One of the most frustrating things about watching Simon Coveney before the Oireachtas committee, yesterday morning, was the sure and certain knowledge that you were one of very few people actually watching it. 10am on a Tuesday morning, after all, is not a time when the average person is free to sit down, fire up their laptop, and listen to the Minister for Foreign Affairs taking questions for two hours. In fact, if we are honest, very few people would willingly watch that sort of thing at any time, unless the alternative was an even more severe form of torture.
And so most people, then, just rely on the media to tell them what happened, assuming that they are interested at all. And the media, being, as it is, compelled to report both sides of any story, especially where Government is concerned, must therefore give Coveney’s evidence much more credence than it deserves.
And so, for example, we get this, from the Irish Times:
Minister for Foreign Affairs Simon Coveney has strongly denied he offered former minister Katherine Zappone a role as a special envoy to the United Nations as early as last March.
At an appearance before the Oireachtas Committee on Foreign Affairs on Tuesday, Mr Coveney also rejected claims that Ms Zappone lobbied for the position or that he breached Freedom of Information legislation by deleting texts between himself and Tánaiste Leo Varadkar.
However, Mr Coveney apologised for “sloppiness”, and for making mistakes in the past few weeks, when explaining the circumstances in which Ms Zappone was offered the role of special envoy for LBGTI rights and freedom of expressions.
You can’t blame the Irish Times there. Nothing they write is untrue. It is a faithful accounting of what Mr. Coveney said, and, indeed, if you read a few paragraphs down, you get more context. But the problem remains: In order to be fair, the media must give Coveney’s denials prominence, and weight, even if those denials are transparently absurd.
In Mr. Coveney’s version of events, you see, he did not, at any stage, offer Katharine Zappone a job. No, sir-ee.
According to Mr. Coveney, when Zappone texted him thanking him effusively for the offer of a job, she had just gotten the wrong end of the stick, and no such offer had been made. This, despite the fact that the Department of Foreign Affairs immediately began working on a job, and even took notes from Zappone about what the job spec should look like.
According to Mr. Coveney, Zappone did not even ask for a job. Indeed, all those texts from her, checking up on the status of the job in question, did not constitute lobbying. “I never felt as if she was lobbying me”, he said, proving that if and when the politics fails, a job as an actor beckons.
So, in summary, he did not offer her a job, and she did not ask for one. That’s his story, and he is sticking to it. In this text, for example, where she asks him in March “what time period the appointment is for”, he insists, no job had been offered, or asked for. We are expected to believe that it was some sort of telepathic connection between them:
Being an opinion writer, rather than a news reporter, gives me the luxury to say what the news reporters in the Irish Times cannot: This is insulting, absurd, dishonest rubbish. Or, to put it more plainly, Coveney is lying through his teeth, and trusting that the way our democracy is structured will obscure it for him.
He is trusting that Fine Gael public representatives will defend him, no matter what he says, or does, to prevent damage to the party. He is trusting that the media will be forced to give his claims equal weight to the obvious truth. He is trusting that the average voter will just hear two sides shouting at each other, and conclude that the truth is somewhere in the middle. In all of that, he may well be proven correct. It is deeply, horrifically cynical.
Giving Zappone a job was bad. It was little more than jobs for the girls and boys. But some of that is to be expected, especially in Ireland, where cronyism and tribalism and nepotism are ways of life. If Coveney had just admitted it straight up, and said something like “I worked with Katharine for years, I know her abilities, and I thought she could be an asset for Ireland, but I made a mistake in not advertising the job”, then this would all be what Fine Gaelers insist it is: a minor scandal.
But the real scandal here is not the job offer. It is the arrogance and contempt with which Simon Coveney is treating the public, and the truth. He spent yesterday morning spouting a cock and bull story, and he doesn’t mind that some of us know it, as long as it confuses many more. He’s revealed himself to be a person completely unsuited to power, and unworthy of any trust, or respect.