IF YOU publish a play, you put the dramatis personae up front. In much the same way, when you create a cabinet, what gets looked at first is the personalities. Like a medieval morality play, we're introduced to the Man who Triumphed over Adversity, the Youth filled with Promise, the Good Housekeeper who Stays within Budget.
This morality play approach has disadvantages. For example, if your dramatis personae characterises Brian Cowen as The Man of Constant Rage You Wouldn't Want to Meet In A Dark Lane, it is all too easy for the facile to jeer at the inclusion of children in his portfolio and to suggest that he'd frighten the kids he's supposed to protect.
Whatever about its drawbacks, the morality play approach to portraying the new Cabinet is vivid and interesting. Which does not mean that the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, took that approach when constructing it. I'd be willing to bet he didn't.
Function before form is how he approaches everything. The accountant in him starts with the bottom line: what's the objective? Once that has been established, he puts the people or the resources or both in place to achieve it. In creating his Cabinet, he would, first of all, have assessed the functionality of the various Departments and examined new models of approach.
There can be no doubt, for instance, that it was less than functional to have Trade separated from Enterprise and Employment. Employment is dependent upon Trade, Enterprise is interwoven with exparting: it made no sense to have them in different departments. Structural logic came into play and that Department is now Public Enterprise. It makes similar structural sense to put Tourism and Sport together, especially since our tourism product is increasingly cent red on activities.
In the past, when we thought of tourists as passive units to be bussed from the Cliffs of Moher to the Abbey Theatre with a stopover to buy shillelaghs, it would have seemed odd to juxtapose Tourism and Sport. However, as we move our tourism focus away from older visitors paying passing obeisance to their heritage and set out to attract younger visitors, putting the two together is much more functional.
It should not be assumed, however, that the departmental reconfiguration built into this week's Cabinet announcement is merely an accountant putting things into different boxes. The Taoiseach is not thinking in the short or medium terms when, for example, he recreated the Department of the Marine into the Department of Natural Resources. It was inappropriate for forestry and fuel to be in the same Department. It had about as much logic as categorising feet and shoes together, because they both tend to be found at the end of people's legs.
Not only was questionable logic in play, but potential conflicts involving energy policy and the mission of the ESB were always likely. Exploiting our natural resources in a sustainable way (as is implicit in the environmental policy developed by Minister Dempsey) can be better achieved under the aegis of a dedicated Department.
Noel Dempsey's proposal for an ecoaudit will always happen when the Cabinet discusses potential policy in any sphere: in effect, that an environmental Geiger counter will be run over the policy at an early stage is now, thanks to Mervyn Taylor, built into the Cabinet approach vis a vis Equality.
Taylor repositioned equality from being a pious aspiration. Now it is a necessary precondition and qualification for progressing potential legislation. That is a tribute to Mervyn Taylor's understated doggedness. However, it is also a good reason for doing away with the Department of Equality and Law Reform.
AS A former minister for justice, I have my doubts that removing law reform from the Department of Justice ever had merit. The Department of Justice is all about making and reforming laws.
To break off a function like law reform means only that a group of civil servants are uprooted and put in another building. They do the same work in that building. The animating presence of Mervyn Taylor meant that objectives were met against a deadline. However, now that those objectives have been met, it's time to return the lander to the mother ship, as has been done. One of John O'Donoghue's key tasks is to ensure there is no slackening of the output of this unit.
One structural infelicity may be the placing of disability in the Department of Health. Many, if not most, people with disabilities reject what they call "the health model", which interprets them as victims of an illness to whom services must be delivered.
The health model is inaccurate in that only some disabilities result from illness, and even where illness is the cause, it does not or should not categorise the person as a patient from that point on. People with disabilities see the issue as one of human rights. It will be interesting to see how well the new structure supports the fine policies in this area developed by Mary Wallace.
APART from being reconfigured, some of the Departments have been renamed. Although the renaming of government departments smacks of changing Windscale to Sellafield, closer examination suggests rather more than placing a veneer over existing realities. Transport, Energy and Communications is a gathering together of categories rather than a statement of direction, whereas Public Enterprise sums up both the bodies for which Mary O'Rourke will have responsibility and the ethos she will want to create.
There is real significance, too, in the renaming of Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht. People living on islands outside the Gaeltacht have always believed those living on islands within the Gaeltacht got preferential treatment. All islanders now have an equal voice at the Cabinet table.
Of most importance in what the Labour Party describes as "empowerment of the marginalised" is the renaming of the Department of Social Welfare. This may go a long way towards excising the humiliating sense of subservience felt by people "on welfare". The names we call people, and the names we give the Departments serving the citizens, marginalise as effectively as any other form of discrimination.
If you want something to eat you don't go to a hunger prevention unit: you pick up some fast food. If you're entitled to a State payment you don't go to the Department of Social Welfare. You go the Department of Social, Community and Family Affairs. And you've no problem saying so.