Harney caught up in an absurdity not of her making

IN MANY ways Mary Harney deserves what is coming to her over the appalling mess of the health service.

It was she, suffused with conceit, who insisted on taking over the Department of Health and Children to clean up the mess left there, as she would have had it, by her predecessor, Micheál Martin.

On the day of her appointment to this department - September 29th, 2004 - she said: "We have the analysis and the blueprint [ a reference to Micheál Martin's health strategy: Quality and Fairness: A Health System for You] - a huge effort went into preparing that.

The challenge now is to implement the reform" (the coded message being that Micheál Martin could not implement reform, but she could and would). And we can see the results of that reform in the serial disclosures of scandal, inequity, ineptitude and waste, thousands of lives lost, thousands of lives blighted.

In that speech of September 17th, 2004, she said also: "The one thing I want for the country I love is to have a health service that is accessible to every citizen, regardless of their wealth." Skipping quickly by the cringe-making "Dulcis amor patriae" stuff, the one thing she has done in Health is to frustrate the very issue she highlighted: to have a health service that is accessible to every citizen, regardless of their wealth.

She went on to protest that she was not "driven by any ideology", which is odd coming from the then leader of the most purposefully ideological party in the State - and anyway everyone has an ideology, everyone is "driven" by an ideology, whether they know it or they don't.

But something else she said then also justifies what is coming to her. She said: "The Constitution delivers to the taoiseach and 14 other members of the government the responsibility of running this country."

Well, if this is so, how come she doesn't have responsibility for running that bit of the country entrusted to her: health? How is it that systems or executives or administrators or clinicians or someone else is responsible for the terrible calamitous bungling and not her?

She deserves to get it in the neck for what she stands for and for what she said, but, in reality, there is an absurdity here. First on the Constitution bit. What article of the Constitution says that the taoiseach and 14 other members of the government have the responsibility for running the country? The answer is: no article of the Constitution says this or anything like it.

The claim was just part of the blather Mary Harney concocts so effortlessly and so regularly. In fact, the Constitution is vague on what it means by "executive power", but there is nowhere in it any suggestion that ministers run, or should run, the country.

Mary Harney has got into this career-defining mess through an absurdity at the heart of the way we run things here: giving elected politicians responsibility for the executive function of their departments - in her case for running the health service.

Mary Harney never ran anything in her life until she became leader of the Progressive Democrats, and she made no great fist of that and would be seen to have made no great fist of it were it not for her good fortune to have been succeeded by Michael McDowell. She then became a minister responsible for a huge government department with governance over areas she knew nothing about: the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment.

I am not faulting her for knowing nothing about this or for having no executive experience or capacity. I am merely pointing to the absurdity in our system that we expect politicians who happen to have been teachers or lawyers or tradesmen/women, full-time carers, economists or just politicians to know how to run complex corporations, and then we wonder why they make a mess of it.

The idea is crazy. Mary Harney knows nothing about systems in health organisations and should not be expected to know anything about them. And, when systems go wrong, it is a nonsense to blame Mary Harney, because it is our (i.e. the people's) fault for persisting with a system that is absurd.

Quite simply, the executive arm of government should be run by experienced, skilled executives, not by unskilled part-timers who have no experience of running anything.

And in saying this I am not picking on Mary Harney, for the same is true for many politicians I admire such as Micheál Martin, Noel Dempsey, Brian Cowen, Eamon Ryan, John Gormley, Mary Hanafin, Brian Lenihan and many others. In fact, the only politicians I can think of that were any good at running anything were Seán Lemass and Charlie Haughey.

Seán Lemass, when taoiseach, used to be woken at 8.30 each morning. Breakfast and the departmental papers would be brought to him in bed. Within a hour he would have taken all the decisions he needed to take for the day. He then got up, went into government offices, came home for lunch, returned to the department and left promptly at 5pm, bringing no papers home with him. Most ministers nowadays work most of the time and achieve a fraction of what Seán Lemass did.

We should have a radical reform: take politicians out of the executive arm of government altogether (no jobs for the boys) and appoint a full-time professional executive mandated to execute policy as decided by the Dáil. And there would be the added bonus that politics might then be about policy, not position.

"When systems go wrong, it is a nonsense to blame Mary Harney, because it is our fault for persisting with a system that is absurd