It is the most blatant and inept incident of cronyism I can recall. That is saying something: I did, after all, work for Fianna Fáil in the 1980s.
The notion that a Government party appointed a party member to a State board when that person’s qualifications for the position were flimsy or indistinguishable from most will upset but, sadly, not surprise many.
The concept that the Government would orchestrate such a board appointment so the person could shore up their qualifications for a Seanad byelection that he was almost certain to win will have been difficult for most to absorb.
To think that the Government presumed it would get away with it will have come as a shock to all but the most cynical.
This week’s debacle over the nomination of Fine Gael’s Seanad candidate John McNulty to the board of the Irish Museum of Modern Act (Imma) exposes in one sorry tale the failure to reform politics and this Government’s raw contempt for parliamentary accountability in general and for Seanad Éireann in particular.
Byelection
It should all have been so straightforward for Fine Gael. When Deirdre Clune was elected to the European Parliament last May her seat on the Seanad cultural and education panel fell vacant. Our peculiar Seanad election laws provide that such vacancies are filled by means of a by
election in which only current TDs and Senators can vote. This electorate currently numbers about 223. About 90 of these are fully whipped members of the Fine Gael parliamentary party and, with likely Labour support, Fine Gael justifiably saw holding on to this Seanad seat as a foregone conclusion.
So, an internal Fine Gael party process came up with a shortlist of three women to contest the Seanad vacancy. All are well positioned to be candidates for the party in the next Dáil election when, incidentally, legislation requires that a third of a party’s candidates must be female in order for the party to secure State funding thereafter.
Somehow things then started getting messy for Fine Gael. Taoiseach Enda Kenny, as party leader, had the final say on this, as he does on all matters. On his own motion or having being persuaded by some apparatchik, Kenny ignored the all-female shortlist and instead decided to bestow the Seanad seat on John McNulty. McNulty is a businessman and diligent party activist in Donegal South West. He was an unsuccessful party candidate in the recent local election but, notwithstanding this, party headquarters see him as the latest in a line of potential successors to Dinny McGinley, who is expected to retire at the next Dáil election.
The Taoiseach having picked his man for the Seanad, it was the job of party officials to make it happen. Someone realised, however, that McNulty might not have the necessary qualifications for the culture and education panel. Someone then asked or told the Minister for Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht, Heather Humphreys, herself a novice, to appoint McNulty to a vacancy on Imma’s board. The exchange of emails, if there was any, between Government Buildings and Humphreys’s office on this one will make for fascinating reading when the emails finally come out under freedom of information.
Last Friday, McNulty’s nomination was submitted to the Seanad returning officer, just days after McNulty was appointed to the Imma board. On Monday morning the returning officer ruled McNulty qualified for the panel. In deciding on this the returning officer sits with a High Court judge to whom she can refer the question of qualification if she feels it necessary.
Interestingly, McNulty has chosen to describe himself on the list of Seanad candidates as “businessman and board member of the Irish Museum of Modern Art”. His proposer is listed as Enda Kenny.
On Monday, Today FM and others spotted and reported the story of McNulty’s recent appointment to the Imma board. On Tuesday, Fianna Fáil’s Thomas Byrne raised the issue on the Seanad order of business and called a vote requiring the Minister to come to the House to explain. The Government doesn’t have a Seanad majority, so Humphreys had to appear.
Prepared script
She came to deliver a prepared script. It bulked up McNulty’s membership of a culture subcommittee of the Kilcar parish council and his enthusiasm for the GAA and the Irish language as qualifying him for the Imma board.
Humphreys was then asked a series of questions by Senators, including whether she aware he was to be the Seanad nominee when she appointed him. In response she merely read most of the prepared text again. It sounded even more ridiculous the second time around.
This walks, talks and looks like a stroke. It was stroke. Having being rumbled, Fine Gael should have the decency to stop digging. They are only making themselves – and their Labour colleagues – look even more foolish. Their time would be better spent implementing meaningful Seanad reform and putting in place a truly competitive and transparent appointments system to State boards.
