Yesterday, we did some analysis on these pages of the opinion polls showing public support for the new restrictions announced, last week, by Government. Today, we turn our attention to a different set of figures, from the same polls:
🚨POLL🚨
Kantar / Sunday Independent
Q. "How much do you approve or disapprove of the way the authorities are responding to the pandemic?"
Government:
Approve: 46%
Disapprove: 38%
Neither: 14%NPHET:
Approve: 56%
Disapprove: 25%
Neither: 12%29 Nov – 3 Dec 2021
— Ireland Votes | #Vote2024 (@Ireland_Votes) December 5, 2021
NPHET, according to Kantar research, has a public approval rating a full ten per cent higher than the Government which it serves.
This is telling, and should frighten the politicians, for a few reasons.
First, and most importantly, it clearly demonstrates that in the public mind NPHET and Government are not the same thing, and that they are in fact two competing institutions that are to be separately appraised. There is no reason why this should be so: NPHET serves the Government. NPHET’s policy is, and should be, Government policy, and vice versa. NPHET does not have any statutory power to act alone. All of its decisions need to be ratified, and enacted, by the Dáil and the Government.
In Ireland, however, that is not how voters see it. There is now a good section of the electorate who clearly believe – by dint of the fact that they approve of NPHET, but not the Government – that the country should be effectively governed by Dr. Holohan and his team, and that Dr. Holohan and his team have different, and better, policies than the Government which they serve.
Second: It demonstrates how politically damaging the Government’s approach to managing NPHET has been to date. The fact that NPHET and Government are being appraised as separate institutions is a monumental communications failure for which, in all honesty, the Government’s communications office should be sacked in their entirety.
This situation has emerged primarily because Government has, up until now, allowed NPHET to run its own communications policy: Daily Press Conferences. Regular solo media appearances. Members of NPHET becoming household names. Tony Holohan winning the freedom of Dublin City.
This is not, for example, how the Department of Transport works. The Government’s advisors on roads and railways are not household names with their own distinct policy that frequently emerges in opposition to the Government’s own policy. In fact, no civil servants have ever had such public prominence as NPHET do.
In a democracy, like Ireland’s, it is essential to have some kind of permanent Government, like the civil service. It ensures continuity, and institutional knowledge.
But the whole point of democracy is that control can be exerted over that permanent Government. A reason we elect TDs and Senators in the first place is that so there are people who are accountable to the public to give the orders and make the decisions. When it flips the other way around – the unelected advisors and officials giving orders to the elected representatives – then democracy itself, not to mention the legitimacy of the Government, is undermined.
It is also just political malpractice. What has happened, in Ireland, is that the Government has implemented NPHET policy. Everybody knows that. But the nature of politics is that when things go wrong, people blame the politicians. And when things go right, they are minded to give credit to people who are not politicians. So, in short, we have ended up in a situation where when things go right, NPHET gets the credit. And when they go wrong, Mr. Martin gets the blame.
In that context, the decision the Government took last week to “gag” NPHET (though that is an unfortunate word) is clearly correct, and the only problem with it is that it is about two years overdue.
It has also provoked something of a revolt in the media, and amongst NPHET-fans in the general public, who are, of course, disingenuously presenting it as some kind of censorship.
It is nothing of the sort.
If Dr. Holohan and his team really want to raise the red flag about some grave policy error, they remain free to do so. They can leak to the press (as they undoubtedly will). They can, if they wish, completely ignore the Government’s restriction on them speaking (they probably will not).
This is simply a matter of good communications: In a crisis (if covid remains a crisis) Government should speak with one voice. NPHET and the Government are the same thing. Having, as we have had so often, civil servants and politicians contradicting each other is bad for public confidence, and bad for the Government.
This should have been the policy from day one. It is astonishing, frankly, that they let it get this far.