Ministers who deserve to be fired – but won’t be

Several cabinet ministers deserve to be reshuffled. Reshuffled a lot - in fact , reshuffled out.

It would be nice to name and shame them, but since - by definition - they are shameless, shaming them is impossible.

So let’s just name them. Two of the three Marys, for starters. The odd one out is Mary Coughlan - though she could do with a bit of reshuffling as well.

Mary Harney came to the Department of Health and Children with mountainous conceit and almost nothing else, aside from a determination to make the health divide even worse. To be fair to her, she has been spectacularly successful in that.

Her conceit was that her enormous intellectual and organisational talents , far surpassing those of any of her predecessors - particularly those of her immediate predecessor - would transform the health services in jig time (although she was not claiming any particular jigging prowess).

The best comment on her performance is that her immediate predecessor regards himself as fortunate in his successor, since his achievements glitter more brightly on the sullen ground, ploughed by Mary Harney.

The other Mary -Hanafin - has been a disaster in Social and Family Affairs. It’s hard to make out how she has become such a cut-throat Boudicca.

Boudicca, by the way, was queen of the British Iceni tribe, which rose against the Romans around 60AD. They ravaged all before them, and tens of thousands were killed. When her army was defeated by the Romans, she poisoned herself.

Mary Hanafin has not killed tens of thousands and, since I know and admire her father and mother, I wouldn’t suggest that she poison herself, though she has certainly done her fair share of cutting.

I can think of no previous minister of her department who didn’t soon acquire some sense of appreciation of the depth of inequality in this society and who didn’t want to do something about it, even though, in most instances, they did nothing about it. In her case, she has been scornful of the very accusation of inequality and has been one of the proponents of deepening the divide.

Mary Coughlan has been fairly harmless, so let her be - but somewhere other than Enterprise, Trade and Employment.

Batt O’Keeffe has a vocal supporters’ club among his buddies in Fianna Fáil, and that is not to be disparaged. But O’Keeffe has history which should have ordained that he lost his Dáil seat and never, ever got even junior ministerial office.

He did far, far worse than Trevor Sargent. Far, far worse than even the disconsolate Willie O’Dea (as far as we know, that is).

A support group for mental health patients in north Cork acquired a house in an estate in Charleville to be used as a transition centre for people coming out of psychiatric hospitals, to help them make the change to ordinary living. 

The residents of the estate conducted a persistent campaign against this support group, and picketed the house, much to the distress of the few mental health patients who came to stay briefly. Eventually, the house had to be closed down because of this local opposition.

This all took place in 2006, just around the time O’Keeffe was ingratiating himself with the electorate of Cork North East, where he was to stand in the 2007 election, leaving his old constituency of North South Central.

One of the ingratiating ploys was to support the people who were driving the mental health patients out of the transition home in Charleville. He sent them local council documentation to assist them in having the home closed down. 

For that, O’Keeffe deserves to be reshuffled out of the cabinet and out of politics - but that won’t happen because, for all the gab about protecting the vulnerable, they couldn’t care less. (I wrote about all this in 2006 and 2007, and invited O’Keeffe to give his side of the story, but he was too busy to bother replying.)

Then there is Martin Cullen.

The case for his reshuffling is now so compelling that even he probably agrees he has to go. Poor Eamon O’Cuív in Community Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs is likely to be another victim, because he is such a nice fellow and will take the demotion without instigating a civil war. Strange how the genetic impulse dies out so quickly.

Dermot Ahern is another who is in the sights of the begrudgers.

Last Monday, when the news leaked about Trevor Sargent’s letter to a garda, the political class, en masse, turned on poor Ahern, all believing that he was the malcontent who did in a Green in retaliation for the doing-in of O’Dea.

Quite shocking, really. What is there about the man from Louth, who has ambitions to be the next Taoiseach, that causes such groundless suspicion at almost every turn? Politics can be so savage, can’t it?

And then there is the biggie, the fellow most responsible for Fianna Fáil’s electoral distress, the person with most culpability for the economic and banking crisis, the person whom the public most wants to see the back of . . .Brian Cowen.

But, oddly, this will not happen.

Not now anyway. It was made more unlikely by Brian Lenihan’s illness. But if Lenihan is given the all-clear in a few months, then the other Brian had better start cleaning out his desk.

Great crack, all this, but it doesn’t matter - not even a tiny bit.