Róisín Shortall: No regrets

No regrets, then. Three months after her shock resignation, Róisín Shortall looks back on her turbulent spell in Government with a jaundiced but unwavering eye.

“Am I sorry I walked? No, not at all. I’d like to have been able to continue in the Department of Health but I didn’t believe it was possible to deliver on the reforms we promised in the Programme for Government while James Reilly is the Minister.”

The phone rings constantly with calls from Ordinary Joes, and her mailbag bulges with letters from disillusioned, sympathetic members of the public. But as Mary Harney once said, is one day in government not better than a lifetime in opposition? “I’m not interested in the trappings of power,” she responds. “I’ve always taken a workmanlike approach to politics. I’m there to do things. Yes, it is harder to do that in opposition but I wasn’t doing it in the department and I wasn’t prepared to continue pretending that I was minister for primary care when I wasn’t.”

Shortall’s departure is arguably the defining event of the first half of this Government’s term in office. Her rows with Reilly, particularly over primary care centres, exposed the interparty splits, the leaking of Labour’s soul and its failure to live up to promises of a new politics.

Subsequent media disclosures about the primary care centres showed a lone female junior minister standing up for objective criteria for allocating the centres where they were needed. Ranged against her were the big beasts of the old political establishment, all male, all doing politics the old way with their hands in the pork barrel.

Shortall herself doesn’t mention the “B” word but correspondents frequently tell her in their letters that she was bullied. She has always characterised her differences with Reilly as being based on ideology rather than personality, but a cracking in her voice when recounting events hints at a different story.

She says she prepared herself adequately for the political and media fallout to her departure, but not for the public reaction. “I have been overwhelmed by that. I believe there is a strong mood for change. People are really hungry for a new type of politics and they’re really disappointed with the way things have turned out.” The files show that it wasn’t just Reilly who intervened to add primary care centres in his constituency to the list; other locations added at the last moment were in the constituencies of other Ministers or in areas the subject of lobbying by Labour politicians.

“There was a lot of ‘That’s the way it works’ but it will always be like that until you try to change things,” Shortall says. “That’s what’s wrong with politics in this country. We need to move towards using the evidence to influence decisions.” She wonders whether the pre-election talk of “a new politics” now means anything. “I believed it had to mean something. It had to mean being open about how we do business and it had to mean spending money wisely. We’re no longer in a situation where money can be thrown around. Maybe that was naive. I certainly would say if I was in a ministerial position again I would do exactly the same. The kind of pork-barrel politics we see in this country: I think the public has moved way ahead of the political system. They’re not tolerant of that any longer. They want money spent wisely and decisions taken in an open way.”

There is no disguising her sense of disappointment at the lack of support from Labour Ministers, though she acknowledges they were probably not made aware of the work that had been done to draw up a list of primary care centres based on objective criteria and weighted in favour of the disadvantaged.

“Some of them were aware of the huge difficulties within the department and would have known that Reilly was not singing off the same hymn sheet as Labour. He’s ideological. They would have known from Cabinet that he was a difficult customer and hard to pin down.” Still, the Labour bosses backed the senior Minister, and what really galled Shortall was the clumsy attempt by Cabinet to justify actions that she feels were simply “not plausible”. She says she has been ostracised by her former senior colleagues since leaving. She would have gone this December anyway, unable to support a Budget she says is unjust and regressive.

“Given there are so many people at their wit’s end to survive, for the sake of cohesion there needed to be a demonstrable measure in the Budget to show that we’re all in this together.” She suggests a 5 per cent “solidarity levy” on incomes over €100,000 and caps on the tax relief applying to pension contributions would have obviated the need for child benefit and respite care cuts.

Pondering her own support for Labour going into Coalition in early 2011, she says that at the time she believed there was “enough” in the programme for government to make it worthwhile. “There seemed too to be a mood to challenge the troika. I thought there would be a much more serious facing down of them. There was certainly a mandate for it.”

While Shortall has moved on after a public bust-up, the other Labour Minister of State in the department, Kathleen Lynch, has expressed confidence in Reilly. “Kathleen uses different tactics,” she says by way of explanation. Shortall is Old Labour, while Lynch came into the party via Democratic Left and the Workers’ Party. So is there a Labour/DL cleft? “That’s for another day,” she replies.

“There’s a huge amount of dissatisfaction within the wider Labour Party. Members feel let down. For the time being I’m staying within the party because I subscribe to its values and tradition. But I think at leadership level it has been disappointing for members and supporters.”

Healthcare heartaches: Controversy and cashflow

This past year has been a hugely controversial one in health, but let’s start with the positive news.

In the past, the controversies in health have often involved medical disasters such as misdiagnoses and infected blood products. In many cases, the consequences were catastrophic for patients and their families.

In 2012, the reason health has seldom been out of the news has largely to do with resources, or the lack of them. The system itself has struggled on, delivering high standards of care in most areas and has improved in areas such as waiting lists.

The single exception to this focus on resource problems was the tragic death of Savita Halappanavar in Galway University Hospital in October, which garnered worldwide attention and reignited the debate on abortion. Three separate investigations are under way into the death of the 31-year-old who was pregnant when she was admitted to the hospital.

The other constant has been the presence of Minister for Health James Reilly on the front pages of the newspapers. Some of Dr Reilly’s misfortunes are his own work – his appearance in Stubbs Gazette, for example, over an unpaid debt, and his meddling with a list of primary care centres with the addition of two locations in his own constituency.

Other controversies, for example the Halappanavar case, landed in his lap through happenstance but were made worse by the Minister’s approach. The decision to put three Galway-based doctors on the HSE inquiry into this death was not made by Reilly himself but he got the blame anyway for not proofing it beforehand. Neither was it Reilly’s fault that An Bord Pleanála shot down plans to build the new national children’s hospital at the Mater, but the Minister ended up with generally undeserved egg on his chin for much of the year until a well-received decision to place the project at St James’s was made.

Most of his fellow politicians think Reilly has an impossible job, given the hairshirt demanded by the troika. The health service has performed creditably given the loss of staff and reductions in spending up to now, but many doubt the Minister’s ability to cut another €1 billion off the budget next year.