You may not have noticed it, but a great many of my colleagues in the more mainstream outlets are devoting immense amounts of space at the moment to the internal squabbles in the Government about the forthcoming, and ridiculous, ministerial reshuffle.
The latest row is about who gets to be the Finance Minister. As we all know, the Taoiseach is due to resign his office in a matter of weeks, not because he has lost the confidence of the Dáil or because he has lost an election, but because between them, the two larger parties in the Government decided to treat the premiership of the country as a bauble to be shared equally amongst two squabbling children. It’s Mr. Varadkar’s turn to play with it.
And that’s all well and good, retorts Fianna Fáil, but it’s our turn to play with the Finance Ministry. And so, Paschal Donohoe and Michael McGrath are likely to swap jobs – not because one of them has done especially well or poorly, but because in Ireland in 2022, the position of Finance Minister is less about doing the job well than it is about satisfying the pride of a particular kind of very special political party activist who wouldn’t care if the country was on fire so long as one of their own crowd was appointed Minister over the ashes.
All of this is, of course, an immense boon to the civil service, who are, no doubt, encouraging the reshuffle to be as wide-ranging as possible.
Government departments are very large institutions. There will at any time be 50 or 60 key people within those departments, all responsible for various sub-elements. A Minister who wants to lead their department effectively will need time to get to know those people, form relationships with them, understand what it is that they do, and how they interact with each other. Then, perhaps, they might feel like they have an handle on things and can actually run the show. And then, once that happens, they’ll be shuffled off to a new department to start it all again.
Not – remember – because of any sense that they have done the job badly (though many of them have) but because it’s time for Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael respectively to have a go in that particular Ministerial Mercedes, or Prius, or whatever it is they call luxury these days.
There are, of course, political realities here. Those being that both parties agreed to enter Government only on the basis that all the nice jobs and perks – including the office of Taoiseach – would be shared around amongst them equally. At the time, and indeed to some extent right now, nobody commented on what this said about our politicians. Because patriotism it ain’t.
It gives the lie, I think, more than any policy decision that these people could ever take, to the notion that they put the country first. The country is facing into a winter of discontent, with high inflation, and record energy prices, and the very real prospect of some electricity blackouts. There is a housing crisis.
If the Government wanted to be at its most effective in tackling these crises, it would leave the Ministers it has in place. You may disagree with the Government’s policies, but if the Government believes these policies will help the country, then it should want people in command of their departments enabling them. That’s not what we’re getting.
We’re getting, instead, a self-indulgent and self-involved reshuffling of the deck chairs in Government, replete with all the ceremony that brings: Family members brought up to Dublin for the big day. A trip to the Aras to get the seals of office. No doubt, many utterly stupid newspaper columns about the mature transfer of power between old civil war rivals, as if the battle of the four courts took place in 2003 rather than 100 years earlier.
This is no way to govern a country. We can laugh all we like at the UK with its 4 PMs in eight years, but at least all that shuffling was based on accountability and people deciding to make a change on the basis that the job was not being done to their liking. Here, we’re shaking the whole thing up just to give another set of children their go playing with the toys.
Politicians should be mortified by it. As should the rest of us.