Radio Kerry’s Jerry O’Sullivan: “So a deal has been done?”
Michael Healy-Rae: “I never used the word ‘deal’.”
The Year of the Snake begins next week. In an admirable tribute to Ireland’s embrace of multiculturalism, we are marking the occasion by inaugurating a new government that speaks with forked tongues and slithers around what everyone knows to be the truth.
When is a lie not a lie? In keeping with Irish tradition, we must answer with another question: when is a deal not a deal? Bill Clinton once slid around an awkward query by replying that “it depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is”. The ethics of government formation rest on a similarly slippery evasion.
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To understand why “deal” is the dirtiest four-letter word, it is necessary to remember one simple thing: it is illegal for government ministers to allocate resources to a particular constituency because of the identity and interests of the TD that represents it.
The taoiseach, the tánaiste, the members of the cabinet and the junior ministers are all subject to the Ethics in Public Office Acts of 1995 and 2001. As the Standards in Public Office Commission (Sipo) puts it in the handbook each of them will receive this week: “Office holders should at all times observe the highest standards of behaviour and act in good faith with transparency, fairness and impartiality to promote the common good in the performance of their official functions.”
Transparency means that all decisions and the reasons for them must be open to scrutiny. Fairness means that the criteria used to allocate resources must be the same for every constituency. And impartiality means that office holders cannot put their thumb on the scales because it suits their personal or partisan interests to do so.
In case this is not clear enough, Sipo spells it out: ministers must “make decisions and encourage and support the making of decisions on merit and without discrimination” and must not “be influenced in their official duties by personal considerations”. This last phrase surely covers the highly personal consideration of securing one’s own seat at the next general election.
Politicians are well aware of these laws – which is why they learn semantic juggling. Under Bertie Ahern after the 1997 election, a Fianna Fáil government got around both the Ethics and Freedom of Information Acts by claiming that the deals it did with Independents were bargains, not with the government as such, but with Fianna Fáil itself – and therefore a private matter that no one else had any right to know about.
Jackie Healy-Rae, one of those Independents, was quoted in the Dáil as saying that “only a portion of the paper” on which his deal was written “would stick out from the folder but that it was worth millions”. Leo Varadkar as taoiseach subsequently described this kind of arrangement as “skulduggery”, so we know Fine Gael is dead against it – at least when someone else is doing it.
[ Bashed tables, dad dancing and pizza: how the deal for a new government was doneOpens in new window ]
Fast forward to 2017, and Fine Gael, under Enda Kenny, had an arrangement with Michael Lowry. Robert Troy, on behalf of Fianna Fáil, asked him in the Dáil: “Will the taoiseach tell us on the floor of the Dáil today if he has an arrangement with deputy Lowry? Will he answer ‘Yes’ or ‘No’?” Kenny: “No.” Troy: “So he is telling a lie.”
The following year Micheál Martin came back to this question. By then Varadkar had replaced Kenny. Martin confronted him about the “deal or no deal” gameshow and asked him “if he has specific deals or arrangements with Independent deputies”. Varadkar replied that “there are no understandings of the nature suggested by the questions with any particular Independent deputies”.
Martin was incredulous. “Deputy Lowry has toured Co Tipperary telling people he has an arrangement with the government. There is evidence that he has privileged access to ministers ... All the evidence confirms that there is such an arrangement.”
When Varadkar said that Lowry and other government-supporting Independents “are able to raise queries and issues, often related to their constituencies, on which we try to assist”, Martin replied that “therefore, there is a deal”. Varadkar: “That does not constitute a deal.” Martin: “Of course it does.”
So we have on record the incoming taoiseach’s definition of a deal with Independents. It includes not just what is written down in the Programme for Government but the privileged information they get on, and their influence over, matters “related to their constituencies”. And yet we are asked to believe that the Independents who pledged to keep Martin and Simon Harris in power for the next five years do not have deals with the Government.
Last week, Irish Times political reporters described all of this semantic shiftiness as “a political grey zone of constructive ambiguity”. That’s accurate except for the “constructive” bit. There is nothing constructive about the creation of political grey zones in which we as citizens are not allowed to know how our government is working and why specific decisions are being made.
That transparency, fairness and impartiality stuff didn’t get written into the law for no reason – it was put there because of the disastrous effects on all of us of ministers acting like bookies’ tic-tac men communicating the odds by a secret system of signs. Rub your head for a ring road for Tuam; touch your nose for a light rail system in Thurles; fists together for a new university in Kilgarvan.
In the grey zones between deal and no deal, nothing will be written down for prying eyes to discover under FOI. Everything will be intimated and insinuated. We are back in the land of the unknown knowns, the cognitive gymnastics in which you call things everything but what they are.
Yet the doublespeak is doomed ultimately to fall apart. The art of the deal requires TDs to be able to say to their voters: look what I got you. When those claims are made, Sipo should investigate them for what they are: evidence that the law is being flouted.