I dunno Mike. You take the chance when it comes. I think paschal probably reckons he has a couple of sweet gigs and doesnt need the hassle of the big job.
I think fg will tank this election and ff will do a lot better than expected. The older conservative money vote has to go somewhere.
The likes of the Healy Raes are diverting resources from far more deserving areas to their own pockets. Robbing Peter to pay Danny.
I listened to as much of Harrisâ speech as I could stomach - did he mention housing at all? If he didnât I would be worried for us all.
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Tue Mar 26 2024 - 06:00
On Thursday, in the prime slot on Morning Ireland, Neale Richmond drove the first big tank on to the succession lawn. He started the logroll of Fine Gael TDs endorsing Simon Harris as the man to lead party and country. This was the key moment in the making of a taoiseach.
I listened back to the interview wondering whether I had missed something â but I hadnât. What I thought I must have missed was âSimon was a great minister for healthâ. Harris, after all, held that critical office for four years. If heâs leadership material, thatâs the crucible in which we must have seen greatness emerge.
The only thing Richmond could think of saying about it was that Harris was a brick during Covid. In fact, Harris was marginalised during that crisis: the Stateâs response was run from the Taoiseachâs office. What Richmond could not say was that our next taoiseach left his mark on the health system as a whole.
Harris will be the fourth of the five taoisigh who have come to the office for the first time this century to have served previously as minister for health. This suggests â does it not? â that however else you get to the top in Irish politics it is not by fixing things.
By my rough reckoning, Brian Cowen (elected taoiseach in 2008), Leo Varadkar (2017), Micheål Martin (2020) and Harris (presumably 2024), had served a total of 11½ years in the Department of Health before ascending into the firmament and becoming A-number-one, king of the hill, top of the heap. Which means that the health system has enjoyed the stellar leadership of the brightest and the best, the most talented and effective members of the political class.
Or perhaps it simply means that we have a political culture in which you donât get to be head honcho by making broken systems work. You survive their dysfunction. The AbbĂŠ Sieyès, a big figure in the turbulent years of late 18th- and early 19th-century French politics, when asked what he had done in the French Revolution, replied: âJâai vĂŠcuâ â I survived. Harris now joins the Health survivorsâ group that consists of every first-time 21st-century taoiseach except Enda Kenny.
As minister, Harris appointed two very capable people to drive long-term reform of the health system. Both ended up resigning in frustration
The health system is Irelandâs most chronic institutional mess. It is an incoherent amalgam of competing forces, part private business, part religious charity, part national service, part insurance scheme. It is a chimerical creature with the head of a capitalist, the body of a socialist, the feet of a missionary and the tail of a professional interest group.
Hence the paradox of Irish politics. Ambitious politicians usually want to get their hands on big-spending departments and health is the drunken sailor of the spendthrift world. It takes well over a fifth of all allocated government expenditure. And by definition it has a vast impact on the lives of citizens from the cradle to the grave.
Yet those ambitious politicians donât crave the opportunity to control it â they dread it. Cowen compared the Department of Health under his stewardship to âAngolaâ because it was full of landmines. Martin joked that this description was too sunny: âAngola is honeymoon country.â Itâs a ring of fire the rising minister has to pass through. The primary object is not to put out the fire â it is to avoid getting too badly burned.
It goes without saying that, with so much money to spend, a minister for health will probably do some good things. But which of these future taoisigh left a profound mark on the system itself? Which of them took on the big job of ending the gross inefficiencies and glaring inequities inherent in the way it is set up? None of them. They survived. While the landmines went off, they were nimble enough to duck and move on.
Answer this quiz question: which minister for health who went on to become taoiseach created the SlĂĄintecare strategy that governs the medium- and long-term development of Irelandâs healthcare system? Itâs a trick question because none of them did. That job was handed over to an Oireachtas Committee on the Future of Healthcare, headed by RĂłisĂn Shortall.
We have a political system in which the Oireachtas exists to rubber-stamp government decisions. But in this one case, successive governments were all too happy to hand the task over to parliament and, in effect, to a member of a very small Opposition party. Why? Because none of the ministers wanted to do it.
As minister, Harris appointed two very capable people to drive long-term reform of the health system. Both ended up resigning in frustration. Laura Magahy, head of the SlĂĄintecare implementation office, quit in 2021, after Harris had left the department, citing âslow progressâ in âkey areas requiring dedicated, focused, reform effortâ. She was followed by Professor Tom Keane, head of the SlĂĄintecare advisory group, and the man who had earlier transformed Irelandâs cancer services. He had âcome to conclude that the requirements for implementing this unprecedented programme for change are seriously lackingâ.
Those requirements include political leadership. Harris pledged to introduce free GP care for children under eight by the middle of 2020. It arrived three years later. He was going to have the under-10s covered by the middle of 2021 and the under-12s by the summer of 2022. Neither happened. He also said the childrenâs hospital âwill be finished in 2022 and open in 2023âł. Neither of those things happened either.
What all of this tells us is that actual achievement in government is not what gets you to the top. Simon Harris is not becoming our leader because he has proven he can solve chronic problems. He has risen without trace, which is the perfect path to power in contemporary Irish politics.
Itâs not the survival of the fittest. Itâs the survival of the smoothest. Building a positive media profile and performing well in broadcast interviews are the tests you must pass. Stay out of trouble and you too could be taoiseach.
Why, are you on a waiting list?
Mary Lou and Simon will make Meehaul look very good in the debates.
FF are 7/1 for most seats.
Meehawl got his arse handed to him by a nun with a nice hoop on Prime Time a few days before the referendum.
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He really didnât.
Martin v the rest in the debates will be a bit like Dublin in the 2018 All-Ireland semi-finals. The opposition will be so bad that itâll be impossible for him not to win.
Read an interview with John Crown where he said that the universal health care system in Ireland (similar to Germany) already exists in the form of the VHI and forty per cent of people have it and challenge is to roll it out to all.
Makes an interesting point about consultants on public contracts being more accountable for waiting lists and money needs to follow patient so somebody should be paid per procedure//consultation rather than hours worked
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Mary Lou would bate Micheall with her beret
The health system is Irelandâs most chronic institutional mess. It is an incoherent amalgam of competing forces, part private business, part religious charity, part national service, part insurance scheme. It is a chimerical creature with the head of a capitalist, the body of a socialist, the feet of a missionary and the tail of a professional interest group.
Great paragraph
Problem there would be theyâd all want to do ingrown toenails and the handy risk free quick stuff
Meehawl has overarching points. Mary Lou is like a shrill LGFA head
I actually sheâs ok at debating. Michael gets too thick
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âHold on a minute nowâ in shrill Cark tones + hand-waving
I bumped into MicheĂĄl at a funeral yesterday. The man is Stately, has a great way about him. A man of the people who is tall and a good straight back. If it wasnât for him being part of that cunting organisation that is FF youâd give him a vote.
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do they play the klaxon instead of the last post down there?
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Turns out the Garda who lent the bike was helping a whistleblower in the months leading up to the bike loan
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I knew there had to be more to it.