans how he and Mrs Lovett will dispose of his victim’s corpses by baking them into her pies and offer them for sale:

[Mrs. Lovett]: Have a little priest

[Todd]: Is it really good?

[Mrs. Lovett]: Sir, it’s too good, at least!

Then again, they don’t commit sins of the flesh

So it’s pretty fresh

[Todd]: Awful lot of fat

[Mrs. Lovett]: Only where it sat

[Todd]: Haven’t you got poet, or something like that?

[Mrs. Lovett]: No, y’see, the trouble with poet is

How do you know it’s deceased?

Try the priest!

Both Sweeney Todd and Into the Woods show Sondheim’s delight in constructing major Broadway musicals around stories and topics you’d not consider suited to the genre. But this was Sondheim’s genius.

The standard Broadway musical formula had been: Boy finds girl. Boy loses girl. Both sing about wanting the other. They find each other again. All ends well. Instead, Sondheim told us about the characters. Their fears, their loves, their doubts, their hesitations. While some of his musicals have dark overtones – Assassins, for example, is about the eleven people who attempted, some successfully to kill US Presidents – they still tackle the bitter sweet joys of living, the desire to be wanted and loved.

As Sondheim frequently observed:

“Ask me to write a love song and I don’t know what to write. But ask me to write a love song about a woman who has just been jilted by a guy and walks into a bar in a red dress and orders a cocktail… and I know…”

And Sondheim really knew how to write love songs. His love songs are not doe-eyed or dreamy, they are about real love. They are among the most haunting and touching tunes you will ever hear.

Thus, the added joy of a Sondheim musical was to be taken from laughter to tears, from dark to light, in just a few minutes. You see this in Follies and Company, shows that include two of his greatest love songs.

In “Losing My Mind” from Follies, Sally sings about the man she has long idealized and still loves, but didn’t marry:

All afternoon

Doing every little chore

The thought of you stays bright

Sometimes I stand in the middle of the floor

Not going left

Not going right

I defy anyone to listen to the Barbara Cook singing this song and not be moved.

While in “Being Alive” from the previously mentioned Company, Bobby, who we first see as an unattached carefree man-about-town, announces that more than anything he wants to be loved and in love. The love he wants is not idealised, it is real and compelling:

Someone to crowd you with love

Someone to force you to care

Someone to make you come through

Who’ll always be there, as frightened as you

Of being alive

“Somewhere” / “There’s A Place for Us” from West Side Story is amongst Sondheim’s greatest love songs. With music by Leonard Bernstein, it re-tells the Romeo and Juliet tale in a modern-day New York setting. Though we already know the story, and thus the ending, we know their love is doomed, yet the song makes us hope that they can find their somewhere together:

There’s a place for us

A time and place for us

Hold my hand and we’re halfway there

Hold my hand and I’ll take you there

Somehow

Some day

Somewhere!

Though written as a duet, Tom Waits haunting solo rendition, with a soaring orchestration, gives it an even greater depth.

Last, but not least, is Sondheim’s torch song masterpiece: “Send In The Clowns” from the show: “A Little Night Music.”

Probably no other single Sondheim song has been more written about than this one. As Sondheim himself explained, the word “clown” should not be taken literally. It does not refer to the circus variety, but rather to foolishness. In the show the song is sung by an aging actress, lamenting the love she let pass, so it’s a theatrical reference meaning “if the show isn’t going well, let’s send in the clowns”… i.e. “let’s do the jokes.”

Frank Sinatra’s recording made it a global hit. The song became a constant in Old Blue Eyes concert playlist. Showing his huge respect for the lyrics, Sinatra preferred to perform it with just one accompanist, sometimes his pianist Bill Miller or sometimes, his guitarist, Tony Mottola.

Across Sondheim’s career the most frequently uttered criticism of his work was that his tunes were not hummable. No one leaves a Sondheim musical, said the critics, humming the show’s big songs. It was a criticism that Sondheim rejected, saying that hummability was an illusion and that songs only became hummable based on familiarity or close resemblance to other songs.

Time has proven him right. His songs are among the most hummable, not just because they are now so familiar to us, but because they tell our story, in our voice.

The sadness is that the man himself is no longer with us, but the great joy is that his music, his words and his take on the vicissitudes of life will remain long after him.

Thank you Mr Sondheim.

PS **I created a Spotify Playlist to accompany this column. It includes songs mentioned here, plus a few other personal favourites.

Derek Mooney is a communications and public affairs consultant. He previously served as a Ministerial Adviser to the Fianna Fáil-led government 2004 – 2010. His column appears here every Monday. Follow Derek on Twitter: @dsmooney

Pic: Getty