I cannot have been the only one, yesterday, to have struggled to suppress a guffaw upon reading the news that the Minister for Communications has formed the view that ex-RTE CFO Breda O’Keeffe has a “moral obligation” to repay her €450,000 severance package from RTE. As reported in jolly detail by the Irish Times:
There is a “moral obligation” on RTÉ’s former chief financial officer Breda O’Keeffe to repay an exit package of €450,000, the Minister for Media Catherine Martin has said, while Tánaiste Micheál Martin has called on RTÉ to “reassess” the package.
Ms Martin said: “What I would say in relation to the exit package that was revealed yesterday, there may not be a legal obligation on the former CFO, but I would concur there is a moral obligation.”
The application by senior politicians of the phrase “moral obligation” when it comes to repaying funds is, it’s fair to say, somewhat scattergun. There is at least one former cabinet minister in Ireland – a relatively high-profile figure – who received over €70,000 per annum in pension payments since he left Government at the ripe old age of 43. The gentleman in question is now in his middle sixties, and has accumulated far more that Ms. O’Keeffe did, all for spending less than three years as a cabinet minister and 21 years in total as a TD. Does he, I wonder, have a similar moral obligation?
Neither he, nor Breda O’Keeffe, have any legal obligations, that is for sure. Both of them availed of a retirement or pension package that was signed off by others. To suggest that they have an obligation to return the money amounts to that favourite line of Irish politicians – that somebody else has a duty to bail the state out of the consequences of its own incompetence.
As ever, with politicians, what they don’t say is as interesting as what they do: Note upon whom the “moral obligations” in this case were laid by the Minister: The person who received the money, rather than upon the organisation that paid it out. If, as the Minister appears to be suggesting, the payment of €450,000 was a morally illegitimate use of funding deployed by the taxpayer, then surely it is fair to ask whether RTE has a duty to pay an equivalent amount of money back to the taxpayer. Do they not, for example, have a moral obligation to write off 2,727 TV licence prosecutions – which is the number of non-payers they would have to extract money from in order to recoup what they paid to Mrs. O’Keeffe? Why is the licence fee payer obligated to fund a transaction that the Minister is apparently willing to characterise as “immoral”?
The answer, of course, is that Minister Martin hasn’t really thought about any of this. What’s happened is that a political imperative has developed where attention must be diverted from the moral crimes of RTE, and onto an individual with whom the public can identify. Thus, the hope is, that rather than increase their anger at the national broadcaster, the public might fix its rage onto Mrs. O’Keeffe, who has not done anything legally incorrect.
But has she done anything morally wrong either? In this case, it’s not clear that she has. Once you strip away the basic begrudgery towards other people getting large sums of money that all of us, to some extent, share, it’s not really clear that she did anything immoral. She apparently placed a particular monetary value on what her own redundancy was worth, put that on the table, and RTE accepted it. That is not her fault. An argument that what she did was morally deficient would have to rest on the premise that she knowingly over-inflated her own value, and should have been more humble about what she was worth. Which is an interesting message, to say the least, from a feminist Minister who has spoken in the past about the need for women to be more assertive about their own value.
Still, moral obligation is a useful soundbite for the Minister, because it has the advantage of sounding sufficiently outraged about something while never committing to do anything about it. As I wrote yesterday, in another context, it’s a little bit of failure theatre. The point is not to recoup the money, but to position oneself as a champion of all that is good and decent.
This failure theatre is ultimately necessary because of the pretzel into which the Government has twisted itself on RTE: Simultaneously trying to argue that it is outraged by the waste of money at the national broadcaster, and that at the same time it is in the vital national interest to give RTE even more money from the public purse. The logic of that position dictates that RTE’s incompetence and perceived wastefulness cannot be attacked, and that there must be some other villain. In this case that’s the morality or otherwise of Breda O’Keeffe.
That’s why we live in the land of moral obligation. Moral obligations are great because they cannot be enforced. They allow politicians to preen and pose without action. And they can be applied as selectively as one wishes. After all, one might also argue that given that this mess happened on her watch, the Minister for Communications has a moral obligation to resign and repay her own salary. Right?