A man who has led an "overall reform programme" at the top of public sector, and who was "previously responsible for organisational reform" in a highly sensitive area, writes Fintan O'Toole
Who will bring his "considerable experience to bear in leading the major programme of change that lies ahead". Who has been appointed because his "considerable breadth of expertise and his proven track record in the area of structural reform" will allow him "to give leadership and direction to the wider reform agenda".
Who is this paragon of public sector reform? Who is this great leader whom Minister for Education Mary Hanafin was thrilled to have persuaded to take on a vital leadership role at "a key transitional phase in the implementation of change"? None other than Michael Kelly, the secretary of the Department of Health, whom Mary Harney effectively accused in the Dáil of being responsible for withholding crucial information from her and on whom, effectively, she sought to pin responsibility for "systematic maladministration" in the department.
Michael Kelly has been appointed to a big job at an important time, the chairmanship of the Higher Education Authority. It is a role I know something about, having been a member of the HEA in the late 1990s. The authority has responsibility for the funding of the Republic's seven universities and six other institutes and colleges.
The higher education sector is increasingly recognised in virtually every report as one of the main arenas in which Ireland's future development will be decided. It is also a sector riven by tensions and crises, as most of the main universities are in the throes of fierce debates about their future structures and direction. The balance between the intellectual and cultural role of the institutions and their narrower economic function will be decided in the next year or so and that decision will have a huge bearing on every aspect of Irish life.
The chairman of the HEA is arguably the single most influential figure in the shaping of policy in this critical area. The HEA has a very capable professional staff, which implements its policies. It has a board which, in theory, makes the decisions. But diligent board members can do no more than read the documentation, attend meetings once a month or so, and try to ask intelligent questions. The chairman occupies the pivotal position, linking the staff, the board and the Department of Education. For the most part, the chairman gets his or her way.
The problem with Michael Kelly's appointment to this role is not necessarily whether he was, in fact, responsible for the debacle over the levying of illegal charges on long-stay patients. Michael Kelly has many admirers who regard him as a very able and decent public servant, set up unfairly as a fall-guy. But that's another argument. The only thing that's relevant to his appointment as chairman of the HEA is the staggering hypocrisy of a Government that, on the one hand effectively makes a man take responsibility for what Mary Harney described in the Dáil as "systemic administrative failure", and on the other acclaims his track record and gives him a vital job. Either Michael Kelly was responsible for a dreadful administrative disaster, in which case he should not be chairman of the HEA, or he was not, in which case he should still be at the Department of Health. Either way, his appointment to the HEA can be described only in Mary Harney's pithy phrase: "systematic maladministration".
The manner of the appointment is especially reprehensible because it contradicts one of the reforms that Michael Kelly is supposed to implement. In her announcement, Mary Hanafin twice referred to the key priority in Michael Kelly's two-term tenure being the implementation of last year's OECD report on higher education in Ireland. One of the recommendations of that report is the restructuring and reform of the HEA itself. As part of that process, the OECD says: "The post of chair of the authority would be subject to public advertisement [like the presidents of universities or the directors of institutes]."
This is hardly radical stuff. It's a basic principle of good governance that key jobs should be advertised and filled by a transparent process. Just last year, the Government itself withheld funding from the Football Association of Ireland because it was refusing to advertise the job of chief executive. Yet here we have a highly significant public post being filled with no open process, and indeed with no apparent process of any kind.
Michael Kelly was shunted into the job because Mary Harney wanted rid of him, the political optics demanded that a head be seen to roll, and real accountability is a joke.
This kind of stunt is exactly why we get systematic misadministration. The Government's response to the exposure of a huge breakdown of public responsibility in the Department of Health has been to weaken the already tenuous ethic of good governance still further. In an outstanding example of hypocrisy, the Tánaiste preached to the Dáil on Friday that "every person who draws a salary paid by taxpayers has a responsibility to the public". Except, she forget to add, when political expediency demands otherwise.