The return of Helen McEntee to the Department of Justice was naturally heralded with trumpets across the news and newspapers for most of yesterday. It is, after all, a modern tale of feminist triumph: The Mummy returns, striking a blow for career minded middle class white women of all stripes and none.
For the past six months or so, Ireland has not had a full-time Minister for Justice, with the role having gone instead to Simon Harris on a part time basis.
In its own way, it is very revealing that Ireland has managed just fine without a full-time Minister for Justice for half a year. Swapping the person at the head of the Department made no discernable difference to the Government’s policy agenda. For all the talk about the need for more women in politics, or the assertion that women do things differently, I’d invite you to ask yourself the following question: Did you notice that she was missing?
This is true, it must be said, of a great many Ministers: Increasingly, many of them resemble “non player characters” in modern computer games, resembling little so much as they resemble AI generated bots designed to say their lines and read out whatever little spiels their civil servants have written for them on a given day. McEntee? Harris? Heather Humphries? It makes no difference which of them it is, for when it comes time to stand at a podium and read out the latest policy, they all sound identical.
In theory, it should not be this way. Politicians are supposed – since they are all individuals – to have unique management styles and policy priorities and agendas of their own. The fact that in Ireland, one of the most senior Ministries can be passed around between smiling gormless faces without anybody really noticing is evidence of the true malaise: That in most respects, the “Government” is not really a “Government” at all. It is simply the public face, and the fall guy, for what some Americans have taken to calling “the deep state”.
What that means, in short, is that most policy in Ireland no longer originates in the Oireachtas. A person in Ireland who wishes to re-shape the country would be, in many ways, foolish to seek election. The real power lies not with Ministers, but with those to whom Ministers have voluntarily handed it over: Policy sections in the Civil Service; state funded NGO lobby groups; Social Studies Departments in Universities. The Hate Speech bill, for example, the single most significant piece of policy to have emerged from the Department of Justice since McEntee left the office six months ago, emerged almost unscathed from a public consultation in which it was widely opposed.
If politicians were genuinely making policy, one might expect that public opposition to their policies would influence them: They would be responsive, for example, to polls showing 75% of the country concerned about immigration. They would take on board the considerable opposition to fuel price hikes. They would enact an agenda that helped them win elections, which is the end-objective of being a politician. But increasingly, they do not do so.
Instead, our politicians are increasingly just frontmen: Their job is not to make policy, but to sell policy that has already been made elsewhere. In the case of Harris and McEntee, neither of them were so much running the Department as they were effectively acting as its official spokesperson.
This should, in a way, not be surprising: Neither of them are up to running a Department.
Neither of them had ever run anything, in fact, before being put in charge of a large Government Department with thousands of employees and a multi billion euro budget. Making them Ministers is the effective equivalent of picking a sports fan from the pub and making him or her Manager of Liverpool FC. With the mild difference that the chap in the pub might have some firm ideas about how to make Liverpool better.
And so, what we are left with is what we have: Nobody as much as pretends that McEntee’s absence from Government or return to Government will make even the slightest bit of difference to Government policy or Government’s execution of the policy. She is not so much Minister as she is a distraction: Look at the modern woman, living her best life.
The irony is that many other career women don’t get that attention: A surgeon returning to work after Maternity leave doesn’t get the klaxon headlines in newspapers that our Helen does.
Which is a pity. Because Surgeons are, at least, useful.