I have always regarded Micheál Martin as the most intelligent and progressive member of the Cabinet. As minister for education, he handled the revelations of child abuse in the industrial school system with honesty and sensitivity.
As minister for health, he pushed through the smoking ban with clarity of purpose and a steely ability to withstand pressure.
It is therefore a real pity that, after his appalling performance at last week's hearings before the Oireachtas Committee on Health and Children, his continued presence in Cabinet is not just untenable but dangerous.
If ministers can get away with disowning responsibility for scandals within their departments in the way he did last week, democratic accountability is a charade. That notion can now be reasserted only by his resignation.
The coverage of the claims and counter-claims arising from the fiasco of illegal nursing home charges is a classic example of what magicians call misdirection. A flamboyant gesture with one hand distracts from the other hand manoeuvring a card from the sleeve.
In this case, the gesture that has distracted both parliamentarians and media is the Travers report. It poses the question: what did the civil servants tell the minister? While we look for a smoking gun, we fail to see the flaming artillery.
For to anyone who looks at the context for this scandal the real question is: what did the minister ask the civil servants? This becomes the key question when you remember that the illegal nursing home charges were not some obscure State secret guarded by faceless bureaucrats. At least from January 2001 onwards, they were public knowledge.
This is not hindsight. On January 27th, 2001, I wrote in this column about "the systematic ripping off of elderly people in nursing homes by health boards and the Department of Health". I returned to the issue twice in the following two months. And this wasn't some fantastic piece of investigative journalism. I was anticipating, and then reacting to, a detailed and scathing report published by the then Ombudsman Kevin Murphy.
The Ombudsman's report, admittedly, came at the issue from a slightly different angle than the current controversy does. It deals mostly with illegal demands for payment from the families of nursing home residents and with the failure to tell those residents that they were entitled by law to retain a portion of their pensions.
Crucially, however, in following up the report, Kevin Murphy explicitly drew attention to the dubious legality of the entire system of nursing home charges. On June 21st, 2001, he made a presentation to the Committee on Health and Children. In it he drew attention to a "major outstanding issue". This issue was "whether people with medical cards are entitled to the provision of free long-stay care".
He expressed the clear view that the Health Act of 1970 made charges for nursing home care illegal: "I consider that any elderly person who needs long-stay nursing home type care . . . is entitled to have this service provided by the relevant health board as an aspect of in-patient services." Noting that the Department of Health disputed this view - which he regarded as "self-evident" - he stressed: "I do not accept that there is any doubt as to the obligation on health boards to provide in-patient services for eligible people."
Here was a very clear public suggestion from a senior officer of State that the Department of Health was breaking the law by imposing charges on patients in nursing homes. And we know for a fact that Micheál Martin was personally aware that, at the very least, there were serious doubts about the legality of what his department was doing.
In November 2001, when he published his health strategy document, he noted the Ombudsman's observations in relation to the eligibility of older people for long-term residential care and confirmed that special attention would be given to these observations in a proposed general review of legislation on entitlement.
The question of whether or not his civil servants ever briefed Micheál Martin on the subject is thus irrelevant. He knew there was a potentially fundamental problem. If you're the head of any organisation and you know of a potential disaster just below the surface, you call in the management and demand to be told what's going on. If you don't, you're not fit to hold the job. Especially if, when the predictable crisis happens, you then scuttle off and blame everyone but yourself.
Micheál Martin told the committee last week that he bore no responsibility whatsoever for the debacle. And this is what has made his position so untenable. If a minister who knows there's a problem and does nothing bears no responsibility for the continuation of that problem, what possible means of accountability does our democracy have? We, as citizens, do not elect civil servants.
Ministers are there to connect us to the system of administration, by looking out for our interests and accounting to us for the actions of their departments. Micheál Martin failed in the first of those duties and now has the brass neck to tell us openly that he doesn't even recognise the second. If he stays in the Cabinet, democracy is a sham.