Eagle-eyed observers of the news will have noticed, over the weekend, the stories by Hugh O’Connell in the Independent and John Burns in the Irish Times that Minister Catherine Martin’s special advisor, Tanya Warren, is to be the new head of policy at Coimisiún na Meán, the new media regulatory body set up by…. Minister Catherine Martin.
That this might raise eyebrows is hardly a surprise. As an advisor to the Minister, one might expect that Ms. Warren would have been at least somewhat involved in the procession through the Oireachtas of the legislation setting up Coimisiún na Meán, and in the Minister’s decision to confer formal powers upon it. Now she’s landed a big job with that very same body. If you’re eyebrows aren’t raising, you’ve likely had too much botox.
The new commission is a monstrosity of a body. It plans to grow in scale to fully 160 staff members over the next year or so, and has as its remit the regulation of both broadcast and online media platforms. It is specifically concerned with implementing the EU’s digital services act, which has proved a point of contention between Elon Musk and the European Union in recent months.
Tanya Warren’s new job comes with a salary of €122,000 per year, which is an increase of about 20% on what she would have been earning with the Minister. Questions about how convenient it is that somebody so close to the Minister would get that job – which, unlike her employment with the Minister is not dependent on the outcome of the next election – are obvious.
But there are more important questions which are less obvious.
For one thing, it should be noted that Coimisiún na Meán does not have any new powers. Every power that it has is a power that has been transferred to it from Catherine Martin’s office. That is to say, the Minister in essence conferred some of her powers – granted to her as a democratically and temporarily elected official – to Coimisiún na Meán, which is permanent, and not in any way democratically elected. In other words, this is the transfer of political power from elected officials to unelected bodies.
That has clear advantages, if you are a Minister. For example, while you might be voted out of office at the next election, and replaced by somebody who disagrees with you, the same risk is not run by your former advisor who is now “head of policy” for a commission that now has many of the powers that you have taken away from your successor. While your special advisor was likely to be out the door with you, in the event of an election loss, she’s now protected by Irish employment law as an official with a state body, and cannot be removed by the next Minister in your job.
Further, that commission now has many of the powers that your successor would have had, if you had not set it up.
This is a trend with the Green Party in particular, and it’s a trend that most opposition politicians do not appear to have noticed, and about which the public – foolishly as ever – does not appear to care.
One of the Green Party’s most persistent strategies is to remove matters of policy from the democratic arena altogether. You will notice this trend in almost everything they do: For example, the insistence on making their climate change targets “legally binding”. This in essence means that the public can no longer vote against them, because the public (through the elected Government) will be sued if they diverge from Green Policy even if the voters have rejected Green policy at the ballot box.
You see it also in the recent establishment of so-called “environmental courts” in the new planning bill, which again is an effort to give Green Policy preferential treatment in law, and to remove it from the democratic process entirely. And you see it here: The establishment of a new media commission, with the Green Minister’s power’s permanently transferred, and conveniently a Green Policy advisor in charge of policy. Again, the effect – and likely the intent – is simply to make Green Policy irreversible by the voters at an election.
I have written here on many occasions that the Green Party is one of the most ruthlessly effective political organisations in Irish history, and that assertion often gets pushback. But this is what I mean: Not only are the Greens advancing their own policies ruthlessly – they are also, across the board, working as hard as they can to make sure that even if the voters remove the Green Party, the voters have no power to reverse Green Policy.
And so, Ireland is set to have, permanently, a new civil service body, with 160 staff, which will, no doubt, be ideologically committed – remember who their head of policy is – to making sure the media in Ireland is tilted in a particular direction.
This is what the wielding of raw power looks like. And to combat it, voters (and those who would purport to oppose the Government) need to understand it. The problem is that in Ireland, people will get distracted by the salary, and the “corruption”, but never notice the bigger picture playing out with appointments like this one. The Commission is the problem, not the person appointed to it.